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It's hard to know everything which could be affecting this without a link to both pages. 1) It's possible that the Chinese version is just so much more popular (links) that it still gets returned instead of the EN page despite Hreflangs (which Google can overrule in extreme circumstances). **2) **It's possible that Google still thinks users will get the 'best deal' on the Chinese version of your site, even when ordering products or services from abroad (look at your currency-normalised price points). 3) It could be that the English version of the page has other technical issues which prevents it from being indexed, which forces Google to list one version only (a common one is if, you have regional redirects implemented for Google - but you forgot to 'exempt' Google from those redirects, and thus it crawls from a particular data centre and can only see one version of your site which it keeps being redirected back to). 4) It could be that the brand term originated in China and thus Google considers the brand term to be part of the Chinese language, not part of the English language (and thus you get keyword targeting problems all over the place). If the brand term looks and sounds Chinese and was originally created in (or for) the Chinese market, if most of the links around the web which mention the brand term are Chinese - you can see how Google could get confused. 5) It could just be a Google glitch which you could post about here (but there's no guarantee of a reply).

Josh,  You knew the answer before you wrote the question but it is a smart question. As someone who works daily in an agency and is responsible for most of our proposals, I see this regularly around link building, ranking, website development, etc. Client comes in and says we need a new website and we quote $15,000. Client says we have someone who can build the same website for $5,000. "Fantastic, you will save $10K!" Someone says we need to be ranked in top three of Google for our terms, how much will that cost? "I don't know as we do not guarantee rankings of any kind." Yes, you can add more to that, but you understand. So, with link building if you know the others are guaranteeing X amounts of high quality links I am assuming the client told you this. If so, my answer would be "That is great, I have been doing SEO a long time and am unable to make those kinds of guarantees. I wish you the very best." Of course, you could be tacky, "Once that is finished, should you run into trouble, we do penalty recovery!" I had to write this as it really is funny that people still don't get this stuff. Matt in our UK office said something the other day that cracked me up about a potential client who had a huge huge huge SEO problem and said they would pay $3k one time to get 2 million pages indexed within a month after they had gotten most of their pages to disappear somehow. He said, "Pay peanuts, get monkeys!" Sometimes the monkeys will beat you out for a client; let it go and move on. Best

I have an answer. Less than ten in any industry niche. Why that number? That is how man fit on the first page of Google and everyone else - even if they do SEO - is not getting much out of it.

Like most low barrier of entrance, web-based businesses, there are endless pseudo-professional "firms" and "individuals". To get a rough estimate of licensed, established consultants and firms, try counting DMOZ entries.  It's not fool-proof, but neither is your question.   Did this answer your question?