Founder of well known and successful Phoenix Arizona search engine optimization firm Dataflurry held a survey of hundreds of search engine optimization customers that have signed up for seo services from other companies to improve their organic search engine results.

The questionnaire was based around whether or not search engine optimization customers were satisfied with the results that they received from their search engine optimization campaign investment with a wide variety of companies and providers. The questions asked were to determine whether they were 1) extremely happy 2) satisfied 3) disappointed or 4) extremely unhappy.

Unfortunately, the results were very sad indeed. Ultimately, from our survey we determined that 72% of seo customers were disappointed or extremely unhappy.  This type of Data is very unfortunate says Joel McLaughlin, owner of Dataflurry.

Joel also states that he believes there are too many people claiming to be search experts, however since the industry is widely unfamiliar to business owners, many people can easily fall victim to fraudulant providers or novice optimizers with minimal experience.  When it comes to the internet, anyone can claim to be an expert provider for intangible services – but the facts are this; the internet is becoming more and more competitive, and without hiring an above-and-beyond provider you are risking he loss of time and money, and you also run the risk of search engine penalization.

Joel also mentioned that there are a few things that companies can do in order to protect themselves from losing thousands of dollars without receiving anything for their investment.

Customers should screen seo providers and make sure that they have several client testimonials and references that you are able to contact to discuss the seo firms performance. Don’t simply rely on one or 2 customer testimonials, because those testimonials could be random success.   Often times, customers go for the company that sounds the best and makes the largest promises, unfortunately in the SEO industry – this is the most dangerous route to take.  In all reality, no SEO firms can promise success in a specific amount of time, and they can’t guarantee rankings. The only value they can provide you when selling is showing you examples of past client success.

Also, find out what the company plans on doing to improve your rankings. The company should be optimizing your website itself, building inbound links, researching out competition and more.

Additional problems can arise that have devastating effects; If you hire a firm that doesn’t understand how to obtain quality links to your website in a natural appearing link building method, the seo company can hurt a website instead of helping it, because search engines want to penalize websites trying to alter their search engine results without providing quality user experiences.