Frustrated with SEO/PPC companies

Welcome to internet reality where marketers thank you for spending all that
money to make it easier for them to spam you with their garbage to sell offers.

Lesson learned from some pick pocket SEO services. Its important to have enough knowledge for the owner to have mutual understanding with the project. This will avoid or lessen the promising conversions or marketing fluff.

I don't know how much a service call is worth, but 21 through organic in a week sounds pretty good. PPC does not look like it is paying off, though.

You did not say how much of your SEO budget was going to PPC versus organic SEO efforts, but I'd certainly consider scaling back or completely eliminating the paid advertising.

As someone that has previously worked for SEO agencies, I personally find most SEO agencies are ethical.

What I would say is, all an SEO can do is drive traffic. How the site converts is down to the site itself. You're only giving us the number of conversions but not telling us how much organic traffic you're getting. In addition, we have no idea on the value of your product or service...

So we have no idea if your SEO is doing a good or bad job, so I will not comment on that.

That said..

You could lower your costs by taking the work in house. Particularly when you're spending such a lot of money...

In comparison to an SEO Exec's hourly salary, an agency could charge 5-10x more. They have a lot more overheads and have to make a profit.

So you could consider hiring a couple of knowledgable SEOs in house OR hire an SEO on a consultant basis to analyse what is being done month by month.

The key is to have realistic expectations and then judge if the SEO is meeting them.

Best,

I will tell you what. Sit back and do the math . Come up with a number you are willing to pay for one call/lead? Divide your budget (10s of thousand) by this number and you will get the total no.of leads you want for that price. Convey this to your SEO/PPC campaign. They may try to confuse you with jargons. If they do so, ask them to come up with their figures. Stick to your numbers because you may not know PPC campaigns but you know your business.

Ppc is beneficial for the ecommerce or product companies whereas for services and solutions seo is best so it might be the wrong choice the reason of your frustration.

It looks like Pay Per Lead model would be what you are looking for. You would only pay for a qualified lead/call. No more need to pay for unqualified clicks. You will only pay for clients who are interested and who you talk to.
You can contact me for more info.

I feel your pain, been there, done that, in the end I just read all I could find on the subjects and did it myself.... I could offer the same to you, but because of all the scumbags in the industry you probably wouldn't think I could do it either... do it yourself.
We make a direct profit from online advertising, it took us about three years of tweaking to break even, and then we have been gaining profit from it over the years, as well as residual visitors. The important thing is to track the leads and conversion so you can weigh the cost vs the result. It is very very hard to make money though online advertising because there are so many people losing money at it, which inflates the cost for us all.
Offpage SEO, unless you have a very high profit model, for the most part is a waste of time these days. There are armies of people working at offsite SEO, and you will never be able to compete with the Amazons, Wallmarts, and McDonalds of the world in this aspect. Social media is easier than SEO nowadays, assuming you have something worthy of sharing.
If you insist on finding someone to do SEO for you, do a Google search for SEO companies. Anyone worthy of your money will appear on the first page, that is their proof of work.

Hi SempreAvanti,

While there wasn't quite enough information in your post to be certain about what is going on, it sounds to me like the ratio of organic to paid advertising is way off from what we normally see as sources for new business.

In your niche we typically see 70-90% of new business generated from paid search ads, while organic search will typically be around 10-30%. There may be some notable exceptions, but they are rare.

The fact that you have very few PPC leads compared to organic seems to indicate most of the new business in your area is going to your competitors.

It is well known in marketing that organic search traffic is dominated primarily by information seeking queries with no commercial intent while sponsored listings capture the overwhelming majority of high commercial intent search queries.

It seems that your current marketing firm may be focused too heavily on the wrong channel. The solution might be as simple as shifting most of your marketing dollars over to paid advertising where most of your competitors are winning majority of all new customers.

I'm not suggesting that you completely abandon SEO, just that you should optimize your marketing dollars to more closely match the true sources of new business for your niche.

Based on your own account, the quality of leads from PPC are far better (100% conversion rate vs. 30%). Why are you not spending most of you marketing dollars on PPC? And if you are, why are you not getting at least 2 leads from PPC for every organic lead? There seems to be a lot of new business from paid ads that is going straight to your competitors.

Also, the ratio of leads from web forms seems to be off. There is a strong trend of the ratio of leads from web forms overtaking phone call leads. That might not be the case in your local market, but it seems like something we often see from campaigns that are not yet using custom landing pages optimized for their campaign goals.

There are a lot things that could be wrong, and it seems that your instincts are right. You should be getting a lot more business for the amount of money you are spending.

There could be other things going on that we cannot see from the little bit of information in your post. If you want to PM me your website URL I'll take a quick look to see if I spot anything amiss. At the very least I tell you at least one or 2 things that you can try that will likely improve your results.

HTH,

Don Burk