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SEO Firm not working - Advice Needed

by mikeandtomphoto
18 replies
  • SEO
    • |
A few months back (5) we started looking for an SEO company that could work on a specific page on our website Manchester Wedding Photographer | Mike & Tom. We received quotes all around the same price and did our research and went with the company we felt looked most professional, had the strongest portfolio from what we could see and generally in our opinion spoke sense when we discussed the project.

Our site was already ranking number 1 for its domain and keyword and we asked them to focus their efforts on ranking this specific page 'manchester' for the term 'Manchester Wedding Photographer'. We had had success ranking a similar sub page for a different area although simply didn't have enough time to repeat the same process for Manchester.

Information on what they told us:
- It should take around 3 months to rank on the top page
- They would build quality links to the website increasing the overall domain authority
- They said it should be fairly easy to achieve a rank within the top 3 search results
- Around 5 hours per month would be spent on the site

After 3 months we checked our rankings and were currently ranking on page 5 for our main domain. We were sceptical that we would achieve number 1 with the main domain as it had no clear references to Manchester.

We contacted them saying that its now been 3 months could you provide and update.

They said they had seen a dramatic improvement and had reached page 5. (Yes dramatic as it was a new page but not the page 1 they had said and not for the page we had requested to be ranked)

We asked how long now before they believed we would improve and reach the goal. They said we expect it to rank top page within a couple of weeks then top 3 the following 4 weeks after that for your specific Manchester page.

We decided to continue with the project and purchased another month hoping for improvement. We now rank on page 6 for manchester and it has been a further 4 weeks.

So advice needed....
What should we do? Purchase another month on their word that has currently not been correct on any occasion? Or leave them, start all over from scratch and admit we have wasted a sizeable sum. We honestly don't know what to do!

Understand they may read this but done caring...

As a subnote.. We understand SEO is an ongoing thing and shouldn't nec be seen as we will have this ranking within this amount of time and if we had clearly seen the ranking that they had promised we would have no problem continuing with the project as we would be making money from the ranking.
#advice #firm #needed #seo #working
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    No offense but I always have to laugh when someone mentions SEO portfolio, lol. That's so easy to fake it's just silly.

    Anyone that gives a time frame for ranking a page is blowing smoke. You build a page, throw links at the page & wait, repeat until ranked. It might take a week, it might take a year, all depends on how tough competition is for the target keyword. That's SEO, you have no idea how things will pan out until you jump in & start doing the work.

    How much are you paying for 5 hours a month?
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    • Profile picture of the author mikeandtomphoto
      So if a portfolio is easy to fake how would choose an SEO company if you were looking?

      Well of course it would be easy to give a timescale, yes it might take longer yes it might be quicker? Do you not give a timescale on your experiences?

      £300 - Yes im sure you say it is cheap as everyone has said this in the past although we enquired to about 20 SEO companies with the quote all being around the same price. No vast differences excluding maybe 1 who was based in London.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by mikeandtomphoto View Post

        So if a portfolio is easy to fake how would choose an SEO company if you were looking?

        Well of course it would be easy to give a timescale, yes it might take longer yes it might be quicker? Do you not give a timescale on your experiences?

        £300 - Yes im sure you say it is cheap as everyone has said this in the past although we enquired to about 20 SEO companies with the quote all being around the same price. No vast differences excluding maybe 1 who was based in London.

        I suppose the price itself isn't bad $300 for 5 hours of work per month but you need to keep in mind the quality of backlinks depends on the budget which means you're most likely getting around $150 per month worth of backlinks the rest is going towards manual labor (link building).

        Your site needs some work, here's a few 404 error pages where you have a bunch of broken internal links on your site linking to pages that don't exist.

        Change hxxp to http
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/hari-anushree-destination-wedding-photography-india
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/2015/09/
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/gallery/
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/hari-anushree-destination-wedding-photography-india
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/nick-leah-destination-wedding-photography-france
        • hxxp://www.mikeandtom.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml

        The broken sitemap_index.xml file has a site wide link, that's a lot of links pointing at a page that doesn't exist considering you have 648 pages indexed on Google SERPs.

        The Home page left/right horizontal scroll is a horrible user experience.

        My advice is forget hiring someone to build links for your site & do it yourself long term. You're a photographer which means you have an unlimited supply of original photos to use for link building. Do something like this here for generating long term organic backlinks.

        I know you want ranked yesterday (who doesn't) but creating a long term strategy for organic links is safer than hiring someone to create low budget backlinks. Apparently there's at least two people in your business, take 1 hour a day each to upload original images to image sharing sites & request a backlink in exchange for traffic using your images. This is something you can easily do on your own.

        Use your photography skills to your advantage & spend that $300 a month on something more productive.
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        • Profile picture of the author mikeandtomphoto
          Yeh the site is a mess as keeping on top of it isn't the easiest thing in the world for ourselves. I could easily rank a site for a city and wedding photography and we are lucky enough to have several sites in top 3 positions but the reason we reached out to the seo company is that we simply didn't have time, not 1 single hour each to do that. If we could do it (complete novices, self taught on forums like this) surely a professional who has plenty of experience could.

          Thanks for pointing out the sitemap_index problem, it often does that when I dont update the wordpress plugin for some reason. Much appreciated.

          They built 5 links in november from sites similar to this - ZBrushCentral

          We would happily spend $300 dollars if it meant hiring somebody to repeat the process you linked to but obviously we wouldnt know if that worked before hand.. looking back it could have been a much better option.
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          • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
            Originally Posted by mikeandtomphoto View Post

            Yeh the site is a mess as keeping on top of it isn't the easiest thing in the world for ourselves. I could easily rank a site for a city and wedding photography and we are lucky enough to have several sites in top 3 positions but the reason we reached out to the seo company is that we simply didn't have time, not 1 single hour each to do that. If we could do it (complete novices, self taught on forums like this) surely a professional who has plenty of experience could.

            Thanks for pointing out the sitemap_index problem, it often does that when I dont update the wordpress plugin for some reason. Much appreciated.

            They built 5 links in november from sites similar to this - ZBrushCentral

            We would happily spend $300 dollars if it meant hiring somebody to repeat the process you linked to but obviously we wouldnt know if that worked before hand.. looking back it could have been a much better option.

            You are paying $300 per month for a few forum profile links. I would never work for $300 per month, but that is pretty shitty work.
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
            Banned
            Originally Posted by mikeandtomphoto View Post

            Yeh the site is a mess as keeping on top of it isn't the easiest thing in the world for ourselves. I could easily rank a site for a city and wedding photography and we are lucky enough to have several sites in top 3 positions but the reason we reached out to the seo company is that we simply didn't have time, not 1 single hour each to do that. If we could do it (complete novices, self taught on forums like this) surely a professional who has plenty of experience could.

            Thanks for pointing out the sitemap_index problem, it often does that when I dont update the wordpress plugin for some reason. Much appreciated.

            They built 5 links in november from sites similar to this - ZBrushCentral

            We would happily spend $300 dollars if it meant hiring somebody to repeat the process you linked to but obviously we wouldnt know if that worked before hand.. looking back it could have been a much better option.
            I just now looked those are followed links on that forum. I didn't take any time to look at your exact backlinks on that forum, I'm guessing they're followed.

            I'd say you got ripped off on the forum links, it's not even direct targeted traffic. If it was links on a local wedding forum/site (local traffic) where women are searching for a photographer, sure that would be a decent link because it would have potential to generate direct sales even without SEO. I'm talking legit links, not obvious hit & run spam.

            The problem with forum links like that in regards to SEO is paginated forum threads that have no authority & the fact that most forums in 2015 are nofollow outbound links. The forum webmaster could easily switch the entire site over to nofollow because that's what webmasters do on forums in 2015 to avoid spam.

            Five free short term links in a month is nothing.

            You need to think long term strategy for a legit offline photography business. It's very easy to let someone else get your site deindexed in Google SERPs. It's next to impossible to get a Google ban lifted on a domain. Think about what you're doing to your site link profile unless you enjoy starting over with a new domain/links.
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        • Profile picture of the author GarrettMickley
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          My advice is forget hiring someone to build links for your site & do it yourself long term. You're a photographer which means you have an unlimited supply of original photos to use for link building. Do something like this here for generating long term organic backlinks.
          Just wanted to hop in and say thanks to Yukon for that link. Don't know why this thought never occurred to me!

          As far as OP goes, it seems like most of the people (like Yukon) in here are right. I wouldn't go with these guys any further.
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  • Profile picture of the author cbpayne
    Are you getting a report from them about what they are actually doing.
    The backlink profile looks very weak and for £300 a month, I would expect to see something substantially better.
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  • Profile picture of the author mikeandtomphoto
    Although thanks for the link to the thread. Very interesting.
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  • Profile picture of the author MrMintyBluez
    Anyone you reach out to for SEO help needs to provide you access to the Google Search Console, Analytics, and they need to tell you EVERYTHING they are doing, as well as proving it.

    One mistake on your end. Never, NEVER, NEVVVVERRR, accept promises to get ranked. No SEO firm has the power to guarantee ranks and I mean NO ONE. If a firm ever promises you that you need to run. I lost about 20K in a past company for falling for those types of firms.
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  • Profile picture of the author Content Lane
    You cannot gauge SEO on a schedule. This is probably in the fine print of the contract. I did not see any mention of content anywhere. Google's search results are very much content-driven.
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    Is your content stuck in the slow lane?
    Order high quality content from Content Lane!
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Content Lane View Post

      You cannot gauge SEO on a schedule. This is probably in the fine print of the contract. I did not see any mention of content anywhere. Google's search results are very much content-driven.

      You're obviously spamming the forum sig (outsourcing articles).
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      • Profile picture of the author mikeandtomphoto
        Ok so you are all in agreement that something is not right with them and I shouldn't continue?

        Would it help if I uploaded the reports they send and agreements in place? To give a bigger picture I mean?
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  • Profile picture of the author Svend2014
    Interesting thoughts... @ MrMintyBluez - you are wrong... there are seo companies that can get their clients on page one or two of google for their keywords. I know, cause I do it all the time. @ mikeandtomphoto - you need to dump them... they had a chance and blew it! They made promises that did not come through. Time to find a better firm with proven results! I do screen shots of my results on my website, and anyone is free to go to google and try the search and see for themselves that page one results are doable, and in a fast time period, and for a fair price! check out my site on google... search svend seo results 2015 --- see it works! ;-)
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    • Profile picture of the author MrMintyBluez
      Originally Posted by Svend2014 View Post

      Interesting thoughts... @ MrMintyBluez - you are wrong... there are seo companies that can get their clients on page one or two of google for their keywords. I know, cause I do it all the time. @ mikeandtomphoto - you need to dump them... they had a chance and blew it! They made promises that did not come through. Time to find a better firm with proven results! I do screen shots of my results on my website, and anyone is free to go to google and try the search and see for themselves that page one results are doable, and in a fast time period, and for a fair price! check out my site on google... search svend seo results 2015 --- see it works! ;-)
      Lol, you cant guarantee anything. A guarentee is followed by the ability to call Google and have them manually move their serps.
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    • Profile picture of the author DannyVeiga
      Troll much? First post after being registered for almost 2 years - and you're just offering your service without providing good value... next.

      Originally Posted by Svend2014 View Post

      Interesting thoughts... @ MrMintyBluez - you are wrong... there are seo companies that can get their clients on page one or two of google for their keywords. I know, cause I do it all the time. @ mikeandtomphoto - you need to dump them... they had a chance and blew it! They made promises that did not come through. Time to find a better firm with proven results! I do screen shots of my results on my website, and anyone is free to go to google and try the search and see for themselves that page one results are doable, and in a fast time period, and for a fair price! check out my site on google... search svend seo results 2015 --- see it works! ;-)
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  • Profile picture of the author DannyVeiga
    I help clients all the time - but I don't come to them or look for clients that just want "SEO". I work with businesses that want real results, a true growth to their business. To be honest, you need someone who wants to ask questions and listen carefully to what the goals of the business are.

    There's so much to do for marketing a business properly, not just build forum links or a quick dirty job for $300 a month. There are tons of data to look at, let's take a look and see:

    1: Whoever you hire, needs to look at what specific niche you're involved in, and your competitors. What backlink profile do your competitors have that you can take advantage of? what keywords do you need to target? Are you only focusing on main keywords (hint: FOCUS on long tail)
    2: They need to look at past Analytical data to see what type of visitors you're receiving, where they're coming from, how long they're staying on the site, what pages they're visiting, are they just bouncing off? Are they sharing your content? Do you even have any content to share? Are you blogging at all (i just see photos with no links to content)? Is your website easily navigated by its users?
    3: Do you have any errors in Webmaster Tools? Do you have schema setup on your site? What CMS are you using? Is it optimally coded?

    I can go on and on. The point is, it's not just about "hey I'll guarantee you X results in 4 weeks, for $300".

    Ask yourself this - if I know that a #1 spot for your industry could potentially bring you $20K (just throwing out a number) why would I even want to charge you just $300?

    Now, potentially, you may need someone to go and look at what links were built, and if they're doing more damage than good.
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  • Profile picture of the author tomhenry1710
    thanks for your sharing
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