SEO complaints are something we avoid my making it clear what is expected and what we have done previously to achieve our goals and what we will do for you to ensure the site looks / works / converts / ranks according to our plans. Here is a sample conversation where this didn’t happen due to amateurs being involved as they were ‘cheap’, offering very cheap website design then recommended a 3rd party SEO company (that was not very well regarded) once SEO problems were highlighted.
[Website Owner] Regarding our website ranking problems / SEO concerns, I gave you a list of towns, cities, and a couple of counties that are our main target areas that i looked at that we appear on some pages well near the top and others several pages later, can this be rectified?
[Website Design Company] I have put them into the website, but unfortunately there is no guarantee of where you will come. Nothing can be guaranteed on Google. Even if a company says they can get you to page 1 they are lying. The trouble is someone may optimise their site heavily for just one of those areas as they only need to perform with 1 search term and they will beat you every time. As stated before, once Google displays your site correctly things will change, however they still display things like Offers chocolate fountain hire for weddings, corporate events, parties, and special occasions which doesn’t appear anywhere on the new site.
[Website Owner] Please find enclosed this email from the previously website designers, which to you is self-explanatory. To me tells me we are not as good as we were which i find hard to believe? I’m sure you can explain so i can understand. What i don’t understand is why i have a hosting invoice? I hope you can let me know what the reason for this is?
[Website Design Company] He is using scare tactics as per usual. We changed the main search term to [your main service] and area, which is why there is a slight (but really nothing to worry about) dip. Tomorrow they might have gone back to how they were.
As said before all you need to do is update your website more often, even if it is just the writing on the front page. His 3 pointers are pretty much bogus. Also bare in mind he does the SEO for one of your competitors by the looks of things. There would be a massive conflict of interests there if he is promising the same to both of you. He cant get that page in position 1 so how will he get yours to position 1?
I am presuming the hosting invoice is for the webmail service. I have emailed him regarding this in the past and have received nothing back. Unfortunately I do not have the time to keep chasing him, plus I do not have the confidence he could actually carry this job out successfully. And with wanting to charge extra for a simple database addition to the hosting which everybody offers for free, his business model is a tad off the norm. If you could contact him and ask what the invoice is for then let me know.
[Old Website Designers] Your domain is very much registered and hosted with us, there is three parts to it:
Name Server, A Records and MX Records, you have chosen to change your A Records (IP Address) but you have our Name Server and MX Records so hosting fees are applicable I am afraid.
We were last contacted by your new website design team, on your behalf, to change your A records and done that instantly for you.
Happy for you to transfer away or stay with us, if you transfer away there is a small transfer charge to pay (see charges on the website) and if you stay with us also happy.
I look at sites as if they were my own and can say that your site has been neglected in terms of SEO and can see some very amateurish SEO mistakes on it, which if you want to take our SEO program we will be glad to fix. Additionally we have now got more SEO successful projects that we can report on to give you confidence that we can deliver SEO success in terms of visitor numbers and search engine rankings. The first part of our SEO project involved benchmarking and reporting on the current status so we can use that as a reference for you and to show the improvements made over the coming weeks and months.
If you want to talk about your options in terms of hosting and SEO, happy to chat about this if you have any questions or doubts about our abilities and how that they can improve your business.
Just ask him if we transfer away can we have the emails that exist sent to a specific address.
Your domain name is a .co.uk domain name therefore there is no charge to transfer. Unless he charges £25 for 2 seconds of work.
We can transfer the domain to another host but need their IPS tag and the fee to complete this. In terms of history you mean your existing emails? If so if you use an email client for your email then your emails will be stored for you locally and you will retain your emails. if you pay the fee and give us the new IPS tag we can do this for you tomorrow or Wednesday.
[Website Owner] All our systems at home. IMac, MacBook pro and iPad are all Apple, but i have this old system at work that we played with before. if necessary i will bring the iPad into work if you want us all on apple. Just a thought emails are on phones. I am on Blackberry till mid next year!!! is this a problem?
The only problem we will have is that you will lose all of your emails that are on your WebMail. He is offering no export solution and also you don’t have a server solution to house your emails. All of the emails should be on your systems however. I would use the iPad at work anyway. It’s much more fun. No problems with the phones, you will just have to input new details into them and the computers which you have.
[Website Owner] When i moved to this to the website designer I was with it was because i was forced to move to him due to illness, i was critical of them off because i lost everything and had to start all over again. When i mention this to you, you told me he should have backed all this up for the transfer so i would not have lost it all. Can we not do this this time. I don’t want to lose all the history again if i can help it!
He should be able to yes, it just seems he does not know enough about it. How many emails have you got in WebMail and would you mind giving me access?
Tomorrow is the last day you can opt to transfer the domain before it auto-renews, this will invoke a yearly renewal hosting fee of £45. If you want to transfer the domain you will need ensure we receive the transfer fee of £25 and provide the IPS tag for the transfer to occur tomorrow. If you want to transfer the domain after Wednesday then the hosting fee plus the renewal fee will be payable, if there is any way I can help then please email back.
[Website Design Company] He doesn’t even give a months’ notice? Bloke is an amateur. I have looked at the WebMail. You can export the emails 1 by 1 but not by bulk. Its a pretty good system apart from that. I didn’t charge you for hosting so just pay it. I don’t think you use many resources off my server, so if that remains the case and you keep recommending me then I wont charge you for hosting in the future. Don’t tell any of my other clients please. Unfortunately people like this get you by the balls in these ways.
[Website Owner] We have just had this from our friendly website design / SEO Company. He still maintains we are slipping back. I must admit we don’t appear to be getting many web enquiries recently, and almost no enquiry forms recently. Can you advise. We will also sort your cheques if she has not already got back to you.
Did you ever consider the site changes and / SEO offer below? I mention it as I was looking at rankings of chocolate fountain companies yesterday and noticed that you are still moving down or sideways along the rankings.
In Google your ranking for the competitive search term is now 8th (it was 4th about a year ago)
If you are interested the SEO project details are on the website. As its Christmas and I am confident in getting you top 3 for 4-5 different search terms and as you were not happy with your old SEO before I am willing to reduce the cost of the 3 month SEO project from £800 – £900 to £700 – £800 with no monthly commitment afterward, plus will reduce the cost of webcopy and the blog by 10% if you decide you want to increase your rankings / visitor numbers and website standing / popularity then this is a good option for you.
[Website Design Company] Getting extremely bored of this guy now to be honest. Did a search on Google which you will see on the image attached. You did not pay me for any SEO work however I optimised for more than 5 phrases within the cost. 3 months SEO work at that cost is absolutely shocking and is more than what you paid to have the whole site designed and built. If you want to give something like SEO optimisation a whirl, pay a much bigger reputable company about £25 a month. Give [cowboy SEO company url] a call. They appear top for most search phrases on the search engines regarding SEO. And as said before, this guy is offering you top 3 (which you already appear in my neck of the woods) so where will that leave his other customer?
Your site is fully content managed so you can get a company on board and manage all of this yourself, I will then help if any technical issues arise. Please don’t use this guy.
[Website Owner] I had no intention of using him. I just wanted you to see what he was sending me.
As I said before I did not really want to leave the other parts of our business with him. You advised us to do so. Thank you for your advice on SEO.
[Website Design Company] Yeah, unfortunately he has got you regarding the hosting but happy to leave the website with me as discussed. I hate people in the industry like him who rip people off with scare tactics. Just did some searches for your key areas and you are well up there. Just ignore him or tell him to stop emailing you regarding this. Let me know if you need help with anything else.
Without asking any questions about how the form is setup, the hosting platform etc it is on, we are not going to get very far in solving this. Yes your emails may be working, but that doesn’t give us any clue why these are not being received.
I have again added myself as a recipient, submitted the form and received an email. Please find attached the headers from the email which you will need to give to the website design company and he can put a ticket in with the hosting company. They will then have to let me know what has changed lately that it no longer likes the form. Every hosting server in the world will have a different configuration, and the one used is a shared hosting platform so changes all the time.
Do you have any hosting with them? If you do I would ask if you have access to a MySQL database, then you can have emails and website hosted with the same company. Then you won’t have to go to 2 people. I host the site and database for free as you had troubles along the lines somewhere.
Just changed the way the form sends. It now connects to your mailbox and sends using that. The hosting company may have updated their servers recently which messed things up a bit. But as I said, you are on a shared email environment so you will never get to the bottom of it. The form has always sent otherwise you would get a huge error after clicking submit. The servers just didn’t like it at certain points.
