How To Choose An SEO Company
Saturday, April 17, 2010 11:41 | Short URL for this post: http://hud.gs/xvzhiLet’s suppose you have a website. And let’s also suppose it’s not yet large enough for you to commit to in-house SEO resources, but you think ranking higher in Google for some organic search terms would probably be a good idea. More traffic can lead to more sales and if you’ve never done any SEO work, there’s probably lots of traffic out there waiting for you, regardless of what vertical you operate in.
So, you decide to enlist the help of one of the many hundreds thousands* of SEO companies out there in the UK (*look, I’ve not counted but it really wouldn’t surprise me). The big question is, how the hell do you choose?
Well, the normal answer to a blog post like this is get a recommendation, check previous work, get references, decide based on your budget, remember going local might be cheaper blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all true, but I just wanted to give a few quick tips to help you dismiss SEO companies quickly, without having to spend too much time doing all of the above.
1) Ignore SEO companies that send short spam emails
Of course, you know this already right? Presumably though, some people do contact these dimwits to ask about SEO services or they wouldn’t keep spamming! Just in case you’ve never received these emails, here are a couple of examples:
Increase traffic to your website
We would like to get your website on first page of Google.
All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
or simply
We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.
I mean, it’s really shoddy stuff. But just in case you were tempted to drop them a line, trust me and don’t.
2) Ignore SEO companies that send longer, more complex spam emails
There seems to be an early pattern developing here, don’t you think? Earlier this week, the following email dropped into my colleague Simon’s inbox. Unlike the short SEO spam emails, these are designed to really put the frighteners on webmasters and companies, which in many ways is even worse. Have a read for yourself anyway:
Hi,
My name is Malcolm Wright. A senior search consultant at SEO Doctors, which is part of an SEO Group that has been established for over 10 years. Excuse the unusual approach, however I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, xxxx.com, during a routine survey of web sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance, resulting in an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologise for any inconvenience caused.
I took the liberty to do some research on your website, and uncovered some interesting points. This may interest you, since it appears that you are trying to gain new business through your website, like most of your competitors.
From my initial observations, your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines such as – Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN Livesearch). When searching on a topic, you probably are aware that most people don’t look past the first page of search results. I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google, meaning that you could be losing out on a significant amount of business. As such I did a bit more digging.
After checking the search engines, I ran a back-link check on your site. Back-links are the number of times your site is linked through another website. Your website has 14 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular. Back-links also help build your site’s Google Pagerank score which show’s how trustworthy your site is. Right now your site has a Google Pagerank score of 2/10, which is probably one of the main reasons why your site isn’t showing up in the first page of the search results.
The final check I applied on your site was page indexing. The more pages your site has indexed with good content and unique keywords, the higher you will rank. Right now, your site has only 424 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve.
So, here’s a recap of my findings on your site:
- Your Google Pagerank is 2/10
- You have 14 back-links
- Your website has 424 pages indexedI’m going somewhere with all this… I wanted to do my homework and research your website because I wanted to show you that I have applied some research in to your website before contacting you with my proposal. We are in the business of doing three things for your website:
1) Diagnosing and fixing all issues with your website
2) Ranking your site to the top of the search results, and
2) Significantly increasing your online revenue levels.
What we do is simple:
SEO is not rocket science as many would suspect. It takes a lot of man hours in hard work and research, something a lot of companies out there, just aren’t prepared to do without charging thousands per month. We are different, because we tackle every single issue with your website that effects how the search engines perceive you, through a combination of expert consultancy and direct work. Thereafter. putting you on the first page of search results in major search engines by working on your site month on month for a minimum period of 12 months. It’s a no-nonsense approach that cuts through marketing fluff to the core of what it takes to get a site to the top. We know what that is. We know how to do it.
The reason why I’m so confident about that is because we have done it before . Our clients are very happy:Financial Advisers UK, Dubai Properties, Gravel, Health Store, Van Hire, Fire Extinguishers, Coffee Machines, Swimwear, Limo Hire, Mortgage Advisers UK, and more – all are on the first page of search results and are very competitive keyphrases. We put them there. We’re so confident that we’ll put you on the first page that we will refund your money if we don’t achieve what we promise.
With pricing starting from as little as £35 per month to promote a profitable search phrase per month, your website is too important to let it go to waste, especially when UK online sales were up by 30% to £59.8 Billion compared to last year. Don’t forget we back our work with a money back guarantee.
If you are genuinely serious about improving your online revenues and want professional SEO as it should be done for a flat monthly fee, please visit our service website at www.seo-doctors.co.uk which provides more details about our excellent service and a call back form. See a selection of our excellent testomonials and example results achieved recently on behalf of our esteemed clients.
Alternatively, if you prefer to discuss your requirements over the phone, then please don’t hesitate to contact me on 0844 7404951 and press Option 1 or simply reply to this mail with a convenient time to call you.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Malcolm Wright
Senior Search Consultant
SEO Doctors
0844 7404951
Providing SEO for clinets since 1999
The only thing he got close was the number of pages indexed. He’s stated the Google PR of the site in question to be 2 when it’s 4 (yeah, I know it doesn’t matter, but he’s not even stated it correctly) and the 14 backlinks is more like 1,500. The site in question also ranks very well for all the major terms we want to target and has done for a very long time; if “Malcolm” looked in any keyword data tool (even ones that require lots of salt) for the major terms in our vertical, he would have seen that.
Their website is predictably awful and of course they’ve purposely blocked all spiders via robots.txt, because they want to. Genius. The domain is new and registered to The Web Clinic Limited, whose website looks slightly more reputable, but now you know otherwise, right? Incidentally, I was tempted to call the phone number in the email but just couldn’t be bothered, so feel free to try and let me know the results 
Anyway, suffice to say, I would ignore any SEO company who spams you with crap like this, regardless of how scary it sounds. You’ll thank me in the end, I promise.
3) Ignore SEO companies that cold call
Oooh, I can hear some SEO’s gasping in desperation at the harshness of this advice. After all, going out and getting business is a legitimate way of making a living, right? Well, I suppose, but if you have time to be making cold calls offering services people don’t need, you’re obviously not busy enough doing SEO for your clients in my opinion.
OK, let me revise this slightly then. Ignore SEO companies who repeatedly cold call you offering services, even when you’ve told them you’re not interested. I mean honestly, if they can’t follow basic instructions like “stop calling me”, how the hell are they effectively going to optimise your website?
A favourite trick of SEO cold callers is to pick a term that no one in the world has ever searched for, and tell you that you don’t rank for it. Conversations often go something like this:
SEO Company: I tried searching for “white 5xl summer polo shirts” and your site didn’t appear on Google!
Us: Well, we rank 1st for “polo shirts”
SEO Company: Ummmm….
Us: We also rank 1st for “white polo shirts”
SEO Company: Ummmm….
Us: And “5XL Polo Shirts”
SEO Company: Ummmm….
That’s honestly pretty typical. I think one SEO company cold called once and said we didn’t rank for “hawaiian beach shorts”; we don’t even sell them! Just to continue my naming and shaming, there is one particular company who will not stop calling the offices where I work. They go by the name of Smart Traffic and have consistently called every week for several months. If you’re reading this, please stop!
4) Don’t worry if your SEO company doesn’t rank for SEO terms in Google
Terms like “SEO Company” and “Search Engine Optimisation” actually have pretty low search volume compared to most revenue generating e-commerce terms, yet the rankings are very competitive due to the aforementioned number of SEO companies out there. So, I wouldn’t really place any weight on the ability of an SEO company to rank for these terms. It’s probably not a bad thing if they’re spending more time ranking their clients for high traffic terms and less time ranking themselves for low traffic terms.
The only caveat I would place on that is that any SEO company you choose must be able to rank for their own brand name. This will sound like a no-brainer to most, but you might be surprised how many don’t, for various reasons. So, just Google the name of the SEO company you’re considering, and as long as they rank 1st for their name, that’s all you need to judge from the perspective of how their site ranks.
5) Don’t accept a generic SEO action plan or proposal document
This is another one many SEO companies won’t like, but let me explain. After you have selected an SEO company who you are seriously considering working with, the next thing they will do is produce a proposal document detailing how they intend to effectively implement SEO on your site. Now, if you’re a huge multi-national, this will include a vast amount of detailed information relating directly to your site. As every SEO company knows, you can’t land large clients with generic proposals; you have to provide actionable intention information from the very start. Effectively, they have to give SEO advice for free in order to land such a contract. This applies regardless of the size or reputation of the SEO company in question; big multi-nationals are generally not run by idiots and they need to see value for money.
However, if you’re a small SME just starting out with SEO on your website, your proposal document will often (and sadly) be very much different. In many cases, you’ll be handed a wad of paper regarding the SEO services provided by the company in question and the only personalised content on it will be your logo and company name, the amount you’ll be paying and the services you’ll be provided with. They’ll be no actual specifics about how the SEO company in question will improve your website.
Do you know what I would do if I was presented with a document like this? Walk the hell away.
Now look, I’m not saying any SEO company should write a unique proposal for every small client. In any business, proposals take time and you can’t win every client you pitch to. But if the SEO company in question can’t even be bothered to provide a reasonable amount of information related directly to your site, then do you really think they’ll have time to optimise it properly when the time comes?
Unfortunately, there are SEO companies who feel a good reputation and previous results is enough to justify providing generic proposals. My advice would be to vote with your feet; there are plenty of good SEO companies out there who are ready, willing and able to give your SEO campaign the attention it deserves and a personalised proposal document is a very good indicator of this. So bear this in mind next time you receive a crappy generic SEO proposal
If you’ve any more “non-standard SEO company choosing advice” then please post a comment below; all input is welcome. I’m off to watch The Derby (c’mon City); thought I’d better post this now in case I’m in a bad mood afterwards
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So what you are saying is, ignore short e-mails, ignore long e-mails and ignore phone calls, is this correct?
Do you know how long an e-mail should be from an SEO company?
Haha, very good. In answer to your first question, if they contain the kind of SEO Spam I’ve detailed above then yes, absolutely, ignore them all. It’s all about the content you see. As for how long an unsolicited email should be from an SEO company, I’d say around zero characters is ideal. If you go about things the right way, plenty of clients will come to you through recommendations and other coverage. Is an SEO company that has to spam or constantly cold call to get clients really going to be any good at SEO? I’d suggest not, but of course you’re very welcome to disagree. I’m sure many SEO companies who adopt these practices would disagree with my views as well
One of our clients received the email from Malcolm Wright at seo-doctors.co.uk this week as well. We also blogged about the email, warning about so called SEO companies that send this kind of spam, but we did a little digging into seo-doctors.co.uk, and found they’re registered to a company called The Web Clinic Limited, as you can see here http://whois.domaintools.com/seo-doctors.co.uk
They used to be called Business First, or b-1st – who are also worth Googling.
Thanks for your thoughts; I mentioned that the domain was registered to The Web Clinic Limited in my post.
Ha!! Excellent, I was literally just about to write something similar to these, and it was about the same company under another pseudo-name.
A new cient of ours recieved the following:
From: wendy.richardson@top10guaranteed.co.uk
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx needs professional help!
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:57:16 +0100
Hi,
My name is Wendy Richardson. I’m a senior search consultant at Top 10 Guaranteed. We are part of an IT Group that has been established for over 10 years as a leading specialist in all aspects of online sales and marketing.
Excuse the unusual approach, however I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, xxxxxx, during a routine survey of web sites which would be capable of achieving higher search engine performance. Obviously resulting in an increase in online sales or the generation of high volumes of additional sales leads.
I am confident that this information will be of use to you, but if I have caused offence in any way through my approach I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused. I’m hoping this will arouse your curiosity, since you are obviously attempting to gain new business through your website.
From my initial observations, your website is underperforming in at least one of the major search engines such as – Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You probably are aware that most people don’t look past the first page of search results. I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages for highly relevant keyphrases, which means that you could be losing out on a significant amount of business. As such I did a bit more digging…
I ran a back-link check on your website first. Back-links are the number of times your site is linked to through another website. Your website has 2 back-links. Back-links also contribute towards your Google Pagerank score. Pagerank is Google telling us how trustworthy your site is. A higher score = higher search rankings. Right now your website has a Google Pagerank score of 2/10, which, when compared to other high ranking competitor websites, may be restricting your rankings. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve.
The next check I applied on your website was page indexing. Search engines like Google scan the information on your website and feed it back to their database. The Google formula is then applied to the data to determine where your website should rank. As such the more pages your website has indexed with quality unique content, the higher you can rank with Google. Right now, your site has 7 pages indexed with Google, and Google is regarding some of that content as poor. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve. Finally I also identified that there could be a number of structural issues with your website which may be having a negative impact on your search rankings.
So, here’s a recap of my findings of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
- Your Google Pagerank is 2/10
- You have 2 back-links
- Your website has 7 pages indexed
- There are issues with content and site structure
I have only scratched the surface of the factors impacting on your rankings. Unlike some of our competitors, I wanted to do some initial work to identify that it would be worthwhile for you to talk to us before contacting you with my proposal. The best way to deal with any problem is to first apply a thorough diagnosis. It would, therefore, be a sensible next step for us to apply a more thorough diagnosis of why your website may not be ranking well before discussing with you what could be done about it.
What we have to offer could prove to be the most value for money investment you could make for your business this year. In an economic climate that is difficult, to say the least, all businesses must invest in areas that will deliver maximum returns with minimal investment. Only strong search engine listings offer real growth opportunities as consumer trends change.
So what do we have to offer? Many factors now impact on how and where you will appear on the search engines. Unfortunately, most business people overlook the things that prevent them from performing well in the search engines and throw good money behind advertising without understanding what their web site really needs. Good SEO firms assess the needs of sites individually and address these by working on sites month on month. A one off fix just doesn’t work. As such we offer two approaches for you to consider.
We can produce a detailed 30-40 page Diagnostic Report for your site together with a personal telephone consultation with one of our SEO experts. Consultations explain the technicalities in our report in an easy to understand manner. Our normal price for this service is £499.00. If you are prepared to act today we are prepared to offer this at a reduced one-off fee of £299.00. Following this consultation we can discuss how best to rectify the situation
Alternatively we could provide this detailed Diagnostic Report for your site completely free. For this you would need to commit to take up our 12 month optimisation and consultancy service prior to our work commencing. The service is based around promotion of specific agreed keyphrases after discussing how to put right all issues highlighted in our report. We would be able to deliver first page search results in the major search engines. For this we charge as little as £35 per keyphrase, per month, dependent upon the competitiveness of that keyphrase. Furthermore, we guarantee to refund your money should we fail to put you in the first page for the keyphrases agreed by the end of the service.
The reason why I’m so confident about our capabilities is because we have done it so many times before. To name a few examples: Maternity Clothes, Dubai Properties, Gravel, Health Store, Van Hire, Fire Extinguishers, Financial Advisers UK, Coffee Machines, Swimwear, Limo Hire, Mortgage Advisers UK, and more – all are on the first page of Google and all highly competitive keyphrases. We put them there.
Our own group website is in the first page of Google for Website Marketing Company and Internet marketing companies. You will see our site listed as The Web Clinic To satisfy you even further we can also provide you with comparative existing client’s contact details to serve as references for the quality of our work.
If you are genuinely serious about improving your online revenues and want professional website marketing for a low flat monthly fee or a one-off detailed report, please visit our service website at http://www.top10guaranteed.co.uk which provides more details about our excellent service and a call back form. See a selection of our excellent testimonials and example results achieved recently on behalf of our clients.
Alternatively, if you prefer to discuss your requirements over the phone, then please don’t hesitate to contact me on 0844 7404951 and press Option 1
or simply reply to this mail with a convenient time to call you.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
So, the same email from another company run by the Web Clinic, making the same mistakes!!
Kind regards,
David Charlton
Senior Search Consultant
Top 10 Guaranteed
0844 7404951
Providing SEO for clients since 1999
I rang them up and asked if they’d like to make any comment for our “name and shame” section that they’re going to be in on our new forum… didn’t get much from them though ;p
Damn I should have taken that link out first
No worries – link removed as requested.
Priceless. And top10guaranteed.co.uk – with their own PageRank = big fat zero – say (in their long email above), “Right now your website has a Google Pagerank score of 2/10, which, when compared to other high ranking competitor websites, may be restricting your rankings.”
Not that PageRank matters for the purposes of ranking but they obviously aren’t bright enough to know they shot themselves in the foot.
Isn’t the point about SEO is that it is inbound marketing i.e. one attracts prospects without having to “sell” in a traditional sense?
How on earth is a non seo-savvy buyer supposed to find their way through this maze? Your post here will hopefully help many of them.
I just received a ‘wonderful’ long email from top10guaranteed.co.uk which said I had a PR=0 and only 7 backlinks. I actual have PR=3 and around 300 backlinks according to Yahoo. After checking top10guaranteed.co.uk and finding a zero PR, only one page indexed by Google and only one backlink (from this page) Ah but the choose to not have their website indexed, why?? They offer a 30-40 page report for £299, who wants to wade through this amount of information written by someone who can’t get the basics right?
I have wasted many hours explaining to my clients and prospective clients the pitfalls of using companies like this. These people give the rest of the SEO industry and bad name and should be exposed
Hello again Jon.
I received the update to comments and thought I’d check back in for another chortle at Top10′s tactics. I think it was your post, together with the two recent high profile Google penalties that finally jolted me into publishing a page on my own site yesterday on the broad subject of seo companies.
Funny thing was that I created the blank page a few days ago with just the H1 header in place plus a “coming soon” message. With zero content, no keyword links (internal or external) and no PageRank (on the new page), the creation of the new inner page was enough to move my home page from 400 to 23 on Saturday for “seo companies”. Can’t wait to see what happens when Google ranks the new content (to which I’ve now linked internally). Mind you, as you rightly say, these are all relatively low traffic keywords so are not worth worrying too much about.
http://www.adjuice.co.uk/about-seo/seo-companies/
Great post!
I agree. I cannot believe how so many so-called SEO companies can just hand a bland proposal to a prospective client and not mention anything specific about their website.
And the number of SEO companies who know nothing about keyword relevence is shocking. Still, I guess it makes the playing field easier for we who know what we are doing.
Steve.
Hello, I have been using ‘The Web Clinic’ for nearly 10 months and we have not seen any increase in rankings for the key words we agreed on, in fact they have gone down.
The response was that the competition we have is very stiff – this is of course very true! But, we had higher rankings before they started! They did tell us that sometimes the rankings got worse then improved with time, I have the feeling your are laughing right now!!!
Are they any good and what should I really be looking out for?
Thanks
Carl
Hi Carl,
I would ask ‘The Web Clinic’ exactly what they have been doing for the last 10 months! If they say your competition is very stiff they should be building backlinks. Yahoo site explorer shows 102 back links and Majestic SEO shows 966 back links from 283 unique domains.
One thing I would recommend is to build some backlinks to your inner pages, a few links to category pages can improve the rankings for these pages as well as your home page.
Hi Roger,
Exactly what I was thinking but I just didn’t want to fling any mud.
Thanks for doing the job for me!
Ewan
Hi again Roger,
I should have added that I checked Karl’s back links using DMoz’s Open Site Explorer Tool and that gave a similar picture to Yahoo Site Explorer. I assume therefore that Majestic is including a whole tonne of low grade links being discounted by the other tools. Any thoughts on that i.e. the inconsistency in the results you observed yourself?
Hi Ewan,
Getting a bit off topic here but this is my take on the difference. Majestic figures are “link Discovery” so these figures show all links they have found over the period and will still count if they no longer exist. Yahoo’s figures should only show links that where found on their last crawl. There are rumours that Yahoo is going to shut down Site Explorer soon and they are advising people to use Bing Webmaster tools so more and more people are switching the Majestic and other tools for backlink information.
Final thought, if the majestic numbers are high and the yahoo figures are low this may indicate that there have been many temporary backlinks.
Nice chatting with you, why not join me on LinkIn for further discussions
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sytecwebdesign
Hi Carl,
Sorry to hear about your bad experience.
One thing I would suggest for next time is don’t wait 10 months. No matter how competitive the field, you should expect results much more quickly than that.
I’ve just checked out your site. By the way, the link in your proifle here is missing the ‘www’ so doesn’t work but I found your site any way.
Bed linen may be competitive but it is not that competitive. Check out the first site on my client page and you will find a site that has number 1 positions for loads of linen keywords.
http://www.adjuice.co.uk/clients/
One reason your site is not ranking as well as it could is the back link profile. According to one link tool I use, your site has back links from only 20 other unique domains. That is very low and very easy to address.
Hope that helps.
Ewan
Hi Guys
Just wanted to update you on the http://www.thewebclinic.co.uk, they are now taking me to court for two outstanding monthly payments. They have passed my company name to a debt recovery agency who has added our name to a credit blacklist unless we pay within 7 days.
I am contesting the payment as they did not improve my rankings as they guaranteed, in fact two of them went backwards and two were not even ranked by Google. I also got an email from my account manager Tony Haslam confirming that some of their staff is based in India!!!
Totally shafted and bailiffs letters just before Christmas!!!
Hello Carl,
Sorry to hear you are ending 2011 on such a poor note, I tried looking at your website but it appears to be down, if this is a constant problem, I’ve found this can impact on your rankings as Google is getting faster at removing sites from it’s index that aren’t always accessible.
You need to understand how much time was spent on SEO activities each month, ie I know insurance groups that are spending tens of thousands each month so their competitors will continue to fall further and further behind unless they match or exceed that investment. Some SEO companies spend that on purely $ and some are tracked by hours.
Another area to understand next time is what % of activities are done on-page vs off-page… there is only so many times you can optimise a page title and good quality links do take time to acquire/build.
Disclosure I don’t have any relationship with the web clinic.
David
Hi Carl, Sorry to hear about your news just be Christmas. Looks like someone is building backlinks to your site, there was a big increase in October but most links came from a site wide link on one directory so this probably didn’t help much.
Let us know how you get on, I hope they don’t get away with this, good luck.
Roger