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Cre8ex
03-05-2014, 06:34 AM
Hi,

As a small business owner, I have found it very confusing to understand SEO in general, however it would be great to get some solid advice as to what I should be expecting for my the money I pay with my SEO service. I currently pay $800 a month, which I am happy to do if I get results, but I really haven't seen results other than movement in my page numbers, it is early days , as it's only been 3 months, but from what I reading 3 months is sufficient to get some runs on the board? What I find most confusing is to gauge what I should be getting for my $800 per month? I understand quality (links) over quantity links, when I have done some research into my company links, I have 77 links in total and this is for 3 solid months of paying for SEO, would this be an average for 3 months? My web address is www.cre8exhibits.com.au it would be wonderful to hear from any SEO professional, or savvy online marketing guru who could help me understand better?

Thank you

Wozcreative
03-05-2014, 10:05 AM
There is a lot of SEO "experts" that charge you a monthly fee when they really should have just charged you a one time fee to fix your current website to make it compatible.
Link building is an old technique, but I am not surprised SEO companies are selling you on this. It happens all the time. It's easy for them because they just throw "old terms" at you that have been around for ages and you buy it!

In terms of your website, I am not seeing any SEO integration.

Basic stuff that I can see are not done:

1) Image file names are not renamed to proper terms
2) Page links are not renamed
3) No call to actions (or very little)
4) Because the images aren't optimized, I am willing to bet there is no image XML sitemap created and integrated with search engines

Anyway.. as a freelance graphic designer who does this everyday and sees issues with client's websites and "seo" experts being hired producing no results.. you may be the next victim of paying for nothing. SEO is a very mysterious thing to most people, so they are willing to pay whatever it takes as long as people can promise.. but it looks like they haven't even taught you what they would offer you for that money.. and it also looks like they are using old techniques which doesn't work anymore. Not your fault.. it's just how the industry is. The problem is finding/hiring an SEO expert that is "HONEST" and some people on this board will agree with me because A) They are designers/developers themselves and see this happen to their clients all the time or B) It's happened to them too and took them too long to realize.

Patrysha
03-05-2014, 10:07 AM
I only understand Search Engine Optimization in it's simplest form and I have no skills at manipulating it so someone else will have to weigh in there - but from a marketing perspective looking at your site, it's all about you - nothing to really place you as a solution to your target markets biggest problems - there's nothing that shows why a person should pick you over the other potential trade show booth designers/fabricators. You've got some solid testimonials but they're buried rather than being front and centre...

Personally I've tended to find that there are better ways to get traffic than through SEO, but I'm impatient and without sufficient cashflow to be effective with SEO.

Wozcreative
03-05-2014, 10:12 AM
I only understand Search Engine Optimization in it's simplest form and I have no skills at manipulating it so someone else will have to weigh in there - but from a marketing perspective looking at your site, it's all about you - nothing to really place you as a solution to your target markets biggest problems - there's nothing that shows why a person should pick you over the other potential trade show booth designers/fabricators. You've got some solid testimonials but they're buried rather than being front and centre...

Personally I've tended to find that there are better ways to get traffic than through SEO, but I'm impatient and without sufficient cashflow to be effective with SEO.


Patrysha is correct on this statement. This is actually about 30% of what "SEO" really is. It's a huge part.. it's how a client gets convinced to use you! Clients only care about themselves, tell them how you are willing to help! What do they get? The other 50% is how the site works/functions and simplifies things for search engines when people are searching for things. It's usually a one time thing.. an SEO expert can come back after 4 months and fix/modify.. but theres NO WAY you need to pay someone $800 a month just so they can link build.

The last 20% is advertising and/or Social Media... The only people you should be paying regularly is if they are making advertisements for you. Adwords/adsense or any other ads online because thats an ongoing experiment.

carloborja
03-05-2014, 10:18 AM
At first glance, even though loading speed isn't that fast, the site looks good. In fact, really good! (design wise and URL structure too).

It's really hard to quantify SEO work. But, these are probably the questions I would ask myself (to evaluate the SEO company) if I was in your position:

- Does this company have a good track record with their previous clients?
- How well do they know their stuff?
- Are their SEO efforts bringing in new clients?
- Are their SEO efforts slowly adding to our revenue?

The last 2 questions are important. Implementing SEO in your marketing strategy should ultimately point to an increase in conversion to a point that it would become a good return of investment.

This might not be the best time to gauge their work. But, as early as now you should be seeing slight improvements.

Wozcreative
03-05-2014, 10:21 AM
Here is a great article I posted on another page about link building and how it actually is different than what you're being told.
Instead of "counting links" you should be evaluating how they got there and the communication happening with them.


Did Hummingbird Eat Link Building? (http://searchengineland.com/did-hummingbird-eat-link-building-173837)

Harold Mansfield
03-05-2014, 10:44 AM
I'll chime in and agree with everything said so far.
SEO is not about manipulating Google and Bing. It's about working with Google and Bing.

Most people have completely unrealistic expectations about SEO, mainly because they have no idea what it is. They think it's some kind of magic code formula that miraculously makes your website rank. That if you just get people there, that's all you need to do and the rest just somehow takes care of itself.

There is no concrete length of time that you can depend on before you see any results. And also, what results are you expecting to see? If it was as easy as just doing SEO and everyone ranked #1, then everyone would be #1. Obviously there is more to it than that.

Success on the web is not about SEO tricks. Marketing online is a constant that you do for the life of your website and has many different aspects. SEO is just one of them.

Manual link building, and creating hundreds of pages is NOT an online marketing plan. It may get you some short term success, but it isn't a long term plan that increases awareness of your company and services and increases conversions.

Your website is the key to all of your online marketing endeavors. It's the foundation. I don't mean stacking it with tons of keyword stuffed pages, I mean is it actually a good website that gives people enough information to make a decision to do business with you? Is it designed well? Is it coded well? Is it mobile friendly? Does the content on your pages match what you are telling Google that page is about? Is it easy to use? Does it inspire confidence that you are the right person for the job? Do you know if it's really easy to use, or you just think it is because you are used to looking at it everyday?

Your first responsibility in building your website is to users. NOT Google. Google isn't buying anything from you. Yes, you want to build with Search Engines in mind, but users always come first. It's better to get 10 people looking for exactly what you have to offer, than 1000 that were tricked into coming to your page.

Link building is just another form of attempted manipulation. The best way to build links is to have something that people want to link to. Naturally occurring links only happen when you've built a great website, with great content, are marketing it (and your company) well, and are delivering value to your customer base. Everyone is not going to get 1000's links. And besides, it's not a numbers game anymore. One great review or recommendation can be responsible for a crap load of targeted traffic. But you will never get that unless you have a great foundation, give great service, and are honest about your offerings.

Happy customers are the best source of great links, referrals and references.

Marketing your company is not a separate thing from marketing your website. You can't sit back and just link build online, yet never do anything offline to promote your business. It all goes together.

I can't tell you whether or not you should be paying for SEO, but I can tell that you know nothing about it. So taking that into consideration, I'd say it probably seems a little silly to be paying for something that you don't even know enough to understand if you are getting any value for what you are spending. It's pretty much paying for vaporware. The promise of something, but you aren't exactly sure what.

JMO of course.

cbscreative
03-05-2014, 11:55 AM
Harold didn't leave much to add. The $800 a month would be more than fair if you were getting what he outlined. I especially would emphasize the people first search engines second part.

One thing that hasn't been clarified and Harold hinted at it by saying there's no magic time frame. You mentioned 3 months that this company has been working on your site. If this was a new site 3 months ago your results so far would not likely be stellar. If this site has been in existence for a couple years or so a good SEO company should be making serious progress in that amount of time.

Woz already pointed out that some of the basics haven't even been done. That would cause me concern. I too am not seeing anything to justify $800 a month. The price is fine if they deliver the goods, but I'm less than impressed.

Harold Mansfield
03-05-2014, 02:03 PM
What's wrong (and Woz touched on this) with SEO's is that most of their methods hing on trying to out think Google's algorythms, which no mere mortal will ever be able to do because we don't know what they are. Instead of trying to understand WHY Google does what it does.

Let's take one aspect: Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate is a measurement that ( to my knowledge) started gaining traction with Google Analytics.

Now why would they measure that? For your knowledge? Some. But more than anything it's a measure of whether or not people find your website engaging, if they find what they are searching for compared to what you've said you have to offer, and a ton of other factors that make people leave a website quickly such as poor design, coding, copy writing, long load times, not mobile friendly and so on.

So it stands to reason that Google is measuring bounce rate to determine which sites to show users based on the behavior of other users engagement on that site.

Therefore, link building (which is obsolete) on a website with a high bounce rate is futile. The site with more engagement will always beat you.
What's an acceptable bounce rate? I have no idea. 100 people say 100 different things. But this I know for sure, 80%-90% on a business website is not good.

So, if your bounce rate is 90% and your competitors bounce rate is 30%, Google will want to show their users the site with the lower bounce rate first. Wouldn't you if you were in the search engine business?

Most SEO's ignore this and are only concerned with search placement and directing traffic. But to what end? Just for the numbers?

So then it would be really easy for you to pay an SEO $800 a month and they meet those deliverables and yet you still don't see an increase in leads or sales. Furthermore, what ever tricks they did to acheive that will be short lived because it's not real, nor natural placement. Google didn't reward you for having a great website, it was unnaturally manipulated. And they will make the adjustment.

So who cares if you add 300 pages to your site, if all 300 pages have a 95% bounce rate? You've basically made things worse.

To date, I have never seen anyone say that who they hired for SEO would get the bounce rate down to an acceptable number and increase user engagement on the website.

Again, when it comes to SEO most people spend all of their time trying to outsmart Google instead of working with them. They tell you exactly how to do it.."design a professional website, clean code, mobile friendly, great relevant, informative content, think of the user first, easy to use, Clear navigation"....Google has been saying this for years. And yet, what do webmasters hear? "Build links. Add pages. Have 50 websites. Keyword Stuff. Directories, Comments " and on and on.

If you stop thinking that Google is some kind of game to be manipulated and start understanding that Google is here for them ( the user), everything that you do will be centric to user experience and satisfaction..not trying to manipulate Google. Do that and Google (and Bing) with all of their spiders, crawlers and analytical data that they accumulate by the mill-second to gauge, monitor and predict user behavior online will see that you are pleasing the user, and you will do much better.

Google is nothing more than a glorified concierge service. They want to deliver the best for their clients. And you can't fake that with link building and page stuffing.

ASAPchange
03-05-2014, 03:23 PM
I usually don't like to criticize other's work when they are not present, but this is obvious.
As Wozcreative mentioned, they didn't done some basic SEO work on site first. And on-site SEO is first, just after that you should think about links.
So images files names, as mentioned, I don't see microformats or similar microdata, first blog post still have default "hello-world" url, ...
Regarding links, yes it's not about number of them, (I see 83 btw but just on 10 different domains). And good most of that links are from Au domains if you are targeting Australia, but lot of different SEO stuff on site and off site could be done for that 3 months and still none of us here didn't noticed that. This looks to me as someone who knows just a bit about SEO worked on it. Can be done much better for sure.

cbscreative
03-06-2014, 11:24 AM
Harold, it's getting crowded on this soapbox with you standing on it with me. :) That's an excellent elaboration on people first, search engines second.

singhabhishek251
11-27-2014, 02:02 AM
I do not think that you are on a good side of business with this SEO company and I think that they have not done anything better for your website. It happens sometime that you do not make money even your website is ranking on top because your keyword selection is not good. You need to ask them how much traffic can be driven with those keywords and if they are valuable to spend money. Try to understand what exactly they are doing for SEo as seo does not only mean to build links if it is not showing results.

turkeysub
02-07-2015, 07:45 PM
You can do a lot of the SEO stuff yourself. You need to make the content on your website more robust and full of key words that match the url of that page. That's only one step, but its just an example of something you can and should do on your own.

IrekJanek
02-11-2015, 12:02 AM
Just my 3 cents. I'm not an SEO but from I can see your links did not give you much so far, you still have PR 0 and Alexa rank is >3mil (you probably get no traffic from searches). Good SEO should probably also offer you to help rewriting your content, your current home page is written for "exhibition stands" as your main keyword. So your main keyword is "High Competition" with about 6,600 searches monthly. With your PR 0 that probably puts you so deep in the search results that you might not get a visitor from this keyword ever.

IrekJanek
02-11-2015, 05:04 PM
I got one more idea for you. Because your product is highly visual, you should create a gallery for each booth model or installation with lots of pictures from different angles, then optimize all pictures for google to find them by the "alt" tag. What that means is put description of your product in the alt tags and use the keyword that you want to be found by. Consider instead current: alt="Salto@Security2014_011" something like: alt="Exhibit Stand - Salto Security 2014 011 - jpg"