One of the largest portions of SPAM emails we all receive will be so called SEO companies suggesting things are wrong or that we have traffic problems, our website is not appearing for keywords we need, etc. Most of these emails come from GMAIL and YAHOO accounts, from places all over the world and from one week to the next you get the same email from a different named person with an English name.
So how do you find a good SEO Company when the world seems full of companies suggesting they are all the best at search engine optimisation and over the years SEO companies have come and gone or changed names or domain names following problems. From an SEO Companies point of view it is easy to pull apart things and look behind the scenes but for a client with limited or no knowledge of SEO then this is impossible. You can research things on the Internet to gain education of what SEO is and how it should be carried out and then try and understand more but this involves tools that SEO companies pay heavily for and even with these tools you need an understanding to identify things.
One of the other problems is that SEO is changing as Google moves the goal posts and this can mean that what one SEO company has carried out in say 2010 is now wrong in 2012 and this is hard to take in and trust as the SEO company carried out the work for the right reasons historically. Then in 2013 things went bad as Google made many changes to the algorithm, more in one year than ever before in Google history and also the release of the Hummingbird version of search meant everything changed.
We have decided to try and write something for less skilled people to read with no SEO knowledge and make sense of what is going on and how to ensure you understand what is right and wrong providing you with tools that are FREE to help identify the good, the bad and the ugly.
We have been involved providing Internet services since 2001 and have a seen all the changes that Google has carried out and also seen the SEO companies change over time.
Is my SEO Company Ripping Me Off
Every website is different and every keyword you wish to obtain in search results has different competitors with varied strengths and weakness’s so you cannot look at things as black and white. An SEO company should look at the competition in the top five of page one google search results and research what websites are in the positions and why. Then they should identify the gap to achieve success and whether or not this is realistic goal for a client to achieve. For example if in the top five search results of Google the websites seen are ebay, amazon, Wikipedia, etc then it may not be possible to achieve success without putting in a large amount of resources and this comes at a cost.
If you are paying for SEO services and the keywords are unrealistic then you could say you are being ripped off as you are not likely to achieve the goal. Also if the SEO company has been working on things for over 6 months with no growth at all then this is time to question things for sure. You must remember than keywords don’t over night go from page ten of google search results to page one and if they do something has changed drastically or something known as black hat SEO may be the reason and this will lead to problem later down the line.
Over 2013 SEO companies had a hard time and the companies appearing in the top five positions for difficult keywords changed over the year like a yoyo and the biggest thing to note is the fact that blue chip companies now dominate most search results for shopping terms. If you had a website ranking in 2012 for difficult terms and now you are positioned on page two this may be due to the algorithm change making it more difficult to achieve success or previous SEO work has harmed something that Google is now picking up.
SEO Company Good or Bad
To identify if an SEO company is good or bad it not to difficult. There are FREE tools out there like SEM Rush which can provide information websites and this can be useful. This tool will allow you to compare SEO companies against each other to see the total number of keywords that are ranked, new keywords that are being picked, lost keywords that have dropped and with this you can see an overall improvement graph and also compare the traffic an SEO Companies website actually gets.
If an SEO company can provide you with services they should be able to provide themselves with online success and traffic to their own website. Success in the SEO sector is obviously more difficult and this means only the companies that truly understand SEO can achieve success.
To provide some assistance here we have setup the platform for you use and you can simply change the websites being checked. For this example we have search “Birmingham SEO Company” and the results we got showed the following companies:-
www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk
www.seosilly.co.uk
digitalcherry.co.uk
www.essentialmarketer.com
www.wowinternet.co.uk
seoitright.co.uk
www.localseoresults.co.uk
www.ricemedia.co.uk
We can compare five websites at a time one graph using SEM Rush so we have to create 2 graphs. The first graph we will create will show the total keywords ranked for each company and the date range will be January 2011 to April 2014
To see this actual comparison click here
To compare traffic that an SEO companies website achieves over the same date range:-
To see this actual comparison click here
The view the report for the SEO Company improved Keywords comparison January 2011 to April 2014 – CLICK HERE
To look at how things are going in 2014 we have setup this comparison which show January 2014 to April 2014 looking at improved keywords – CLICK HERE
How to choose an SEO Company
Using the information in the previous section here we suggest you compare the SEO companies you are getting quotes from to see if they can actually achieve any success online at all for themselves. Here are Chameleon Web Services we have nothing to hide and it is for this reason we provide this information for potential customers to use to compare us against any SEO company in the UK.
Read More: Birmingham SEO Company Comparison Updated May 2014
