What does SEO "maintence" needed on site & questions too

THe "normal" SEO activity to either increase rankings is link building... If all they did was clean up the code then I don't really see how your client's "SEO company" did any SEO...

It sounds to me that they did some on-site optimization maybe with the title tags, h1 tags, alt tags, proper formatting etc...

They should be doing keyword research for you and investing time getting to know your business and goals.

Also, they should be providing continuous backlinking strategies, article writing, press releases, etc....

Lastly, they should be providing support and consolation and helping you understand how the process works.

I would be happy to talk to you guys if you're not happy with your SEO team. My signature points to one of my SEO sites.

Thanks,
Tony

I bet 50 SEOs will come here now and write how your clients SEO company is bad. The point is, we don't know what they did. Most of the work we do clients can't see but behind that is a team of people doing a lof of things to build links. Sometimes if the site is already ok with on-page factors than maybe link building is all that is needed and you can't see the work that is being done but it is being done. I know people like to see with their eyes but there are many companies that "show you the work" and they actually don't do much. I explain clients what we will do, of course not every client can understand so we adjust the level of "tech/geek" talk to the client. If they ask us some specific questions about work being done we explain them. However beside rankings and number of incoming links there is no way you can see the progress. Yes of course reports of created links might be good, but the point is the client doesn't know the difference between good and bad links so using pure number of backlins is also not very good thing. For example good link from some authority site may require specific approach with whole weeks time spent on getting it and some low quality SEO on the other hand may throw you report with 1000 links built just to make you happy but the SEO that created 1 link is probably 10 times better. It's very complicated to judge someones quality of service because in most cases people judge by wrong criteria. My best advice would be to get to know few SEOs. You can offer them maybe some small fee for them to take a look of website. They can give you advice how hard the targeted keyword is, is it the best for your business, if you have any backlinks built, if your on page factors are optimized enough etc. There are a lot of bad SEO companies out there of course, but it would be lame for you to "fire" someone who is doing good job so best thing is get someone else who is qualified to "inspect" them. With a quick check I found that company doing SEO for some clients of mine was using BH stuff like link cloacking etc. I told them to fire them because they could get them penalized in Google.

Thanks for all the input. My client paid a considerable monthly fee for their services & was happy with the improvement in rankings. However, sales for those months did not improve. The SEO company determined what keyword phrases to target when they did their tweaking on the site. As I mentioned, they didn't do any changes to text within the pages of the site, or offsite linkbuilding.

I think the main thing we'd like to find is someone who can assist us in reaching our business goals - perhaps by suggessting & then targeting certain keyword phrases that might be off the beaten path, but result in increased sales. We're also doing a lot of content marketing for the site, and I'd like to get assistance from an SEO person who can look at what we're doing & suggesst tweaks that would improve results.

Long story short - the company did a pretty good job. They DID increase rankings for my client on certain keyword phrases. However, those rankings didn't result in increased sales, which tells me perhaps they targeted the wrong keyword phrases.

I would be interested in discussing some SEO strategies with you. PM me or click on my sig to get contact information.

Thanks,
Tony