Sorry for the wall of text, wanted to give sufficient context - also posted this to /r/bigseo/
I work for a online print company based in the UK. During the last quarter of last year I noticed our SEO rankings were beginning to drop, so as a man of action and initiative I’ve made improving them my personal project! I’m an experienced web developer so the first step was gathering of more information; I’ve read reddit and blogs trying to learn the ropes. That lead to opening a semrush.com account mainly to better track our competitors (we already had a Moz account). Using the tools on semrush, I quickly fixed most of the internal issues plaguing the website - improved response time (the pagespeed module from Google is worth a story of its own), fixed 404 links, removed unnecessary redirects, minimised footer links and tried to group similar content together internally. All that has lead to a noticeable improvement in rankings, but nothing to write a blog about. I considered working on reducing the bounce rate to help our ranking (and conversion rateat the same time), but it became clear that our current traffic levels made A/B testing tedious.
Clearly external improvements were the way to go - primarily improving our link profile. I went back to research and devised a plan on how to improve it. However it became apparent that as I was getting further from my core speciality, I needed professional help with getting the links.
So how does one find a quality SEO company? The obvious answer was to do a Google search for “SEO company” and use the first search result. Visiting the websites coming back as search results was a bit disappointing, none of them seemed to be offer what I was looking for. There was a lot of mentions of “Elite” and “Platinum” packages, of X and Y number of links we were going to get, and little mention of ROI or the quality of those links.
I was not looking to buy links, what I wanted to find is someone who was able to help us create compelling content and reach out to relevant actors that would be link to us without being compensated for it.
So while reading blogs, I had what I thought at the time to be a brilliant idea - I went to the semrush blog, read articles and if I thought they were sensible i added then to my list of SEO companies - what better place to find experts in the industry? I ended up with a list of 2 companies and 1 individual, will not mention them here, but suffice to say they had very popular and educative content on the blog, their websites were great, promising a personalised approach the web design of their websites suggested it was not punched on themeforest.net - all seemed professionals. I went ahead and reached out to all 3.
First to come back was the individual - his fee was roughly $2000 and if that doesn’t scare us we should setup an appointment. It didn’t and we did. The phone call went great - the impression I was left with was that I found what I was looking for. I asked for some UK references and wasassured I would get them in future correspondence. In the next email I got a $3000 quote, allegedly based on the difficulty of our industry. The 50% price increase was off-putting and it lead me to question what sort of impression I make on people. Questioning the price increase and asking for UK references again lead to the response that actually $2000 would be OK as well, and the mention of UK customers was a misunderstanding. Clearly not the right choice.
The second choice was a company - their website has 20 smiling employees, again the phone conference went great, they knew what they were talking about, they had the experience and resources to help us out. Didn’t get to getting a quote this time, I asked for some UK references again and what we got back was disappointing. The reference websites had organic traffic drops in the last month and the sample links were coming from link farms. I had to take a week off during the exchange so I didn’t check the quality of links in my naivety before forwarding them to my boss - fortunately he pointed the issues out to me. Retrospectively this seems similar with the Nigerian prince scam approach of purposefully using incorrect grammar to eliminate intelligent marks from the onset. Regardless - not the right company to work with.
The third choice were the last to reply to the email and took the longest to schedule the call - a sign of how busy they were servicing customers perhaps. A nearly identical turn of events unfolded itself: a great conference call, even better than the other two , very knowledgable people on the other end of the line, they even took the time to research our competitors and shown a good understanding of the local market. Then, perhaps because we have stopped appearing so inexperienced, no response from them for the next week. When contacted they just replied with a list of prices and an offer entirely unrelated to our hour long conversation - another entirely disappointing outcome.
All of the three experiences left me with a bitter taste, seemingly only narrowly avoided being scammed, ruined my barely existing SEO expert reputation inside the company and painted a very dark picture of the state of the SEO industry.
Is SEO an inherently black-hat undertaking or I have just not used the right approach in finding a company to help us with it? And if such a company exists, what is a good way of finding it without wasting weeks on conference calls?
Thank you all for reading!
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