Had SEO Firm tell me to Start Over - pros and cons help please
-
Hi
So I have quotes of 1250 to 2500 a month to run my website, seo wise.
What I am told is they will do all facebook postings, 4 blog posts each month, some citations, and site optimization.
Those amounts due seem like a lot. Yet I was last to start all over.
Basically I was told that because of some bad backlinks, which only a few remain, that you can never recover from an algorithm penalty. And with a Disavow, its like telling Google - penalize me please
So the plan was this:
$3000 for a new site, and new domain, and then it has no penalties, and I will be ranking in no time.
The problem is I am branded. My domain and business name is Bernese Of The Rockies. People know us and we are very respected.
So if we create a new site like example.com, I do not want to mislead people. Or if there is a penalty for say a landing page or site, where I am sending people to my main site for more info type of thing.
Just looking for your input if this is a common issue, where if you have a non manual, but algo penalty that you must restart?
Thank you so much for your thoughts and suggestions.
-
Hi Berner
In relation to "links", you can recover and fairly quickly as William pointed out.
Every website needs continued maintenance. Disavow provides you the opportunity to keep you site in shape! We run monthly health checks (using Moz) for our clients which includes refreshing link data, keeping disavow files updated etc. This gives us the opportunity to identify and solve any site issues efficiently with the client firmly in the loop so to speak.
What has happened? Why it happen? Where? What we will do? Evidence/Outcome?
Whoever you employ, make sure they cover everything and provide "evidence". You deserve to have this. It's not just links that can get you penalised however. If you are researching what exactly Google will penalise you for, take a read below.
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/penalized-by-google/
Keep us informed, we're a friendly bunch!
-
Hi Thanks for the concern. No signed contract or anything like that. I was shopping around for quotes first.
I just figured $36,000 a year to do seo on a site is crazy for my budget. So this is why I am here too learn all I can first, then maybe either do good enough to do my own work proudly, or save some money by having some of the work done myself.
I love the challenge of SEO, yet I find difficulties when there is not a clear road map as I see black hat and white hat seo, but sometimes its difficult to know the difference.
But I am here to learn and I am very grateful for the opportunity.
-
I totally agree with Lesley. And here's the thing, the fee for what you need (around $3,000 a month) is pretty realistic...however, the plan of action is not. I totally disagree with the approach. I don't think that you are being communicated with effectively. I am hoping that you haven't already signed a contract and paid these folks. There are better SEOs who can and will provide you better advice and action that what you are being given. If you are stuck because you already have paid, pass along the info you're getting here and continue to post as they make new recommendations. Don't let them do anything to your business that makes you think "Hmmm, I don't know if that's the right thing." - Ask a ton of questions. You are the client. They have an obligation to serve YOU.
-
Thank you for the tips. It is greatly appreciated
-
You can recover, but I wouldn't recommend hiring one of those companies that said you couldn't.
-
The prices are in line with industry standards, but I think the way of handling it is not. The only time I ever recommend someone changing their domain name is if the company went through a period where they have a bad reputation and cannot recover from that. Like there are bad reviews and things that you cannot control around the internet with links back to the site.
If I were doing SEO on the site I would look for a penalty and then disavow any bad links. Then I would start drilling local citations for the site. I have seen your posts a couple of times on here lately, it seems that local citations would help your site out a lot. I am assuming that you do not ship dogs across the country, or it is very rare for you to do. So you will want to focus on local sites that can get your local ranking factors higher.
At the same time I would do the blog posting and I would also do forum posting too.
-
Thank you for the support.
That's just it I cannot afford $3000 for a new site, yet if there is no recovery from penguin or whatever, then I have to start thinking about the future etc.
Thank you so much for your kind words.
-
Hi Chris,
You have been misinformed. Disavow is your friend when done correctly. If you know you took a hit for bad backlinks, you can recover. This comes from personal experience of fixing this issue. You are usually talking about 1-2 month recovery period when link cleanup is done right.
If you like your brand, domain, and you were ranking before a link penalty, then clean it up. Should be cheaper than a new website as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
International SEO: reposting my own posts to different ccTLDs versions of my website
Hello there Moz community! Moz has been super helpful for me and the team, keep up the good work! I have searched online for answers regarding my specific situation, but I haven't found any. I'm asking my fellow Moz users in hopes of an answer. Maybe this thread will help others too. I currently have this domain: https://eco-reusable.com/ I would like to target Ireland and the UK with my keywords so I have just bought eco-reusable**.IE** and eco-reusable**.CO.UK** My questions are: 1. In order to rank as high as possible for Ireland, do I create a new website for eco-reusable.ie using the same pages but changing all the content slightly so it is not duplicate content OR do I point the eco-reusable.ie domain to eco-reusable.com? By having two sites, we will add more hours but we don't mind if that will be of benefit in the longrun for ranking high in Ireland. I have the same question for eco-reusable.co.uk
Local Website Optimization | | Gael_Regnault
If we have to create three websites and make similar content (not duplicate), we will if it will be better for ranking high in ireland for .ie, in the UK for .co.uk and for the rest of the world for .com 2. If we create three websites, can I safely "copy/paste" my blog posts without being punished by Google for duplicate content? If so, how much variation do we have to have for each of the three sites if we are writing blogs that are the same context. Thank you in advance! 🙂0 -
Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords
We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)
Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto0 -
Multiple My Business pages affecting local SEO?
Hey Moz! We have a situation with a dentist firm with multiple doctors at the same address. They have two locations for their dental offices, and each of the dentists operate at both offices. The issue: Each doctor insists on having their own by business page for each location and i'm afraid this is hurting their local SEO. We've been tracking keywords by week and we've seen some big fluctuations in ratings and i'm looking into why this is happening. The office in location 1 has it's own Google My Business page and the three dentists have their own my business page set up at the exact same address. The office in location 2 has it's own Google My Business page as well and the three dentists have their own my business page there also. This leads the two addresses of the main offices having multiple My Business pages at the same address competing against eachother since they are all are registered with similar names and specialties. Could this be hurting our local SEO? Thanks! -Z
Local Website Optimization | | zacgarrison_700 -
Optimizing Local SEO for Two Locations
Hi there! I have a client that has just opened a 2nd location in another state. When optimizing for local I have a few questions: We're creating a landing page for each location, this will have contact information and ideally some information on each location. Any recomendations for content on these landing pages? The big question is dual city optimization. Should Include the city & state of BOTH locations in all my title tags? or should I leave that to the unique city landing pages? What other on-page optimizations should i consider across the site? Thanks! Jordan
Local Website Optimization | | WorkhorseMKT0 -
SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices
I've read a number of articles on SEO and main navigation for websites. I'd like to get a solid answer/recommendation to help solve this one. This is the situation. We're helping a local business that offers pest control and property maintenance services. Under each of these, there area a number of services available, eg, cockroach control, termite inspections or lawn mowing services, rubbish removal and so on. Is it best to have a main nav containing the top keywords for the services - Pest Control | Property Maintenance, with a drop down to the services under each. Or, a simple approach - Our Services > drop down to each - Pest Control > Termite Inspections, etc. My concern here is that they have quite a lot of services, so the nav could be way too long. Really appreciate any assistance here. Many thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | RichardRColeman0 -
Can to many 301 redirects damage my Ecommerce Site - SEO Issue
Hello All, I have an eCommerce website doing online hire. We operate from a large number of locations (100 approx) and my 100 or so categories have individual locations pages against them example - Carpet Cleaners (category) www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
carpet cleaner hire Manchester www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners/Manchester
carpet cleaner hire london
carpet cleaner hire Liverpool patio heater (category)
patio heater hire Manchester
patio heater hire London
patio heater hire Liverpool And so on..... I have unique content for some of these pages but given that my site had 40,000 odd urls, I do have a large amount of thin/duplicate content and it's financially not possible to get unique
content written for every single page for all my locations and categories. Historically, I used to rank very well for these location pages although this year, things have dropped off and recently , I was hit with the Panda 4.0 update which i understand targets thin content. Therefore what I am int he process of doing is reducing the number of locations I want to rank for and have pages for thus allowing me to achieve both a higher percentage of unique content over duplicate/thin content on the whole site and only concerntrate on a handful of locations which I can realistically get unique content written for. My questions are as follows. By reducing the number of locations, my website will currently 301 redirect these location page i have been dropping back to it's parent category.
e.g carpet cleaner hire Liverpool page - Will redirect back to the parent Carpet cleaner hire Page. Given that I have nearly 100 categories to do , this will mean site will generate thousands of 301 redirects when I reduce down to a handful of locations per category. The alternative Is that I can 404 those pages ?... What do yout think I should do ?.. Will it harm me by having so many 301's . It's essentially the same page with a location name in it redirecting back to the parent. Some of these do have unqiue content but most dont ?. My other question is - On a some of these categories with location pages, I currently rank very well for locally although there is no real traffic for these location based keywords (using keyword planner). Shall I bin them or keep them? Lastly , Once I have reduced the number of location pages , I will still have thin content until , I can get the unique content written for them. Should I remove these pages until that point of leave them as it is? It will take a few months
to get all the site with unique content. Once complete, I should be able to reduce my site down from 40,000 odd pages to say 5,000 pages Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks
Pete0 -
Local Rank & Branding Confusion - HELP
I am working with a client now that has two sites that serve two segments of a particular market segment. They have two different URLs which cater to these different target markets BUT the company is known in its local market as a their brand name (of course) which is different than their 2 domain names used on these 2 sites. Confusing eh? This has resulted in confusing Google and their rank has suffered a bit. To provide more color + insight- Let's just say this company is called AtlantaEventsInc and they offer event services for corporate events and let's say weddings. So let's say they have had atlantaeventscorporate.com for 20 years and then they add atlantaeventweddings.com about a year ago since their wedding business is expanding. So they promote their corporate events on one site and their wedding events on another. These 2 sites also currently share one blog, share one Facebook page, one Twitter and have two Google+ pages. Should we keep these two sites totally separate? and even have separate blogs and separate social media accounts? OR since our rank has only suffered with the new wedding site (just a year old) should we retire that site? (i suppose we could still keep separate blogs though for each target market. WOULD LOVE INSIGHT ON THIS! Thanks, Chris
Local Website Optimization | | Sundance_Kidd1