BT SearchSmart is BT’s latest attempt at trying to get involved in an area they seemingly know little of.

BT tried with once before with BT Customer Street, which has become rather infamous in some circles to their heavy sales techniques mixed with their lack of results and after care. I actually tried to alert BT as to how they were making promises they couldn’t keep before I even knew of the other complaints, but they were simply not interested in hearing how people working for them were effectively ripping people off.

We just knocked up this little site quickly to allow people to make an informed decision on BT SearchSmart and the SEO services they offer. We feel it our duty to warn people of their apparent lack of understanding of SEO, but good understanding of manipulation and lying through telesales.

We would like to share other’s experience with BT’s so called “expertise” in this area to date, so that that those who don’t understand the industry well can avoid being tricked by dis-honest and pushy sales staff who know a few acronyms and statistics, but evidently nothing else.

BT SearchSmart are breaking all the ethics of SEO before they even get going. Any SEO worth their salt will tell you that the list below (BT’s sales pitch) are impossible promises, unethical practices, and downright lies. Ask any decent SEO company, and they will tell you to steer well clear of a company that claims any of the following:

• Guaranteed Page One on Google.
• Claiming to be Google “Backed”.
• Suggesting that ranking for your company name is an acceptable standard.
• Promising incoming links in specific numbers with specific quality, relevance and Page Rank.

It is likely that BT SearchSmart will at some point come across this website, in which case they will likely fix the issues I’ve spoken of here. In order to prove what I’m saying as of this day (3rd March 2010) I have placed screenshots of the most offending issues with the descriptions.
BT SearchSmart Prices

We’ll let you be the judge of whether the pricing is worth it. Cheap as the lowest package is, it doesn’t actually appear to involve in actual work.

So, the £74.99 (ex VAT) is basically a consultancy fee. You get some advice, they don’t actually carry out any SEO work they just tell you about SEO techniques (I’m guessing, but judging from their site and their clients it will be pretty bad advice).

Let’s break it down further.

Keyword selection. Fair enough, if it’s done properly… selecting keywords properly isn’t as simple as people think or as simple as it appears. It’s not just a case of using keyword software. I do wonder though, if that’s what BT do, just running a keyword tool and that’s it. Considering the fact that the salesman who called us, who seemed to think he was very knowledgible about SEO tried to tell me that their SEO services were good because they ranked well for their own company name. The keyword selection on their own site wouldn’t give me the impression they’ve even gone as far as using a keyword tool.

Recomendation document. This is something we simply wouldn’t do. We’re happy to offer up advice to those interested in applying SEO to their websites themselves, however, as we know full well just how complex SEO actually is (it appears very simple on the surface, but scratch that surface and you’ll find you’ll dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper with things getting more and more complicated), we wouldn’t provide such a document as that would give the impression that people can achieve worthwhile results in applying SEO themselves, or getting their webmaster to do it… the latter being fine if the webmaster is also an expert in SEO but if not, the webmaster will then be a webmaster who has that little bit of knowledge of SEO that companies like BT SearchSmart seem to think is all there is to it. The basics… the very, very basics.

The guides for SEO best practice. As above.

Monthly SEO position reporting. Well, this is free in many ways and takes minutes to set up. Whether it’s through Google Webmaster Tools (which you would have through doing the sitemap… see below), or any other free software, it’s great to have but it’s automated and I wouldn’t pay such an amount for it.

A bunch of correspondence access through email and the phone (30 minutes on the phone that is). The fact that the communication in question is with online marketing “specialists” is questionable, to put it politely.

Google sitemap production and provision for upload. This can be done for free by anybody and takes a few minutes, you can just Google how to do it… pretty easy. I certainly wouldn’t be cheeky enough to include any mention of it in a price list. Also, the BT SearchSmart website doesn’t have an XML sitemap itself which is what they’re talking about here… not having an XML sitemap is almost a crime in our industry.

Hmm, Option 2.

More correspondence

Three whole articles per month!! See Our Sales Call from BT SearchSmart to see why this is a bit rubbish!

50 Directory submissions. From looking at the clients incoming links that BT SearchSmart acquired, these are free directories. 50 free directory submissions doesn’t do a lot for your rankings. Note that it’s just “Submissions” too. Some submissions take months or even years to turn into links, and some don’t ever. They may get rejected too, so you might end up with any number of links that aren’t worth much, up to 50!

Enhanced reporting. Again this can all be done free. When you make your Google account for your sitemap and ranking reports, all simple and free… why not add the free analytics tacking code into your site too. Google Analytics provides reporting that’s good enough in the majority of cases.

The work so far, I will accept is a bit of time and effort on the part of BT SearchSmart (if they do it properly, which evidently they don’t). However, it far, far from reflects the price. They don’t do any actual SEO other than a small amount of link building. The work from Option 2 is not even enough to justify the price of Option 1.

Now, if we add the extras at a further £100.00 per month to the Option 2 £349.00 per month we’re looking at £449.00 per month. Plus VAT of course, and the £100.00 set up fee. This should be the entirety of Package 1, at the price of Package 1… well, maybe a little more. We’ve charged clients £200.00 per month and carried out all of the above but we do a hell of a lot more than the above (and we do the SEO parts ourselves, not hand out guides for people with no experience to do it). If we were to do just the entirety of the above alone (which we wouldn’t as it’s not enough to produce decent results) then I would estimate that we would charge around £100.00 per month.

Anyway, this extra £100.00 per month is basically more directory submissions… one of the directories is DMOZ. This is a good directory to be included into but it is still a directory and still free, and still takes just a few minutes to submit to… why is it mentioned as seperate. Submission to DMOZ goes without saying at any level of SEO service. The odd thing is, BT SearchSmart aren’t in DMOZ themsleves. See BT SearchSmart’s incompetence on their own site with SEO for more on this, or Our Sales Call from BT SearchSmart to see why if anyone, they should be in there due to the fact they can apparently make better submissions than other people.

Okay £75 for that is fair enough. Google Analytics is free but for £75 one off, why not have someone do it for you and show you how to use. No arguement here.

30 minutes calls at £50. Well, we do that for free but to be honest we really need to stop doing that, we’re far too soft in that sense.

I don’t have too many issues with this except for the fact that I doubt the abilties of the “Specialists” due to seeing the work carried out by BT SearchSmart.

Notes:

The notes say the SEO service is subject to 3 months minimum term. What SEO service?