Dotty Scott exposes website developers charging for work they don't deliver, like basic SEO optimization. She describes a client who paid for an unoptimized site, which pushed her to start Ask Dotty to teach business owners how to verify the work themselves.
Well, one of the reasons that I do what I do is because in my industry there seems to be a lot of, um, I call it fraud. You can call it whatever you want. Here's an example, and this was early on. I, I had a, a friend that I met through networking, um, hire me to fix her website. She already had one in, you know, that was working. And the problem was it wasn't being found online at all. And when I asked, I knew the person that created this site, and when I looked at it, nothing had been done as far as search engine optimization goes to the site. So a technical thing, nothing was done with it. And I asked, I went back and I asked him, you know, this should just be part of building a website. I mean, I'm not talking about all the extra stuff you do outside of the site. I'm talking about just what's on the website. And his response to me was, well, she didn't pay for that. She just paid for having it up. And this was like within my first year. And at that point I was like, okay, That doesn't work for me. If I was a business owner, which I am, and I hired somebody to build me a website, I would think I would get everything that's included with building a website, which would be, you know, at least in the beginning, it's going to be optimized with the information provided. And so that's what I do. I do as much as I can with optimization when I create a website. And the reason I do that is because I think it's fair and the right thing to do, you know, and that's just one example of literally hundreds of things that I have found other people doing in my industry that are just, they're just not right. And that was one of the big reasons why I started my Ask Dotty education platform is because Sure, if you're a, a do-it-yourselfer business owner, you can learn how to do some of this stuff yourself. But the real reason is I want business owners to have enough information about whatever the topic is that they can decide, hey, this is really cool, I'll do it myself. Or you know what, not my wheel frame. I want to outsource that to somebody. But the problem is a lot of times when you outsource it and you get the project back, you, you know, you paid for it, it's done, and then it's no better. Like whatever the situation was, you haven't gotten any improvement on it. And then you'll come to somebody like me and I'll look at it. I'm like, well, they didn't do this. They didn't do this. They didn't do this. And they're like, well, I paid for that. Well, they didn't do it. So a lot of times people will pay for things, they think they have it done and they don't. It, it just wasn't done. And I want business owners to have enough knowledge on whatever that topic is to be able to tell if they outsource something that yes, it actually did get done and they actually did what they paid for. Because I'm telling you, in this industry, There is a lot of, again, what I call fraud, to where you pay for something, you think it's done, and it really isn't.
