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I would carefully avoid any SEO agency offering flat rates or package deals. The amount of work required to obtain good results vary a lot according to market competition. If you offer "Plasma cutting machines and Waterjet Equipment in Timbuctu" you need a lot less money than if you want first spot for "casino".
Pick a SEO company that will do a market study first (about 20 hrs of work for 50 keywords). Then make sure those guys take time to sit with you to explain what kind of efforts is required for each keywords on each market segment. This way you can make your own choices and pick your package "à la carte".
SEO companies not making a distinction between market competition will usually deliver a very poor service.
My 2 cents.ca
Macguru are you talking about 20 hours of preliminary work to do a proposal, or as an initial service that they pay for prior to submitting a proposal for the entire job?
How do you know their clients have good position in Google? Are they exposing their clients on their website? If it is the case, Ouch! :)
It is fairly easy to get good SERPs on Google for low competition keyphrases. How many results is google showing for those SERPS? If under 100 000, any basic job can do that. What about the demand on those keyphrases? Is there any demand? You can use this tool to check relative demand if you like.
If you have less than 1 000 queries a month for those keyphrases, it wont bring a lot of visitors.
Are they describing their business practice? Do you know what they will do in order to achieve results? Are they putting their clients at risk? Here is what Google have to say about SEO :
[google.com...]
It's not an URL I like to drop, but some "SEO" are giving the industry a bad reputation.
There are lots of incompetents and cowboys out there... I would check their business practice too. If they wont tell, Ouch! You are responsible for who you hire.
If this company seem to have a good business practice, and can achieve good results for valuable keyphrases for that little money, I am tipping my hat to them.
Marcia,
I write a proposal after I met the client with the market study. Sometimes the product is so specific that 2 or 3 keyphrases will do. Most of the times, not.
Most of my clients are communication or web design agencies (repeated customers), not site owners. They hire us to help building good proposals to prospects.
Examples given by the Seo company are ranking very well on Very competitive (though not as competitive as mine) keyphrases. I had checked them on Overture and Wordtracker.
>>Are they describing their business practice? Do you know what they will do in order to achieve results? Are they putting their clients at risk? Here is what Google have to say about SEO
I did not spot any suspect practice except that they use tiny or hidden images with alt tags and links to other targeted pages. They also mentioned they may build another same theme site which will send traffic to their client's site. They offered two alternatives for their clients. They may buy it or loose traffic after the contract. I know this is unethical.
>>If this company seem to have a good business practice, and can achieve good results for valuable keyphrases for that little money, I am tipping my hat to them.
So you think that their service are not expensive. Probably my clients won't afford that. :(
The tactics described are so risky, I would not consider doing business with them at any price.
IMHO, 1.5 K is far from enough for the first month in a competitive market.
I found this good thread [webmasterworld.com] about it, a bit dusty, but still valid.
Hope this helps.
When I checked out the service you are refering to, the SEO site itself was not in the SERPs- his (the SEO guru) explanation to me was that google didn't like how well they were doing and banned them. Seemed sketchy to me at the time adn I didn't hire them.
Are they still banned?
m2c1r:
Don't know if we are talking about the same company. But yes, they seem to be in the blacklist still. ;)
