How to find a good seo company?

[edward-may]

Hello there,

Can anyone recommend how to go about finding a good seo company?

[MibuKotaro]

Hello Alec,

I would say that what EGOL said is right, you are battling against a strong encampment and can't expect to have a strong showing unless you are taking a unique approach. The key is to determine if the 1 month PPC results are good in your mind. Personally that kind of turn around looks very promising based on the numbers but only you would know based on your ROI. If you can justify it then run PPC for now while working on the endgame of the SEO and increasing your site visibility and visitor numbers.

A good strategy that I have found is to do some market research and take your survey data and write some interesting articles that you can use as blog posts and maybe a press release. If you can read the data in unique ways then it is likely to be picked up by a wider user base.

[EGOL]

** So I guess a question would be how to get any results when your competing against the big guys on a limited budget.  **

For this, I imagine a battlefield from the 1700's or 1800's where troops lined up and faced one another.  Where to attack?   You pick a weak spot in the line and attack there.   Better, is a weak spot in the line that is in front of a valuable asset.

So, I look at my business, decide where we are really good at producing content and where we have energy to sustain a very long content campaign and where there is a lot of traffic and money to be made.  Once that is identified I direct a large amount of force there.

For the past few years, I have been attacking the same point in the line.  This is a single keyword niche (category) where I am launching article after article after article, systematically saturating it with content, building a content library for the people who are fans of that space.  At first I had success getting a few keywords to the top of google, then broke through the line and got top rankings for the short tail keyword of the category.  I'll be attacking here hard for at least a couple more years.

I've been working with websites for about fifteen years and most of that time has been spent mainly on a few sustained attacks that have focused on a group of related keyword categories where we have the ability to produce content that is the best on the web or nearly the best on the web in a continuous stream without fatigue.   If I can beat their content, I attack without fear regardless of the competitors' metrics.

So, in your original question, you were asking about work on a project that was started in December.   I am not even looking for results after a few months.  I have not even begun to excavate the base.   I am attacking people who have a fifteen to twenty year head start.  I expect to be hammering at them for a year before I figure out if this is going to work.

I will say that in the past, that competitors generally didn't respond in kind to the content attack.... but that is starting to change.

[Ron_McCabe]

Alec,

Glad to be of assistance.

Ron

[edward-may]

Hi Ashish,

Yes we went for long tail keywords in some places, though we still went or the keyword "Online psychic readings" however we did not go for the keyword "psychic readings" we wanted to maximise our budget to begin with.

Yes regarding the localised domains, we thought starting out in the smaller areas would help give us that edge.

Hope that makes sense

Thanks again

[edward-may]

Hi EGOL

Thank you for your response!

Our competitors spend from $3000 a month to $300k a month on adwords and we can't simply compete with 300k.  Our budget is limited, so we went for longer tail keywords and we are only a new start up.  So I guess a question would be how to get any results when your competing against the big guys on a limited budget.

[edward-may]

Hi Sean,

I didn't get any sort of strategy from them really.  I basically write all the content and made the changes according to their recommendations from the audit, and if I find something I'm not sure about I have to email them and ask, which is basically what I do on moz and good, faster response.

We only ran the adwords campaign for 1 month and I know this is just simply not enough time to make any cause or measures, due to a limited budget we decided to pull the adwords and to put our $ into SEO for the longterm.  With the adwords run at 1 month, we got a few sign ups then I really expected, most came from the USA search.  Our PPC guys told us to start in NZ, so we did, 4 days of running the campaign and we had no clicks, so they changed it up to a different country which was the USA, then we had clicks at least 48 clicks and 19 sign ups, with 3 credit card inputs.

I understand SEO is a longterm strategy we are just wanting to make sure we are putting all our efforts and spending in the right place.

[edward-may]

Hi Ron

Thanks for your advice.  As a newbie starting out, I was told to find the SEO company that ranks #1 for the keyword SEO, as it seems like well if they are actually ranking for that keyword that should say something? However, I read through their testimonials and noticed they ranked a competitor of mine for web design as that is my area of expertise.  So I called the shot, however not knowing what you have stated above brings me to some conclusions.

I have been told they work 5 hours a month on our SEO for our New Zealand domain.  To which the keywords for the NZ SEARCH is not too competitive, and the competition average, with really a low traffic volume.  They said we would see results within 3 months.  We started in Dec last year 2014, they ran an audit for the month of December, after the audit they sent through recommendations to get the site structure properly set up.  Now in Janurary, they have just said they are working on submitting our site to 20 directories in New Zealand one of them being Dmoz, and a few others I recognised and had already submitted myself.

What they are saying makes logical sense, however the work that they are doing seems like common sense information that I'm basically getting from Moz.

Thanks again for the insight.

[Ron_McCabe]

Alec,

As stated above the length of time vs results depends on budget, key word difficulty as well as a host of other factors. I would suggest that you get them to let you know what they are doing as well as what their overall plan is.  If the SEO is not willing to tell you what they are doing I would suggest you run. If they are willing to discuss what they are doing and what their plan is, this is a good sign. I would find out what challenges they are having as well as how they plan to address these issues.  I would also ask them what they think is a reasonable time frame for results. This is usually at least six months. The other thing I would do if you have not done so is get clearly defined goals along with a clear definition from them of  what they consider a win. You may want to find out if any of these wins can be converted to measurable conversion events in google analytics.

If what the SEO firm is saying makes logical sense I would give them some time. If they are telling you to "trust them" and not disclosing the things mentioned above consider moving on.

Hope this helps,

Ron

[MibuKotaro]

Three months is not enough time to get a good sense of any kind of SEO. As EGOL mentioned it is important to look at how much you are paying them. It is also important to question what they promised you.

If any SEO company is promising you rankings of certain positions you may want to step back from them. The key is the strategy you want to use. If you are looking for results in the immediate then running a PPC campaign is the best strategy while optimizing your website. It is also important to clarify your advertising. If you offer something for free but need a credit card for whatever reason you need to express that or people are more likely to not complete your form as they feel slightly lied to.

If you are wondering what to do in terms of .com or .co.nz then the question is where is your traffic coming from and where do you want it to come from. A .com has the ability to rank globally but a .co.nz will be heavily localized to New Zealand. In this instance it is more about your goals as a company.

SEO should be a long term strategy that includes a full mix of SEM techniques to better your results. If you are not in it for the long haul you are wasting your money

[EGOL]

To give a well considered reply, a lot more information is needed and a lot of time is needed for study.  So, I would not bet very much on advice given here without that.

Just tossing out one example.... are you paying these people $10 per month or $10,000 per month.  Big difference  there in the amount of work they are going to give you and the expected results.... but, even $10,000 per month might not be enough to produce results depending upon the condition of your site when they take over and the competitiveness in your niche.

[DealWithAutism]

Hi Alec,

Are you also tragetting the semantic variation of those KWs? It is quite understandable that you are receiving low traffic from NZ, generating much smaller search volumes compared to US. I am from Auttralia,  If I am looking at a non local e-commerce site selling digital products or services, i typically target the US market with a .com domain just to leverage on the volumes. The flip side is that competition for that KW would be much higher for US compared Australia where a .com.au should give me a bit of an edge.