eCig One was among the first companies in the vaping industry — if not the first — to launch a vaping SEO service exclusively for vape websites. Since launching the service, we’ve worked with many vape companies that have experienced the misfortune of choosing the wrong SEO companies with which to work and then had to scramble to recover their lost traffic.

An SEO Company Destroyed My Vape Business!

There are many, many SEO companies in the world today. The competition among SEO agencies is intense. One of the best ways to compete in the SEO industry is by offering package deals, and you might have been roped in by one of those offers.

If you’ve looked for a company that can do some SEO for you, you’ve probably seen the package deals.

• Hundreds of do-follow links from high-authority blogs!
• Page after page of professionally written content!
• Dozens of real human comments for each of your website’s blog posts!
• Thousands of new followers for your social media accounts!
• Just $249.99!

If you’re a prospective customer, a search engine optimization package looks great on the surface. You don’t know exactly what you need to increase the search engine rank of your vaping website, so the neat little bullet list of all the things you’ll get for one low price looks perfect.

You’re probably on a tight budget, so the low prices also look pretty good to you.

SEO packages look good on the surface but provide almost no actual value.

And now we’re going to let you in on the very, very big downside of those SEO companies…

…Most of them haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.

At best, you will receive no long-term benefit from retaining the wrong vaping SEO service. At worst, you’ll ruin your vape business.

We’ll explain why.

Most SEO Companies Don’t Actually Do Their Own Work

If we asked you to name the primary mission of an SEO company, you would probably answer that an SEO company exists to help its clients achieve the best possible search engine rankings. If you’re speaking of SEO agencies that offer bulk package deals, though, that statement actually isn’t true.

The primary mission of most SEO companies is to sell SEO services. After you’ve signed a contract, they don’t care what happens next because they’re farming the actual work out to freelancers. These days, many companies aren’t even doing that — they’re just using AI tools to construct piles of worthless content.

• The hundreds of social media followers? Those are coming from Fiverr. The SEO agency is paying $5.00 for them and none of the followers are actual human beings. None of them will ever interact with your content.
• All of those great, insightful blog comments? Those are coming from Postloop at pennies each.
• What about the professionally written content? SEO companies around the world farm their content writing duties out to content mills. These days, many of them don’t even do that — they just use AI, which is potentially even worse. We’ll explain why in a moment.

So, for that wonderful $249 package deal, the SEO agency is keeping at least half for its trouble and spending the rest on cheap freelance work. If you don’t care about quality, you can get exactly the same result for a lot less by going directly to the freelancers yourself.

If you don’t care about quality, though, why even bother?

Oh, and all of those great links from high-authority blogs? We’ll get to those in a moment. First, though, we need to talk about AI.

Shady SEO Agencies Peddle AI Content with No Value

In the past, shady SEO agencies used to farm their writing work out to websites like Textbroker for a few cents a word. The work from a content mill often isn’t very good — especially when it comes to a topic like vaping, which really needs an expert’s touch — but these days, shady agencies don’t even do that. Instead, they’re using AI to generate their text for free.

AI content, however, has a dirty little secret: The content isn’t truly unique. When a person asks ChatGPT or a similar language model for an article on a particular topic, they’ll get the same article that everyone else who has ever asked for an article on that topic has also received. The words will just be different — except when they’re not.

Suppose, for instance, your article contains a catchy phrase like “Whether you prefer a mild buzz or a stronger hit.” That sounds like great sales copy, until you discover that dozens of other websites have already been given that exact same phrase from the same AI engine.

None of this content will ever rank for anything on Google, and you definitely shouldn’t pay a penny for it.

Any SEO Company That Promises High-Authority Links Is Cheating

If you’ve spent any time reading about how to promote vaping companies online, you know that inbound links are important. Google’s ranking algorithm relies on links between websites to determine which sites are trustworthy and deserve the best rankings on search results pages.

If you’ve done any of your own online marketing, there’s something else that you also know:

Link building for vaping websites is hard. Websites outside the vaping industry often avoid linking to e-cigarette websites. Owners of websites in the vaping industry don’t want to link to their competition.

So if any SEO company promises that they can build hundreds of high-authority links to your vaping website, that company is cheating.

How do they build those links?

Shady SEO Link Building Tactics

• Private blog networks. Some SEO companies register hundreds of domains and fill those domains with content that looks real to a search engine algorithm even though it isn’t content that any human would ever want to read. The SEO company then adds posts to the blogs in the network all linking to a target website with the goal of increasing that website’s search engine rank.
• Forum profile links. Many forums allow members to link to their own websites from within their member profiles. Shady SEO agencies use automated tools to spam those forums with profile links. Some SEO companies even own fake forums that exist for no reason except to link to client websites.
• Link buying. Are you paying a little extra for your shady vaping SEO company? The SEO consultant may toss a few of those dollars in some bloggers’ directions for some link insertions in their older content that no longer receives any traffic.
• Freelance link builders. This the “don’t ask, don’t tell” of link building. An SEO company that really doesn’t care about the health of a client’s business simply goes to a website like Fiverr and finds a freelancer who can build links for a few dollars each. Most of these links end up on websites that are old and vulnerable to hacking. Your link could end up next to links that promote adult content, gambling, movie piracy or worse.

Do you think we’re exaggerating? We’re not. The wrong links can absolutely tank your vape business, and Google is always updating its algorithms to catch link spammers and shut them down.

So, what’s the purpose of these link building techniques? The fact that links are difficult to earn isn’t a problem unique to the vaping industry. No matter what type of website you have, getting another website owner to link willingly to you is very hard. Building a link on a website that you control is easy — and shady SEO agencies love easy money.

There’s just one little problem…

The Google Spank

Tweet from Google’s web spam team about penalizing private blog networks

Buying links is a great “SEO technique” — until you get caught.

After years of brazen “SEO experts” openly flaunting the private blog networks that they used to build their rankings fast, Google finally put the smack down in 2014 when it applied manual penalties to most of the world’s largest blog networks. Google has continued to crack down on PBNs and all other forms of manipulative search engine optimization. If you enter into a contract with a vaping SEO agency that uses artificial link building tactics, you’ll experience one of two possible results:

• You’ll receive no benefit because Google has already found and penalized the agency’s link building outlets.
• You’ll receive a temporary benefit until Google finds the agency’s link building outlets and shuts them down.

In the worst case scenario, your website may also receive a manual penalty. You’ll get removed from Google’s index until you clean your site up and apply for reconsideration.

Your vaping company needs revenue now. If you think that you can skate by undetected with just a few artificial links, though, think again. Private blog networks — and the websites benefiting from them — are easy to detect. We can detect artificial links pointing to any website with very simple tools. For a company with Google’s resources, finding artificial links is a trivial task.

The Two Rules of Link Building

• Anyone who guarantees a specific quantity of bulk links is cheating. It is not possible to control the actions of other human beings. Earning natural links is hard. That’s why those links are valuable.
• When it comes to links, quantity doesn’t matter nearly as much as quality. One natural link from a high-quality website is worth more than thousands of bulk links from blogs that no human would want to read.

Is every SEO agency in the world shady and just looking for a quick buck? Of course not. When we sell content, we’re the ones doing the writing. When we earn links for our clients, we’re doing it the old-fashioned way — with hours of outreach to reporters, bloggers and website owners.

You may get lucky and find another SEO agency with similar ideals.

If you do, though, you might also encounter the third way in which working with the wrong SEO company can ruin your vaping business.

Most SEO Agencies Know Nothing About the Vaping Industry

Do you read vaping content online? When the writer of a vaping-related article actually vapes and knows what he or she is talking about, we can tell. We bet that you can, too. A good writer can research almost any topic, but vaping is one of those specialized topics in which real firsthand expertise makes an obvious difference in content quality.

It’s not unusual for any business owner to outsource content creation duties to a freelance writer or SEO agency. When you publish that content, though, you’re going to name yourself as the author — and you want your customers to view you as the vaping expert that you are.

You’re simply not going to get that level of content from a typical SEO agency — even one that has an in-house writing staff — because the people writing the content know nothing about vaping.

How to Identify a Shady SEO Agency

There are two very easy ways to identify an SEO agency that’s extremely likely to either ruin your vape business or have no positive effect at all. If you’re having conversations with an agency — and those conversations involve either of these things — you should run away as quickly as you can.

They Found You

An SEO agency’s job is to get web traffic. If they’re doing their job, you should find them. We have never sent a single cold email because our clients come to us. If an agency needs to send spam in order to find potential clients, that should be an enormous red flag because that company’s traffic generation techniques are obviously not working for them and certainly won’t work for you.

They Want You to Sign a Contract in Advance

It’s very common for shady SEO agencies to require new clients to sign advance contracts — typically around three months in duration — before they perform any work. We’ve observed that when agencies require long-term contracts, they typically provide no benefit for their clients.

There is no reason why any SEO agency should ever require a long-term commitment from you or require payment before doing any work. We charge only for work actually performed and only after the work is done and approved by you. If you’re not happy, you don’t pay.

Link Building Is Their Only Recommendation

If an SEO company looks at your website and doesn’t have anything to say about your on-site content, it only confirms that the company can’t write the content because it doesn’t know anything about vaping. In this case, the company will try to push you toward a link building package.

It’s very unlikely that your vape shop’s on-site content is already perfect and doesn’t require any work at all. If an SEO company doesn’t recommend anything to you other than a link building package, that company probably isn’t qualified to work with a vaping business — and if your on-site content isn’t right, you will not benefit from links.

You Don’t Need an SEO Agency to Build a Customer Base for Your Vaping Business…

Can you build a strong online presence for your vaping website and attract a consistent customer base without hiring an SEO agency? Absolutely. We are the proof. We launched eCig One at the dawn of the vaping industry. We wrote our own content, promoted our website without the help of an SEO agency and built sustainable search engine rankings that now provide us with thousands of visitors every day. Through trial and error, we learned how to make a vaping website successful and how to write content that resonates with people who vape.

Just like us, you can do it on your own. You can build your own brand, write your own content and attract your own audience.

We’ll see you in five years.

…But It Helps.

SEO agencies know what works on the Internet because they’ve already been through the ups and downs of building their own online brands. Using an SEO agency can significantly shorten the time required to make your vaping company successful — if you choose the right agency. Are you ready to get started? View our vaping SEO service now. SEO is hard work, and we do it the old-fashioned way: by hand. We don’t just know what works online — we know what works in the vaping industry, and we can help you get noticed online.