We often get heavily involved with clients regarding their website, business plans, emails, IT solutions, virus protection, email solutions, social media and website promotion (SEO). As you can see from an example conversation below we go out of our way to ensure clients down fall foul of rogue SEO companies and will help all clients avoid wasting their time and effort (and money) on poor IT services.
[Website Enquiry] What is the login name and password for my wordpress site for my blog? It seems as though something has changed as I cant get in anymore. Please let me know. I have hired a SEO company to work on my site so I may be emailing you soon with some of their suggested actions.
[Website Designers] Hope you are well, funny enough was reviewing your website visitors recently as they are pretty good for a ‘new site’ I see you are doing some PPC but the organic / direct visitor numbers are good. Hopefully you continue to add products / add to your news section / add to your facebook / twitter accounts (posts / photos / tweets) etc. Then if you are serious about promoting your site you should come and see me again as there is 100 things you can do yourself and 100 things we can do for you via an SEO program.
The site is yours obviously but I must warn you there are 100s of cowboy ‘seo companies’ out there that will take your money and do more harm than good for your website / SEO. We will not be responsible for any ‘damage’ they cause and be assured that we have seen this happen multiple times to multiple clients and without fail it always ends with us picking up the pieces and trying to clear up the mess that they leave after taking as much money from you as they can. I will happily review any seo changes they suggest and will give you honest opinions on these.
We have updated your news section (blog) today. We updated the plugins and added a new image resizer plugin to limit the size of the image you upload to a max of 800px. I suggestthat you review your posts as you have too many photos on them and they are badly formatted. Regarding the WordPress Access, nothing has changed here is the original info and access details that we sent previously. Good luck and hope to hear from you soon.
[Website Owner] Many thanks for the below and sorry for the delay, I have just got back from holiday and have been completely snowed under. Good news that my site visitors are doing well. I am promoting it on eBay which I think is helping. What is PPC?
I agree with you re SEO companies and I guess its risky, although I am serious about promoting the site and I have to take a risk by using someone. I have asked for references etc which they’ve provided, although nothing is foolproof.
I didn’t realise you provided SEO services. I am definitely interested and would have approached you first had I have known ahead of time. I have copied most reent email with suggestions from SEO company below and have also attached a file that they sent. Your opinion would be appreciated.
Many thanks for sending me the blog info and also instructions/tips. I think I was putting in the email address as log in name. There are are so many different passwords it gets confusing!
Will wait to hear back from you with your view on the comments below and attached Excel file from SEO company.
The keywords you have given are seed keywords and they are very competitive so we need to find some secondary keywords for each of your seed keywords. According to your budget we can work only on 5 primary keywords, so please let me know which are those keywords you want to rank the website.
Along with that I have done with your website vital analysis report and attached the file with this email. Please go through and find the general SEO friendly lacunas your website has which we need to fix ASAP to get the result soon. The major lacunas are mentioned below:
*Reverse IP detected
*No social media plug-in
*Live Support Not Found
*No Blog page Found
*No HTML sitemap found
*No XML sitemap found
Hope you understand my concern and I am looking forward to hear from you on the same!
Any update / thoughts re my email below of last week?…. Im interested to hear your feedback re the email the SEO company sent to me regarding the tweaks they suggest that I have changed. I’m also interested to hear about the SEO services you provide.
[Website Designers] Apologies for delayed response, I did look at your email with the SEO ‘report’ briefly but have been so busy with SEO projects (ironically) and website design projects / marketing etc I haven’t got around to replying, anyway without more waffle my initial thoughts are:
1, These auto-generated reports are sometimes good but need to be viewed and digested intelligently as they are rarely correct.
2, The list of immediate changes indicates that your SEO company is incompetent / unprofessional / mis-informed.
I believe following any of these amateur suggestions will simply be a waste of your time and if you are serious about promoting your site we can give you as much / as little help as you want / need / can afford. Regarding ourselves acting as a SEO (website Promotions) company I think this is a massive part of the business with local / national and international successes of websites that we have built / promoted.
A full SEO program takes 3 months and costs in excess of £1000 but normally costs a few hundred more than that if we decide we need more content / pages / sections / press releases that need more work / text to be created. If this is out of your budget I am happy to give you a mini-seo project if you agree to do some of the work yourself.
[Website Owners] I have already paid this company to start work for me which I won’t get back! But I value your feedback and have taken what you’ve said onboard. I wish I had known this was a service you also provided sooner but never mind.
As I’ve ready paid this company, an additional payment on top is way outside of my budget. However, I would like to work with you as I do believe you would do a good job. You mentioned a mini SEO project whereby I would do some work myself which Im interested in. Please elaborate and advise what I would be expected to do myself to give me an idea. Also what kind of results I could expect to achieve.
[Website Designers] sorry to tell you but we get regular emails from clients that have been ‘duped’ by cowboy SEO companies that email them or phone them uninvited (spam), indeed one of our biggest successes from a SEO perspective came from a company that had been paying £300 per month to a SEO company for 2 years, the SEO company (using Google Personalised results) were able to show the client via a video that they ranked in the top 3 for their key search terms but this was ‘personalised results’ and not real.
Using one metric (one search term) for this example after the SEO program that company moved from position 57 to position 1 and is still there 3.5 years on.
We don’t do many ‘mini’ projects and no results can be promised or guaranteed, in SEO you cant guarantee any results, apart from telling you we do things the ‘correct way’ according to Google Webmaster Rules and that our goal is to improve your brand / visitor numbers / sales over the long term.
You would be expected to write a lot of news / articles / posts as well as doing some normal marketing (adding yourself to other websites / business directories etc) while we fully review the site and build / improve it.
We have loads of SEO / website design projects on currently and could only commence work with you on your SEO the middle of September at the earliest.
Please tell me what you agreed / have paid them and what the other company have physically suggested and done already for you as we need to know fully if they have done any damage yet.
[Website Owners] Wow you’re up late and reply very quickly, thanks (as usual). Yes I’m aware there a lot of cowboys out there. It’s difficult to judge who is and who isn’t when you don’t know very much about SEO.
The company I’m using haven’t done anything as yet except to list me in 2 classified ads (I asked them for an update). Reason so little has been done is purely due to me:
1) I have been away a few times and havent had time to get back to them
2) I stalled after you advised you provide SEO services. They don’t have any of my social networking info (although have asked for it) nor have they posted any blogs etc as I asked them to hold fire (also because I want to review everything before it gets published). So based on that, very little has been done so I assume no damage.
I have already sent you what they have suggested in the email and attachment in my previous email. Mid September would work for me. Probably the end of September is better anyway as I’m away most of next month. Also; can you tell me where I can get my google analytics info directly? Thanks for emailing it to me periodically but would be useful to gain direct access if you would let me know pls.
[Website Designers] Yes working loads and not enough hours in the day hence the late nights, I have added you to the Google Analytics and you should have an email telling you the same.
Glad to hear they haven’t done any damage, link building if done incorrectly (spammy links on unrelated sites) now invokes a google penalty, see here for reference, so thats why one of the first things we do is review and disavow the links that were placed in places that aren’t relevant / appropriate.
[Website Owner] I’ve clicked on the link in the google analytics confirmation email but it takes me to a generic information page on google analytics. Do I need to log in somewhere and if so what are the credentials?
Finally; I think my website domains are up for renewal sometime soon (both .co.uk and .com) Will you drop me a line to let me know when it’s time to renew?
[Website Designers] Yes its your own Google account – you must have a password or it wouldn’t have let me add you. We have attached the hosting renewal invoice for both domains.
[Website Owners] I have a few Google accounts. I thought you set this up as I didn’t. Do I just log in with any of my Google accounts then? Seems a but strange as I didn’t know anything about google analytics until you began emailing them to me! Thanks for the invoice. I will pay nearer the time. I thought they were due now. Also, I may just renew the .com as nobody uses the .co.uk and I only advertise the com. I assume the above also covers the actual domain name renewal?
Please see the sequence of screenshots I get when I open that link. You’ll see I am not being asked for any password. Instead I’m asked to input my website info and it gives me a tracking number to input into every page of my website that I would like to track.
Have I missed something here? Maybe you could just send me the link to the page where I input my email address and password that you mentioned (which I assume would be my standard password). Very confused as I do t seem to be seeing what you’re describing.
Would you believe it they also just sent this to us? confused now.
We spoke last week about migrating your website across to us for both hosting and ongoing support. I had asked out IT team to take a look at your request for me, they’ve just asked if we’re able to get some additional information from you.
- Could you tell us about the levels of traffic? This means we can scope the hosting requirement fully.
- Also how large is the site in terms of filesize?
