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Losing Faith in SEO Companies
Over the past 6 years I've retained 4 different national SEO companies to increase my SEO. After spending over $100k annually (5% -8% of gross), my position has not increased. In fact, there is a downward trend in my organic traffic since 2021. I have lost all of my top ten keyword positions.
Every time I retain a new company all they say is that the last company messed things up and use that as reason for a lack of productivity. Additionally, there’ s always the extra pitch…if we build you a new website, if we do your PPC, if we can manage your online reputation, etc.…. we can produce results.
Look, I’m not expecting to be the top company on day one, but after a year of production, I really should start to see an upward trend in organic traffic.
My company has a 4.8 rating on Google and my price is middle of the road of my competitors. My company is 27 years old.
I feel like I’ve been constantly deceived and wasted tons of money. Why should I put my faith back in the SEO process?
Please don’t pitch me on retaining your services.
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1 Reply
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Go for Performance Marketing. In this you will only pay if you get lead.
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What industry are you in to?
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Your story could be my exact story. Here is what I finally did:
1) I ran a PPC campaign for my services.
2) After running the campaign, my website’s ranking and traffic significantly improved.
3) I approached an SEO company and provided them with the keywords I wanted to optimize my site for. I requested a detailed plan, regular updates, and monthly reports. I used [SEOjet.com](http://SEOjet.com) to develop the plan I gave them and then said I want every article or blog post you write to be scored in SEOSurfer prior to posting.
What I realized is that most SEO work is outsourced to people overseas, and I was just paying a middle man to repeat to me the same stuff everyone else said OR if they were using someone local they were just using SEMRush most of the time.
My return on advertising spend for PPC is 20:1. On the other hand, my return on SEO is usually just breaking even, although occasionally it brings in a large client. I mainly use SEO for down-funnel searches and to ensure that positive results are displayed when people search for my company.
Feel free to PM me if you want and I will give you more details.
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To identify the reasons for the downward trend, any SEO specialist would have to know your industry, your URL, and your target traffic. With those, an experienced professional can help you understand why you’re website is not ranking and what they can do to reverse the tide. You’re right. You should be seeing an upward trend after 12 months. But the reasons for it could become clear with the actual data. Happy to help analyze if you’d like to DM.
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Focus On Paid ads, the days when a company was able to guarantee results with keywords are over. My advice to u is to focus on paid ads and do the SEO yourself.
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It’s easy to blame everyone else but yourself. How do you spend more than $100000 and not get results? I have an SEO company and my experience with most business owners is that they don’t do their research instead they want to hire people or companies that either charge the least or will tell them what they want to hear. Why didn’t you hire a reputable SEO consultant to help you find a proper agency? Also SEO is just marketing so if a company company can’t show you concrete campaigns they’ll be running to beat your competitors then you’ve failed before you’ve even started.
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what were the strategies that were implemented, if you don’t mind me asking
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Tourism, you say? Hell, forget SEO or PPC and just hire the same relentless wolves that try to get me to sign up for new “they’re not timeshares” timeshares to cold call some bought lead list, or maybe run those “it’s only gonna be 30 minutes of your time” hard sell travel seminars, and you’ll be good as new.
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Okay but if you’re competitors are spending $300k annually why should you outrank them?
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If you were in a good position a few years ago and you’ve seen a bigger hit in the last year, that’s due at least in part to algorithm changes. Tons of websites are losing keyword equity, search volume, SERP features, etc. because of Helpful Content updates. Ironically, Reddit has seen the largest increases in search traffic. One of the bigger agencies I follow has covered this in their webinars ad nauseam for the last several months; it sucks because it makes otherwise knowledgeable people (and agencies) look like morons, and it costs in-house SEO folks their jobs because execs don’t understand the environment — and no one except Google can control what Google does.
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Have you tested your website on performance? Maybe you can tweak a bit there..
Wish you good luck
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Is this Hawaii tours? Brutal. Probably need to hire a head of SEO internally to start with
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How big is your site? Like how many pages? Are we talking less than 100? More than 1,000? More than 10,000?
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99% of SEO “agencies” are trash. National level ones especially are just going to give you boiler plate generic garbage. At this point you should reallocate that spend to other marketing .
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If SEO companies knew what they were doing they wouldn’t have to do it for others. I have been doing SEO and SEO consulting for over 26 years. I don’t do consulting because it’s much more lucrative doing it for myself. Also do you know what happens when I give advice on here? It gets downvoted to oblivion because it’s not what people want to hear. There are so called experts on here saying EAT is not a ranking factor. I have over 12 websites that prove that to be absolutely false.
Don’t hire an agency. Look at your competition and follow their website down to the page. If they have a warranty page, you better have one too that is even better. Don’t take shortcuts by using stock photos, that shows you don’t have actual experience and can’t even produce your own images.
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