My competitor outsourced to india - My observations

[sharkey]

I've had my site for over 2 years now. about a year ago I noticed another competitor pop up (there are many) didn't pay attention to them too much. They were around page 20+ of google. no threat.

Then in the last few weeks I noticed their site race up the rankings in google. they are now on any given day 1 rank above or 1 rank below me on page 1 of google. They even followed me on twitter and told me to go check out their products (what? like I'm gonna buy from them?) Maybe they thought I would have in interest in their products since I was tweeting about the same thing?

I found out they were using an India-based company because a quick search of their company came up with multiple free press releases that were written by someone who very obviously was not a native english speaker. It wasn't a spun release, and it had things like generic quotes:

"I know people will love this product" said Manager Of Store (thats exactly what it said)

It honestly could have been about anything with [insert keyword here]

the contact information to find out more about their product was listed as xxx@ the SEO company .com instead of xxx@the domain of the actual product.com

this isn't an SEO product by a long shot - so I looked them up - India based SEO company not covering their tracks or even bothering to route anyone to the owner of the company they are working for.

I know the owner of the company is in missisippi - outsource their SEO, okay, but their press releases? their PR? customer service? DO they know this company has listed the contact information to write to about their products as an SEO company in India?

I decided to write them from a temp email account with some simple questions about the product. I emailed the email given on their web page to see if I would get a person from India or the owner of the company instead. The answers came back a grammatical nightmare and read like a 14 year old texting:

"we would like U 2b happy with our products so U must trust us when we say U will Love!" They didn't address any of my questions on the website other than "we promise if U check back soon ur answers will appear on d site"

The pages on their website are crammed full of keyword links at the bottom and looks spammy to me as an SEO person. Maybe to a regular person it would look okay. There's a lot of content but most of the pages on the site say almost the same thing with a slight variation.

Soo... here we are, this page that appeared at the bottom of page one, but at what cost? I've never seen this competitor's name pop up on any actual forums about the topic, no reviews, nothing. Does anyone purchase from this company? I have no idea. There's some buzz on facebook/forums/anywhere about everyone else on page one (all competing companies with similar products), but as far as this little rogue company - nothing. What are they doing?

Just an interesting thing that I noticed - thought others here on WF might like to see what happens when you're not careful about your outsourcing and may want to do some better research on individual companies before outsourcing everything. Especially if your company isn't well established.

I'm interested to see what happens down the line with these guys. If they get any orders, if customers perceive them as trustworthy - or if any potential customers notice or care.

[outwest]

I would say when it involves writing, even native english speakers are no guarantee. However without native english speakers, its next to impossible to get correct syntax, punctuation and sentence structure, where the person does not laugh when they read what is on the page. And thats not good for business.

Its a wonder to me half the people who succeed in IM ever do, considering more than half are not native English speakers and are attempting to write for native English speaking buyers

[David Judge]

It is easy enough to outsource the task, but you definitely need to make sure your finger is one the pulse of your onpage content. It needs to sell a user experience to your visitors and let them dip their toe into the waters of your business.

With this in mind, I outsource a bucket load of tasks, but I make sure I train and have each resource following a set guideline.

But it's not why you think.

For me it's for SEO purposes only as I don't want a dodgy post or content potentially being flagged by Google and getting a site re-ranked in their next Panda update.

In all honesty, if you were to look at analytics, very few people would be coming to the site via these posts or articles. They're really just the fodder of getting a site ranked and sit there unseen.

But it's important to have a site that prompts a visitor to take action. I see this as just as important if not more important than SEO or any other comments or posts out there.

[john1818]

If you're looking for an outsourcing company you should look for a few things.

First, is the company's website. An SEO company should've a professional-looking website to attract clients. A crappy-looking website for an SEO is like having a bad hygiene. It's like having a drugstore that sells expired medicines or an auto-shop that sells rusty old cars. I hope you'll get the analogy.

Second, You can actually see what kind of SEO company they are just by looking on how well they write. If it has lots of grammatical errors in their home page then i suggest for you to try to look for another company. Why? Because a good SEO company should have at least a COPYWRITER to edit those simple things.

Third, is their rankings. If they cant rank their website on Google then what kind of SEO they're doing?

It must all start with their website. If they can't do good with their own business, how do you expect them to do quality work for you? Make sense right?

Hope this post helps.

Cheers,

John

[sharkey]

Just an update, I watched their rankings fall back to page 2 - 3 of google except for 2 of their search terms. looks like they've flatlined in terms of new backlink volume.