Seo on Website

EmOZ

Hi Guys,

I hired an SEO company 6 months ago to work on a website for us. We did the usual searches online and found a company who told us they would improve our ranking in Google. They initially changed some of the text on our site and changed the page titles of the pages on our website but after about a month or two we noticed that the site was dropping in it ranking and if anything the site was going downhill. After a few phone calls and emails they promised us that the ranking would improve and that Goggle was indexing the site. I contacted the company personally and asked for all Seo to be stopped in the site. They told me that the site wouldn't improve without their help and that we should stick with them. I told the owner I would think about it and discuss it later with him. I then noticed that they continued to take money from out account. I brought this up with the owner and he said he could continue to take the money because they require 30 days notice in writing.

Over the weekend we noticed that our ranking dropped about 4 pages in Google for our chosen keywords and having looked closer we see that there was a Penguin update in Google which penalises sites for certain types link building. We contacted the company but they said they were not in a position to talk to us because we no longer hired them! They went on to say that if we signed up to them again they would discuss this further and come up with a plan to help solve the problems we have encountered but that it would take a 6 month contract to help us improve.

I suppose what I am asking is how can a company act like this and is this the norm for an SEO company to do this. In my line of business it's all about giving our clients what they paid for and getting a referral from a job well done. The thing that's really getting under my skin is the way he replies to me - like this is an everyday thing for him and he has an answer for everything.

M.T.D

There are good and bad in all businesses and I would really not want to get into a discussion about companies.
Doing major changes to a site i.e. changing page urls if not done properly can drop a site drastically, for a period, in Google rankings.
But if the work done was "correct" the site should recover.

If you pm me the site url, the keywords and location you are targeting, and who you feel your main competitors are, I will do a short resume for you.

IRE60

EmOZ

Do you ant to PM me a url and i'll take a quick peek - juts to see if I can give you any guidance and what might have put you back 4 pages

There's no contract or fee - just in case you're feeling they're all out to get me'!

C

#edit: I just see M.T.D.'s post offering the same - so whichever, I'm sure you get some advice.

tricky D

Why not just post the site here? You'll get plenty of free advice.

The problem with PMing the site is that there is plenty of poor SEO advice out there and scrutiny in public can mitigate against that. I say this without prejudice to the above knowledgeable posters and their generous offers.

M.T.D

Hi tricky
I have no problem with that, but I had noticed some business owners are reluctant to name their business when they have a problem.
But as the op is no longer in a contract with their seo the domain being public can't spoil anything further in that relationship.
And having had a slap before I don't pm unless asked.

EmOZ

I think I may have been scammed guys. I took a look through other forums and it seem this company has done it before but mostly for web design. I think my biggest issue was the attitude and answers I received rather than their inability to do what they said they would. I looked into them a little further today and while they advertise having offices in Dublin they are in fact from Monaghan. The owner sent a text message to my employer yesterday saying that if he gave them any negative reviews online (I think he threatened the with this) that he would take legal action. This may be proof that he knows nothing about both the law and seo.

I appreciate all replies and feel free to contact me via pm but I don't want to add the company name here or my employers site and begin a big long argument with people in the SEO industry. They call themselves Proseo's but they are far from that and in my opinion complete gangsters:)

IRE60

Oh! I've come accross them before!!! Strange that name pops up again.

coppolacabins

hi , You are right. Most of online seo service providers do the same. They just know how to communicate , they do not know how to work. So I never go with any online agency. I will recommend you to try with any freelancer. With freelancer you can start and end any time. Everything will be in your hand. You can ask for weekly report as well. They are trust-able and in control. Couple of sources are odesk and elance.

Atomico

EmOZ wrote: »

Hi Guys,

I hired an SEO company 6 months ago to work on a website for us. We did the usual searches online and found a company who told us they would improve our ranking in Google. They initially changed some of the text on our site and changed the page titles of the pages on our website but after about a month or two we noticed that the site was dropping in it ranking and if anything the site was going downhill. After a few phone calls and emails they promised us that the ranking would improve and that Goggle was indexing the site. I contacted the company personally and asked for all Seo to be stopped in the site. They told me that the site wouldn't improve without their help and that we should stick with them. I told the owner I would think about it and discuss it later with him. I then noticed that they continued to take money from out account. I brought this up with the owner and he said he could continue to take the money because they require 30 days notice in writing.

Over the weekend we noticed that our ranking dropped about 4 pages in Google for our chosen keywords and having looked closer we see that there was a Penguin update in Google which penalises sites for certain types link building. We contacted the company but they said they were not in a position to talk to us because we no longer hired them! They went on to say that if we signed up to them again they would discuss this further and come up with a plan to help solve the problems we have encountered but that it would take a 6 month contract to help us improve.

I suppose what I am asking is how can a company act like this and is this the norm for an SEO company to do this. In my line of business it's all about giving our clients what they paid for and getting a referral from a job well done. The thing that's really getting under my skin is the way he replies to me - like this is an everyday thing for him and he has an answer for everything.

What almost definitely happened here is that this ProSEO company passed the job on to some outfit in India for a few quid, kept the profit and then fobbed you off with emails. The Indian company would have listed you on spammy sites, Google then picked this up via Penguin and demoted your site. Simple as that.

Always get references when sourcing a company, especially for anything web related, as they can damage your website / online presence literally overnight.

Adrian J Lynch

Hi guys I recently launched a new website for my business and I am trying to get my head around SEO, Keywords Adwords etc. Does anybody have any tips for me with regards to SEO or even better still does anybody know how to do SEO?

I don't want the same happening to me that happened to EmOZ, that sounds terrible

Thanks in advance

Nucular Arms

Adrian J Lynch wrote: »

Hi guys I recently launched a new website for my business and I am trying to get my head around SEO, Keywords Adwords etc. Does anybody have any tips for me with regards to SEO or even better still does anybody know how to do SEO?

I don't want the same happening to me that happened to EmOZ, that sounds terrible

Thanks in advance

The truth of the matter is that SEO is a vastly different game now than even a few years ago.

The google updates to the way they rank content and their recent decision to encrypt all search traffic in the wake of the Edward Snowden / NSA snooping revelations have led to a complete rethink of the strategies that must be employed to succeed in your google page rankings. SEO usually refers to the (I would argue) now outdated practice of focusing exclusively on keywords to 'fool' googles algorithms into ranking your pages highly.

The most effective advice I could give you would be to focus on providing quality, engaging content for your customers. Get to know and intimately understand their wants and needs and then generate engaging content in order to appeal to or satisfy those needs. Reach out to them on social media platforms and make extensive use of analytics to help answer all of these questions.

By consistently offering high quality, highly valuable content to your audience (who you have already narrowly defined and discovered through market research and analytics) the metrics that google judge to rank your site will speak for themselves and you will begin to rank highly on Google. You can of course pay for advertising and adwords, which will definitely increase the reach of your brand, however, if your marketing content and product offerings do not sufficiently cater to their needs then this will end up being a wasted investment. Successful online advertising campaigns hit like a laser beam on a precisely targeted demographic of your customers, in the precisely targeted avenues that those customers are most engaged in, be it facebook, twitter, reddit, linked in or just plain old google searches. They will speak directly to them in a voice they understand and are attracted by and as a result, will get you the sales and conversions you wish for.

What I'm trying to say is that there is no simple answer to SEO anymore. You have to play the long game in a consistent, quality focused way in order to beat the noise, and overtake your competitors.

Hope that helps some. If you have any other particular questions feel free to ask and I'll see what I can do to help.

Adrian J Lynch

What a fantastic reply, I really appreciate, some great advice.

Yes from speaking to people and doing research I feel new content i.e. Blog posts and managing social media platforms is really important. I am in the process of getting my head around keyword search terms, as in is it better to use the higher ranked or the lower ranked and which keywords should I use.

Also is it good practice to employee an SEO company just after the website going live or should I wait awhile?

Thanks Nucular Arms

candytog

Adrian J Lynch wrote: »

What a fantastic reply, I really appreciate, some great advice.

Yes from speaking to people and doing research I feel new content i.e. Blog posts and managing social media platforms is really important. I am in the process of getting my head around keyword search terms, as in is it better to use the higher ranked or the lower ranked and which keywords should I use.

Also is it good practice to employee an SEO company just after the website going live or should I wait awhile?

Thanks Nucular Arms

You should still be conscious of your targeted search phrases and that your page titles, descriptions, headings and content reflect what people are searching for.

Google is very sophisticated but it still isn't human so you do need to tell it what your pages and site about about.

I know people who have great looking sites but have the same page title for every page (which happens to be there business name). Making this one small change would dramatically improve their ranking.

Using a small adwords campaign is a great way to see what people are searching too and help you to understand your customers.

I would suggest starting with a small daily budget and choosing keywords (search phrases) that are quite specific to your business and location. I wouldn't use "display network" at you won't know where your clicks are coming from. You usually get some free credit at the start too, like 75 euro when you spend 25.

Get yourself a google analytics account, and webmaster tools if possible so you can see where your traffic is coming from too.

I myself am a huge fan of Facebook ads as they work well for my industry but yours may vary. I get a far better ROI than I do with adwords.

After that it's learning to network with other people in related fields. Be nice to them, like and share their stuff and they will do the same, give them a mention in a related blog.

And of course, as mentioned none of this matters if your service/product/content is poor!

There were just a few ideas from the top of my head, feel free to ask me anything else, as I said I'm no expert but I think this stuff works for me

M.T.D

Great replies from Candytogs and Nuclear Arms.
Re when should you get an SEO company on board. My advice would be right at the beginning.
Hopefully as part of your market research and planning you will have done the research into the current market, what keywords/phrases your target demographic are looking for, and also what your competition and similar businesses in other areas are doing. This is the information you need to create optimised content and for site structure including perma/pretty links etc.
If you create your website and get indexed by Google before you have optimised urls and titles your site can/will take a dip in rankings, sometimes a big dip for months, if you change them.
Once your site is set up with on page SEO done you then need to build your overall web presence, social media etc.
This will then give you a solid base for any future promotions and advertising.

tricky D

To echo and expand on some of the good advice here...

SEO should not be considered as a separate and independent strand when developing a web presence. As M.T.D. rightly says, it is in play from the start and as Google is making many more changes, experiments and tweaks than previously, SEO becomes much more of a moving target and never really quite 'done'.

Google, despite being not human, is moving towards results which are more relevant to who, how, where, why, as opposed to just what people search for. It has been and still is rolling out in sometimes limited stages and experimenting with new formats for results listings and search term input (eg. think asking for local restaurants by speaking into your phone, it's not quite the same input and results output as desktop type of usage). Google results used to be just a list of links mixed with some advertising, but currently there are around 2 dozen various formats and parameters in play eg. local carousels, Knowledge Graph, local packs, local alternatives based on proximity, device vs desktop functionalities, to name a few. A SEO practioner must be up to date in their Google watching or else opportunities can be missed and damage done to your SEO efforts.

The core mantra for SEO is still keep it organic, relevant and natural, it's just that how that effects SEO is moving with the times and more complicated.

jackluter

I suggest to stop the business with the company may be their are not following google guidelines.Recruit experience seo analyst and your business be in best levels by knowing the techniques in seo.

guitarrrszz

these guys definitely outsourced our job, mostlikely to someone on seoclerks or worse, fiverr!! alot of good blogs on seo, content marketing seem to be what brings the backlinks now!

damiendrax

Atomico wrote: »

What almost definitely happened here is that this ProSEO company passed the job on to some outfit in India for a few quid, kept the profit and then fobbed you off with emails. The Indian company would have listed you on spammy sites, Google then picked this up via Penguin and demoted your site. Simple as that.

Always get references when sourcing a company, especially for anything web related, as they can damage your website / online presence literally overnight.

I think you are a bit out of order there. You have no idea of the history of the site, who built links and when they were built.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the offending links were built BEFORE any SEO work was done by said company.
How could you possibly know if they passed on the work to a third party? What makes you think Indian SEO companies automatically build spammy links as a matter of course?

Your statement is made up of wild generalisations, inaccuracies and is probably libellous.

scwazrh

EmOZ wrote: »

I think I may have been scammed guys. I took a look through other forums and it seem this company has done it before but mostly for web design. I think my biggest issue was the attitude and answers I received rather than their inability to do what they said they would. I looked into them a little further today and while they advertise having offices in Dublin they are in fact from Monaghan. The owner sent a text message to my employer yesterday saying that if he gave them any negative reviews online (I think he threatened the with this) that he would take legal action. This may be proof that he knows nothing about both the law and seo.

I appreciate all replies and feel free to contact me via pm but I don't want to add the company name here or my employers site and begin a big long argument with people in the SEO industry. They call themselves Proseo's but they are far from that and in my opinion complete gangsters:)

Its fairly obvious which company you are talking about there!I used them last year over a 4 month period and got no results at all .To say they are useless would be an understatement.Got all the usual answers of it will take time and google has to index the site.In the end I just told them to stop working on the site.

keysersoze0330

damiendrax wrote: »

I think you are a bit out of order there. You have no idea of the history of the site, who built links and when they were built.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the offending links were built BEFORE any SEO work was done by said company.
How could you possibly know if they passed on the work to a third party? What makes you think Indian SEO companies automatically build spammy links as a matter of course?

Your statement is made up of wild generalisations, inaccuracies and is probably libellous.

He said almost definitely. Didn't state anything as fact. How do you know what his statement is made up off? He got a crap service, as did others it seems. Nice of you to sign up to defend this company.

guitarrrszz

keysersoze0330 wrote: »

He said almost definitely. Didn't state anything as fact. How do you know what his statement is made up off? He got a crap service, as did others it seems. Nice of you to sign up to defend this company.

im glad i heard about this thread i got a quote from these guys aswell for SEO :OOOO