Looking for a competent SEO firm or consultant

[9Studios]

Hello Folks,

I run an eCommerce site for video surveillance equipment. We used to be on top of page one for related terms until about a year ago and now we are in page 2 or 3. We have 2 in house full time web developers and I have tried 3 different SEO firms with very poor results.

I am looking for a competent SEO firm or consultant with proven & verifiable track record. If you or someone you know has used an SEO firm or consultant with good results, I would appreciate if you could point me to them.

Thank You!

[MoosaHemani]

There are really tons of SEO companies offering snake oil services. When people ask me how to find a good SEO company I give them a step by step process and here is what it looks like:

-          If you have a big budget, Moz have the list of companies “List of Recommended Companies” just go there and choose anyone of them and you probably will find the one you are ideally looking for.

-          If you have a small budget lesser then $1000 a month most probably no good SEO company is going to touch you unless they are new and wants to build a reputation or you cut a good deal with them.

-          If you have decent budget, here is how you should go about it.

1. Choose the list of companies and check their expert level. Blog and their presence on social media will help you judge that.
2. Instead of email communication, try and talk to them over the skype and voice. Understand their vision and find out more about what they can do for you in terms of ranking and conversion.
3. How will they do it is very important. If they are not transparent and open about their process, cut them from the list, otherwise go for it.
4. Set clear goals and deliverables. We will provide you rankings and not sure about conversions is not a good deliverable. They should set goals everywhere that includes traffic, rankings as well as conversions.
5. Give them independence to do everything that gives your business a positive bump.

If any company you are in contact with is fulfilling all the requirements then you probably should go for it.

I looked in to your website and this is what I found within the first 30 seconds:

-          The website design is boring and does not allow audience to engage. My advice is to try A?B testing of your website design.

-          From the ranking perspective I don’t see many problems. You are ranking well for many keywords (just not only on the first page). You need someone to work hard for you and take these rankings to the first page of Google so that it starts converting.

-          Links are not bad either, just need to kill some links coming from Press release websites.

I think overall you are in a better situation than most. All you want is a company who can help you improve your website CRO areas plus hep you get the rankings on the first page of Google.

Hope this helps!

[Stewart_SEO]

First thing, did you ever establish why your seo dropped off and why you disappeared from your original position?Secondly, what did those other agencies do that was poor?

I can't help you I'm too busy but I might be able to point you in the right direction - then the rest is up to you.

[BBEXNinja]

First, you don't want to hire an SEO company that makes "guarantees" about getting you 1st page Google placement within a short amount of time.

A) Google's in charge, not them, so they can't promise you anything.

B) Generally, the techniques that are utilized to get you 1st page results quickly are against Google's quality guidelines and are easily discovered and penalized by Google. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

To elaborate on point B, more specifically, I'm talking about the creation of "unnatural" backlinks that are intended solely to boost rankings for particular keywords. I would definitely interview the SEO company and ask them what sort of techniques they employ. If they mention link building, I would insist on seeing samples of links they've built for clients.

If they show you poorly written articles or discussion forum posts containing money keyword links such as "house painter boise" or "office furniture delaware" then I would recommend you avoid the company. These exact match anchor texts can improve a website's ranking for such terms in the short-term. In the long-term, however, a website's link profile will show very obvious signs of abuse. It's kind of like a person who's been on steroids for an extensive period of time and will inevitably get slapped with a manual or algorithmic penalty.

You want a more modern and up-to-date company that utilizes quality content marketing and creative social media and marketing solutions to garner your website more natural links.

I would also attempt to diagnose if your website currently has any such penalties. You can use Google's Webmaster Tools to check if you have a manual penalty, or you can use something like the Fruition.net Google Penalty checker to see if you were negatively impacted by Panda or Penguin. If any of the above prove to be the case, I would then do a lot of research on penalty recovery before hiring an SEO company to improve rankings.