Pay for Performance SEO
-
Does anyone have any thoughts on, or experience with, pay for performance SEO companies such as Results First?
Thanks
-
Be careful with anyone who does pay for performance that they are doing white hat seo - look at work they have done for others thru yahoo site explorer and ask for references- you dont want to wake up one day and see you have been penalized by google
-
doesn't surprise me one bit.
-
Thank you for your excellent analysis. When I spoke with one of their representatives I had a feeling that I was on an outsourced phone bank.
Don
-
Without having direct experience with RestultFirst, I can't speak to their ability to obtain results, however a careful review of their site points out several serious concerns.
1. They carry a "Best in Search" "badge" from TOPSEOs. TOPSEOs sells badges for a price, they do not award these based on actual proven or independently verifiable success.
2. The site is chock full of grammatical flaws, the type of which generally come from outsourced solution providers where Americanized English is not the native language. It's actually quite poor when reading content in its entirety.
3. The claim of "white hat" SEO actually appears to be misleading at best. They describe in their services section, how they provide content - if the content they provide is written as poorly on a client's site as it is on their own, this itself would be a turn-off to many would-be clients or customers. It's highly unprofessional. So even if they could get a site ranked, there's just as much likelihood that many of those visits would be lost before conversion to clients or customers.
They then go on to state:
"the product & services of the client are made popular on social networking site and else, so as to spread the word of the brand. Numerous articles with targeted keywords are submitted on the submission directories which act as a link to the client’s site and this is another of the steps taken by the SEO Services Company to help attain a higher rank on the search engines.'
Ignoring the poor writing, they come right out and say that their primary link building method is what is actually considered a very low quality method of obtaining links, not high value nor SEO best practices.
In one of their "case studies", they state:
"In less than a month’s time, the website achieved rankings in the top 2 pages for keywords". Honestly, if the best they could do was get a site into the 2nd page of Google, that's not very good. And it's another validation to me, in my experience, that they don't really do high end work, but "just enough low quality methods" to get a site "sort of" ranked.
Now, they very well could do much more than I was able to ascertain, or than they claim on their site. They could even implement best practices, and not just "questionable" tactics. There's no way to know from their site however. And nothing on the site indicates they do truly high quality, long-lasting work that isn't in the "gray-hat" arena.
So - exactly what is their promise? How much does it cost? What does the guarantee specify, and what are the loop-holes in that regarding the possibility that some of the tactics they use might eventually fail due to search engines devaluing low quality methods?
Many questions need to be asked, and much written documentation would need to be presented for anyone to ever truly have the knowledge based confidence to want to hire them.
So please - be very cautious if you choose to proceed.
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
-
100+ PPC Landing Pages Linking To Main URL... Hurting My SEO?
I started another thread around this question but don't think I was articulate enough. So, I have over 100 various landing pages that I use for targeted PPC. I don't really have any interest in these pages amassing their own SEO value; I simply use them for my PPC accounts. However, they all link back to my home page. Is this considered a link farm? And, if so, is the best option to simply add a nofollow attribute to all the links pointing to my home page? Would there be any reason to keep the links as follow? I don't think they're giving my site any SEO value but I'm concerned that they could be harming it instead. Any expert advice would be much appreciated.
Paid Search Marketing | | jfishe19880 -
Adwords account suspended for talking about SEO. Why isn't Moz suspended, too?
First let me say that we don't care that much about Adwords. We were spending about 20 bucks a month and we never optimized it, tinkered with it, or cared that much. Business is booming for us just with organic search and referrals from happy customers. (We're a blog writing service called BlogMutt. Motto: We work like a dog to fill up your blog.) But we just got suspended from Adwords. After multiple inquiries and multiple unhelpful responses, we got a note that said: "Please note that your website contains matter which states your site's SEO increases. Anything which relates to SEO is not allowed as per Google Policies. Please make appropriate changes to your website." Now, we don't say your site's SEO increases with BlogMutt. What we do say is what everyone says, that blogging is a best practice for any modern marketing effort. We certainly are less clear about improving search rankings than, for example, moz.com. Why is it OK for Moz, but not for us? Don't get me wrong. I think Moz should be able to continue advertising. I'm just wondering how we got into the Adwords crosshairs. Any thoughts?
Paid Search Marketing | | scodtt0 -
Ad Rank and Performance for PLA
Hello everyone and happy Friday from London! I have just launched a Product listing Campaign and I can't get to find any information about ad rank and how it's performing. From AdWords all I can see is: 1.number of click 2.CTR 3.Position which is zero Any suggestions? Cheers
Paid Search Marketing | | PremioOscar0 -
Paying for RSS Syndication
Hello, We know that buying links is bad and can get you in a lot of trouble. What about paying to have RSS feeds syndicated by sites like this: http://feedfury.com/submit Thanks, Alex
Paid Search Marketing | | Anti-Alex0 -
I need monthly SEO help!
Hello, I'm new here, but a HUGE fan of SEOmoz and their working principles. I need someone who would have the same regard for SEOmoz and a healthy respect for safe SEO principles to help me with my monthly clients. Is this the place to post about my need or should I take it to the jobs area? Thanks in advance for your guidance.
Paid Search Marketing | | kbates1 -
Your thoughts on Pay-Per-Rank (Performance based) SEO firms
I am seeing several Pay-Per-Rank (performance based) SEO firms popping up lately. The model is interesting. They only take on the work that they know they can achieve good results. Most seem advertise white hat SEO. Overall thougts? Anyone have any experience with these firms? Any recommendations?
Paid Search Marketing | | paddlej0 -
Seo and ads for Baidu (china)
Has anyone have experience doing seo for the baidu search engine? I have a client who wants to target businesses in china so we are exploring options for PPC and SEO. Any ideas or tips would be much appreciated? I was thinking of getting a bi-lingual mini-site made that would catch leads from seo and ads. Can anyone suggest any chinese PPC/seo freelancers?
Paid Search Marketing | | Netboost0 -
SEO for PPC landing pages
After completing several months of on-page SEO for my site (one keyphrase per URL) and getting an "A" from SEOmoz on each page, now I'm venturing into PPC AdWords for the first time. From what I've read you pretty much want one landing page per keyword/ad. So if I want to target 100 PPC keywords I need 100 landing pages. And each landing page needs to be SEO'd as if you were doing it for organic search purposes so that your ad has a chance at a high Quality Score (8 to 10). I realize that an ad's QS is 2/3rds driven by its CTR but in the beginning when the ad is new the initial QS assigned seems to be driven more by landing page relevancy and some historical attributes of the AdWords account in which the ad or Campaign is located. My question is: What, if anything, do you do different on a page designed to be a PPC landing page as compared to a regular page you would SEO for organic search benefits? Also, should you do any of the off-page things (external links with relevant anchor text) for PPC landing pages? I'm envisioning landing pages that only exist to receive PPC ad clicks and that will not be linked to from my site directly. Each landing page talks a bit about the keyword the user was searching on and then directs them to the most relevant page(s) within my site. Maybe that's flawed? Thanks for any tips...
Paid Search Marketing | | scanlin0