seo outsourcing - is it worth it?

[robshaw33]

hi there

Does anyone have experience of outsourcing seo work?

Lots of pretty reports showing work done and they appear to be doing quite a bit albeit in fits and starts -

They always say they can get results in 8 weeks, but when you get to 8 weeks they havent come close to the results they promised and say they are doing well but they need another month to get to page 1 etc etc.

My google pagerank did go up in the recent update - but i think the entire planets pagerank went up by the sound of it?

And what is google pagerank anyway if it doesnt convert into better traffic volumes?

Even a totally unrelated website that i've hardly done any work on had its pagerank go up.

My feeling is that the outsourced seo is somewhat artificial and google recognizes this and trying to climb the rankings without having masses of highly relevant seo optimized quality content actually on your website already is pointless.

You can get these companies to do all this linkbuilding and article submissions, press releases social networking, directory subs etc

but they dont understand your business they dont understand what you are selling, their english is very limited, and i suspect they are building links with sites that are totally irrelevant to your subject.

So what you get is a quick climb for your chosen phrases but as soon as the work stops google realizes its fake outsourced seo and puts you straight back down behind sites that have been built more organically.

This is just my opinion and i imagine somewhat controversial
What do you guys think? Is it worth it? Even you get to page 1 - how long is your phrase going to stay there if your website isnt up to supporting its position?

Rob

[John Dales]

Hi Rob,

Outsourcing SEO WORKS!!! That is a fact. Many big-time players in the Internet Marketing industry will tell you that their business exploded to a whole new level when they outsource. Everyone should realize that all of us are outsourcing in one way or another. When we buy a bar of soap we are really outsourcing the manufacture of soap to a soap-manufacturing company. And this makes a lot of economic sense. Just imagine making your own soap, refining your own gasoline, manufacturing your own car, programming your own Operating System, making your own shoes.etc..

And the enormous benefits of specialization, mass production and yes, outsourcing extends to many aspects of Internet marketing such as SEO. It is extremely rare that an Internet marketer is an expert in all facets of IM such as Web and graphics design, video, writing, PPC, listbuilding, CPA, SEO, etc.. Everybody has his/her own specific strengths and weaknesses. If your strongest point is SEO then you should not outsource your SEO, you should do it yourself. You outsource in areas where you feel you are weak and concentrate on areas, or even accept jobs, in areas where you feel you are very proficient.

On the point that outsourced SEO looks artificial, I will say that it depends. If the SEO outsourcer varies the anchor texts, gets backlinks from diverse sources,is consistent in linkbuilding and does not suddenly get a thousand backlinks in 1 day and zero backlinks for 30 straight days then I would dare say that it will look natural. The simple fact is that a human being doing SEO has the choice of making SEO look natural or contrived.

On your point that many SEO outsourcing companies do not understand your business or their English is very limited. On this I will have to say that you are both right and wrong. There are many SEO outsourcing companies out there which really fit your bill and when you assign them to make forum comments in your behalf, you will regret that they used the name of your company in their comments because you will be ashamed with the quality of the comments. However, there are many outsourcers in our country (Philippines) who writes very good English. And in fact, I have many Filipino friends who beat native English speaking people in English essay writing competitions. I am a Filipino myself and not a native English speaker, and although my English is not perfect, I dare say that my English is good enough to make meaningful forum comments or write articles.

Outsourcing is really great if you do it the right way. The biggest problem is finding the really good outsourcers from among the crowd because there are a lot of fly-by-night outsourcers out there who often bite more than they can swallow. And when they found out that they cannot really do the job, they never contact you, leaving you in a quandary whether to reassign the work to another person or to wait for the original outsourcer to emerge from the black hole.

Perhaps the best tip that I can give to somebody who thinks of outsourcing is this: Break up your project into many small chunks and try a lot of outsourcers. If you want 1000 backlinks done, try many outsourcers first by ordering 5 backlinks from different entities as a trial.And of course, you award the Big Project to whoever performs best in terms of pricing, customer service, communication, etc..

John

[edpudol1973]

Well in my own opinion, I will not worry much on PR, these technology is not as important as they are 2-3years ago.

PR almost nothing to do with your site traffic. I have many sites who don't have pr but get good traffic from google and other search engines,so I am not worrying with PR any more. But if your business is selling back link to newbies well PR is important I guess.

To answer if outsourcing is Worth? I am confidence to say yes it is, most of those successful marketers are outsourcing all those leg seo leg works.

[Intrepreneur]

You can't outsource SEO unless you know the basics and can see a reputaion in the service. To be frank most services are extremely poor and people still use them so that's what you want to avoid at all costs.

[fitzwar]

I outsource my SEO work all the time and definitely recommend it if your too busy to do it yourself, there are alot of good individuals on forums like this forum and also digitalpoint which i use all the time.

Things like:

Article submissions, directory submissions, blog commenting, theme sponsorhips

are all good projects to outsource to build up your backlinks

I did alot of this and managed to build up 33,000 backlinks in 8 months all outsourced

[robshaw33]

guys
Many thanks for the supportive comments - gives me lots to think about.
The overall impression seems to be yes its worth it - but you have to find the right outfits to do the work.
Like everything in life i guess.
Fitzwar - i hope you dont mind if i pm you for some recs?
thanks guys
Rob

[Ursa Anzur]

It all depends on who you hire. There are many, many companies that do your SEO like you described, but there are also the ones, especially individuals that know what they are doing and actually care about their clients and their rankings.

If you "outsourced" your linkbuilding to someone that is transparent and tells you exactly what linkbuilding methods they are using, keeps you up to date on all work that has been done on a weekly basis, then I don't see why they would be what you call fake outsourced seos.

Additionally, SEO is an ongoing process that needs continuous work. When you stop building backlinks, you lose your rankings. It's as simple as that.

Find individuals or companies that build your links like this:
- they do article submissions
- they do Web 2.0 marketing
- they so press release distribution
- they do video marketing
- they do RSS submission
- they do social bookmarking
- etc.

These are solid linkbulding methods that get you valuable, high authority links.

Hiring cheap outsourcers most probably won't get you the results you want. Especially if they guarantee you any kind of results (usually guaranteed top spots in Google). Nobody knows how Google's algorithms work, that's why nobody can guarantee any results whatsoever. If they do, keep away from them.

SEO experts and consultants charge a lot for their services. If you can't afford them, you are better off learning all about SEO and doing the work yourself (if you have the time).

One more thing, page rank has nothing to do with better traffic volumes .