The Ugly are at their ugliest doing absolutely nothing of any constructive good for clients.

They literally appear to simply take money and do nothing, zero results, zero movement, and have a damn good story to keep the client in “Pay Mode”.

They are primal sales people who have found a niche where they can ply their confidence trickery and entice innocent yet needy companies and website owners  into paying for a service which simply doesn’t get delivered.

The Bad are like The Ugly, insofar that desired results are as rare as hens’ teeth, with one further complication; they are not necessarily just out to take the money. The Bad over promise, under deliver, and grossly over-rate their abilities. Some of the work that they do (yes – they do some work in some cases!) is actually more damaging than beneficial.

They tend to have one or even a handful of out-dated strategies, which have since been blocked or at least flagged by the master search engines, including the almighty Google as being “spammy” or “artificial manipulators” and so if these methods are identified as being used, the search engines kill the site. Use or over-use of such methods can and does punish a website’s performance, putting you back even further than you were before you took The Bad on board.

That is why they are bad – they are pretending to be so all-powerful and knowledgeable. They are not!

Now The Good are as the label suggests – they are good. They have the elementary knowledge of working in conjunction with the algorithms in force to deliver better results. They work at it and achieve some impressive search result positions. The issues are two fold. Firstly they do not specialise in positioning. They want your website business, your hosting, your email marketing, your content writing and the reputation management is really just their foot in the door to get all the other business that they actually want.

The ORM is something of a loss leader for them. Second issue comes from the fact that they lack business acumen; they have had little experience in the field, their imagination runs a little two dimensional. So as long as you are prepared to babysit and feed every idea and concept to them in little bite-size chunks then you might get the results. If you are looking to be able to hand over a bag of problems and expect them to sort it out then you will be wasting your time generally. If you are awaiting a presentation of sensational fresh ideas and concepts, please do not hold your breath.

You will need to become expert yourself so that you can figure out what it is that you want to be done and then explain it to the minions. They tend to be able to deliver exactly what you order – providing you order exactly. Anything left to the imagination will be just that – left! It simply won’t get done, and you have no recourse due to the fact that you didn’t specify how it was to be done.