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Was it $400 monthly or what?

If you've paid a 1 off fee of $400 for "SEO" then you did not receive what most of us on this site would call search engine optimization. In other words rather than being scammed, you just bought into something which was not SEO. You are right though in saying that someone willing to take your $400 for something he calls SEO is probably the kind of person who would ruin your site if you push for a refund (I've seen some dodgy companies do this to their clients in the past)

Just cut your losses, find a better SEO company and let them deal with whatever damage has been caused to your site by this other company.

Be prepared to spend quite a lot more than $400 though, if you're going to insist on cheap don't expect miracles.

Since you are trying to dominate the first 5 positions because you want people to buy from you I would recommend building a new site from scratch with the following:

• Different domain registrar
• Different hosting company
• Different content
• Different link profile
• Different site design

...you get where I'm going.

I can vouch that having done this for a certain client of mine it is indeed possible to dominate a keyword but you have to pose a competing company.

We did this because we had a client who owned 2 hotels with 2 different names that were right across the street from one another in London. In our case we were also able to register two Google places listings.

I was personally uncomfortable about doing this as room service was provided by the same chamber maids, the food by the same chef and the prices were identical. The only difference was in who manned the reception area and the decoration of the rooms...

If you are currently number 1 for most of your keywords but you feel that some people are buying from your competitors there must be a reason and creating a duplicate of your site won't help even if you have the first 2 pages covered. I would invest my time in finding out why. Could it be the prices, the product itself, delivery options, site structure, the images you use etc?

I would  build the new site, not to trick customers into buying from me, but to learn what their preferences are and then apply them to my main site.

What I'd do is set up a poll/survey for people to vote for their favorite restaurant and then announce the winner on a monthly basis.

I would then send an email to the restaurants telling them about the competition and encourage them to get people who visit their site to go and vote for them on your site.(Easy back links and visitors)

Finally I would offer a $50/100 voucher for a random person who voted for the winning restaurant to spend at that restaurant. (This will encourage the restaurants to add the link in the first place and the visitors to make the effort to go to your site and use it.)

The setup for this would take no more than 10 minutes. so it's a very easy thing to do and will get the ball rolling very quickly.

Hope this helps

I see the problem here, were you using the Google Keyword Tool?

If yes then on the left there is a box headed Match Type

You will find a tick near the word Broad

You need to UNtick that and then tick Exact

I've attached an image of what it should look like, hope this helps

MdJCI.png

From your question you mentioned 2 or 3 competitors which means that you should still be able to achieve a first page position for the keywords you're targeting but perhaps not the top 3. In that case it comes down not only to optimization and link building; Is your site as useful as theirs?

A question I very rarely hear people asking in the SEO field is "I want to compete with someone for certain keywords, but is my business worth being ahead of the competition at this point?"

As well as content might be written, the moment you enter the e-commerce side of SEO the prices, delivery model/costs company reputation etc come into play a lot more than in the service industry. Especially if the product you're selling is the same one your competitor is selling. How many different ways can you describe a product?

My point here is the better the business model you are following the more likely people are to use your site than your competitors and in time you'll beat them in the SERPs. You should still put effort into generating content and building links but it will be easier if user experience on your site outclasses that of your competitors.

Hope this helped

Very valid point Alan thanks for the heads up however I feel that the thumbs up system is most useful as an indicator to others who are probably faced with the same question as to which answer is the most appropriate.

I don't consider myself to be an advanced SEO so when I read the responses to certain questions I am not always able to determine which answer is the best one, that's when I look at the number of thumbs up each response has received as it is usually a good indicator.

Having said that I do believe that anyone who puts effort into leaving a useful response should be rewarded, nothing makes me happier  then when I am called out and thanked personally

Would it be possible for you to contact the people you bought the links from and have them removed?

Also what is the time frame from when you were on the first page to when you dropped?

I think at this point if this has only happened recently then it's too early to talk about building a new website with a new domain. I would add more positives like good content, social activity and quality links while fighting to remove the bad links.

It seems like you're the only person to have had such a bad experience with customer care, could it be that your tone on the phone was similar to the one you are having here?

Having said that the rank tracker tool is glitchy but it clearly says above it to simply create a campaign for more accurate results

I don't think it will make much of a difference if you say branding branding branding, ultimately what you can do is try it, then wait till the page gets ranked, remove two of the brandings, see what happens, then act accordingly. If it sounds natural, like a pep talk, then you won't have any issues.

Those services you mention which give out thousands of forum profile links are usually not worth your time or money, you see the same thing with generic directory listings, they are useless. Unless the forum topic is relevant to your website and they are do follow then don't waste your time.

I've found that signing up to 3 or 4 popular forums and being really active in them is a lot more beneficial in the long run.

Mike Salt

ipositions.co.uk

ipositions

(Yeah that's us, but we deal with small businesses more than we deal with large companies since we're not a massive company ourselves)

Hi, apart from owning iPositions I have shares in a cleaning business and certain other businesses in the wedding industry. Like Thomas said internet directories like the yellow pages still bring a return and we do in fact use them. We also advertise with Google Adwords and even though we are also ranked highly for our local keywords I would never stop using Adwords.

For the cleaning business Facebook advertising was useless but for the wedding ones it works great, so again it's all about trial and error.

We do a lot of email marketing and it has a very very high return simply because our followers are people that would have already bought from us before and are keeping an eye out for more of our email-only offers.

In total our internet generated sales can be divided into the following demographic:

Organic positions on SE: 20%

Paid listings like Google: 25%

Paid listings like Yellow pages (and some other niche directories for the areas): 30%

Facebook: 5%

Email marketing: 20%

Most of our traffic comes from  organic positions but we seem to get better conversions from our paid efforts.

Hope this helps

A few points to make here:

Sandbox: This is not a term I would be using anymore, not since 2005 at the very least. I get the impression you think it is a penalty imposed by Google to new sites but the contrary is actually true. Newly registered domains usually get what I call a 'grace' period were rankings are slightly boosted. After some time if the site is not properly structured, has poor on-page SEO or poor content it will lose this added boost.

Since the difficulty level is 26% I'm going to say that if you create good content for the site and build up a healthy and legitimate link profile you can get it ranked within 6 months pretty easily.

You said this is a local business so you will be using geo targeted keywords, Google places and local social marketing I assume? Although I would recommend not guaranteeing your client that he will be there 100% in 6 months I'm very sure it can be done.

You can easily build a website with wordpress and there's loads of themes you can choose from which you can then edit. Have a look at these an see if you like any. They're all free by the way - http://www.fabthemes.com/

If you are only targeting for US traffic then I would definitely set GWT to target the US. You will never be able to completely cut off foreign traffic and you shouldn't want to however if you want to increase the visits to the site you should build backlinks from US sites, blogs etc. and start using social networks and target Us nationals.

Hi thanks for the reply (first time a moz staff member gets in touch with me Woot!) I've literraly copied part of your answer and sent it to my clients and it seems to have done the trick! Thanks a million!

Have you rebuilt it on Wordpress?

Here's an old article by Rand about Flash: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/flash-and-seo-compelling-reasons-why-search-engines-flash-still-dont-mix

My two cents, Flash sucks the life out of SEO.

Can you post a link to the page, I'll be happy to tell you how to do it.

Same here we've tested this out and it makes no difference at all. If it did in the past I wouldn't know but as of 2010 (which is when we tested this theory) the length of registration didn't make an impact on ranking.

We've noticed that rather than being a number it's a percentage. Once you hit 80% of all anchor text being the same term you will usually get penalized. This doesn't seem to apply to new sites though.

Would help if you indicated which particular industry/product you are referring to. We provide internet marketing, not just SEO, to some big manufacturers in Holland and Italy and I can tell you now that the ball game is different when you're dealing with the medical electronics industry as opposed to glass or beer factories.

Hi a very big percentage of my client base is in the hotel business; you said that your adwords costs are very high and I was wondering why that is. Are you trying to achieve the very top spot? That's unnecessary because in the hotel business people don't choose the first hotel they come across they shop around so even if you are floating around 6th place your're still going to receive a high number of clicks, but on the plus side they won't cost so much.

If your client needs to fill rooms quickly (a request I get from my clients on a regular basis) we tend to change the wording of the advertising to attract last minute travellers; people who go bargain hunting by signing up to a last minute offer for hotel rooms and flights.

I don't know if your client is willing to go down this route of attracting the last minute traveller but if he wants clients by next week that's the only way he's going to do that.

Hope this helps

You seem to have answered this all by yourself already, reciprocal links and close to useless nowadays and since you do not think you will get any direct traffic from their site I wouldn't bother if I were you.

"And if one was so inclined to build bad backlinks to a competitor it would have a negative effect"

There is a whole branch called Negative SEO specialised in destroying your competitor' SERPS and though you will find loads of sites promoting that they do this in a "Completeley legal" I urge you not to succumb to the temptation of trying it.

The time and money you would spend trying to negatively impact others would be better spent on optimizing your own site, and think about it: If suddenly anyone above you starts dropping in rankings and your site is the only one that ascends don't you think someone is going to wonder why?

I'd build a new adsense site on Lowcarddiet.com but I'd host it with a different company so I don't get penalized for having the same C block address for both sites.

To clarify you would only need to do this since you're trying to optimize the two sites for the same keyword,

From what I've seen Google assumes that sites hosted by two different hosts are probably run by separate entities, and therefore links between the two sites are less likely to appear as an effort to game the SERPs.

This of course brings up the question of whether EMDs are still worth buying in which case I would say they are.

Finally the most important question is whether you already have a presence on the first page for that keyword, if you've got the number one spot I would justify making the effort of getting another site there, if not then your time might be better spent improving your rank for that keyword.

Hope this helps