Most website owners get approached by SEO companies (normally from India) at one point or other, we have seen some horrible situations where these so called ‘SEO companies’ have nearly ruined businesses and urge you as a website owner not to trust your website and its promotion to amateurs, the following is generic advice we recently gave when given the following message:
[Business Owners] We have hired a SEO company to work on my site so I may be emailing you soon with some of their suggested actions and please can you give them full Google Analytics access and ftp / cms access details.
[Website Designers] Hope you are well, funny enough was reviewing your website visitors recently as they are pretty good for a ‘new site’ I see you are doing some PPC but the organic / direct visitor numbers are good. Hopefully you continue to add products / add to your news section / add to your facebook / twitter accounts (posts / photos / tweets) etc. Then if you are serious about promoting your site you should come and see me again as there is 100 things you can do yourself and 100 things we can do for you via an SEO program. You should refer to the list of recommended updates we sent to you once the site was completed.
The site is yours obviously but I must warn you there are 100s of cowboy ‘seo companies’ out there that will take your money and do more harm than good for your website / SEO. We will not be responsible for any ‘damage’ they cause and be assured that we have seen this happen multiple times to multiple clients and without fail it always ends with us picking up the pieces and trying to clear up the mess that they leave after taking as much money from you as they can. I will happily review any seo changes they suggest and will give you honest opinions on these.
I suggest though that you review your posts as you have too many photos on them and they are badly formatted.
[Business Owners] Many thanks for the info and sorry for the delay, I have just got back from holiday and have been completely snowed under. Good news that my site visitors are doing well. I am promoting it on eBay which I think is helping. What is PPC?
I agree with you re SEO companies and I guess its risky, although I am serious abut promoting the site and I have to take a risk by using someone. I have asked for references etc which they’ve provided, although nothing is foolproof.
I didn’t realise you provided SEO services. I am definitely interested and would have approached you first had I have known ahead of time. I have copied the most recent email with suggestions from the SEO company and have also attached a file that they sent. Your opinion would be appreciated.
Many thanks for sending me the blog info and also instructions / tips. I think I was putting in the email address as log in name. There are are so many different passwords it gets confusing! Will wait to hear back from you with your view on the comments below and attached Excel file from the SEO company.
[Website Designer / SEO Company] Apologies for delayed response, I did look at your email with the SEO ‘report’ briefly but have been so busy with SEO projects (ironically) and website design projects / marketing etc I haven’t got around to replying, anyway without more waffle my initial thoughts are:
1, These auto-generated SEO reports are sometimes good but need to be viewed and digested intelligently as they are rarely correct or relevant / helpful.
2, The list of immediate changes indicates that your SEO company is incompetent / unprofessional / mis-informed and recommend you simply cut ties with them as they seem unable to understand your SEO requirements and their ‘standard’ update requests are both wrong and un-helpful.
I believe following any of these amateur suggestions will simply be a waste of your time and if you are serious about promoting your site we can give you as much / as little help as you want / need / can afford. Regarding using us as a company to tackle your SEO this is a massive part of our business with local / national and international successes of websites that we have built / promoted.
A full SEO program takes 3 months and costs £900 but normally costs a few hundred more than that if we decide we need more content / pages / sections / press releases that need more work / text to be created. If this is out of your budget I am happy to give you a mini-seo project if you agree to do some of the work yourself.
