Reputable SEO Companies?

[Karl00]

Found out my current SEO company supposedly uses shadow websites to get rankings. Not entirely sure but have read this a few places online. Overall, you read good sentiment about the company, but low reviews can certainly be found. Which SEO company should I hire? I have a website that uses Wordpress. I find Wordpress a bit complicated. How important are meta tags? It does the basics, but it's annoying at times. I don't think my SEO company even does anything with my website. They give me about 13 keywords to show up on Google, and my business shows there for those keywords. Wouldn't mind have 20 keywords or more. I don't know much about SEO. Would rather dump money in organic search than AdWords. At the moment, they're charging me $700/yr. I pay all upfront. Otherwise, it would cost more. One thing I dislike is they have primary owner permissions/privileges on my Google Business account. Do not know why that is really needed and I was hesitant at the time to grant that permission which is now higher than mine. I questioned this about a year ago, and their explanation was that it "leaves them with the full responsibility of anything that happens with changes or ranking to the listing." If I cancel, what happens? Thoughts on this?

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

If you are interested in taking some of this on yourself you could install the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which does a pretty good job of letting you know what you need to do on each page. Granted it could take a lot of work depending on how many pages you have, but you need a good foundation to start with for SEO. Lisa @callthatgirl has an eBook on SEO that is helpful as well. I am not familiar with any specific companies that do SEO work. At least not enough to recommend them.

 

[GTP]

There's plenty of "free" SEO tools if you search on the web.
One of the better ones here...

 

[callthatgirl]

Here is my thoughts on SEO. Do it yourself and learn it. Then you have the skills to build for life. SEO blogs stay forever unless you break your blog somehow. I have some from 2011 still cranking out good SEO.

I get almost 100% of my business doing SEO by hand and it works.

Here are a few samples of my work and mind you, I conquered "international" page 1 rankings. SEO is not hard but you have to deliver what you're marketing for. I can do all of this myself and some of it, I refer out.

• WordPress SEO Expert
• Outlook Expert
• Office 365 Expert
• Outlook Consultant
• Office 365 Vendors
• G Suite Expert
• OneNote Expert
• OneDrive Expert
• Google Apps Expert
• Gsuite Expert
• Microsoft Exchange Expert
• Office 365 migration experts

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Found out my current SEO company supposedly uses shadow websites to get rankings. Not entirely sure but have read this a few places online. Overall, you read good sentiment about the company, but low reviews can certainly be found. Which SEO company should I hire? I have a website that uses Wordpress. I find Wordpress a bit complicated. How important are meta tags? It does the basics, but it's annoying at times. I don't think my SEO company even does anything with my website. They give me about 13 keywords to show up on Google, and my business shows there for those keywords. Wouldn't mind have 20 keywords or more. I don't know much about SEO. Would rather dump money in organic search than AdWords. At the moment, they're charging me $700/yr. I pay all upfront. Otherwise, it would cost more. One thing I dislike is they have primary owner permissions/privileges on my Google Business account. Do not know why that is really needed and I was hesitant at the time to grant that permission which is now higher than mine. I questioned this about a year ago, and their explanation was that it "leaves them with the full responsibility of anything that happens with changes or ranking to the listing." If I cancel, what happens? Thoughts on this?

I don't have any recommendations on an SEO company. In my opinion every great SEO company is going to dip into the grey area of SEO for some customers but the idea is to be as white as the competition and budget allows. You should really look into SEO for yourself, have an understanding of how popular the keywords you want are and how tough the competition is for said keyword. Does the keyword pull up local results first? well then unless you're in a major city the competition is usually fairly weak. An extension like mozbar can give you a general idea of what you're up against. (Don't look into mine as an idea of what to do, I went too far on purpose and google gave me a spanking)

 

[nlinecomputers]

(Don't look into mine as an idea of what to do, I went too far on purpose and google gave me a spanking)

Not trying to embarrass you but you elaborate on that? What did you do that Google didn't like?

 

[callthatgirl]

I don't use SEO tools. I use IE without being logged into Gmail. I type in "service + town" and find competitors that way.

I create blogs in WordPress "service + town" and do some other things, but that's an SEO blog. Give it a few days and your blog will rank. If you use the Google console, it will rank same day.

This is pretty simple folks.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Not trying to embarrass you but you elaborate on that? What did you do that Google didn't like?

Have you ever heard of sape links? my competition was using sape links so I did something like that but I arranged for a more exclusive arrangement outside of that network. Lets not elaborate on that further, i just really wanted to know what it was like to be #1 before I spent all the time and effort to do it the real way.

I don't use SEO tools. I use IE without being logged into Gmail. I type in "service + town" and find competitors that way.

I create blogs in WordPress "service + town" and do some other things, but that's an SEO blog. Give it a few days and your blog will rank. If you use the Google console, it will rank same day.

This is pretty simple folks.

Well yeah and you've been working on it for a long time but what if suddenly several people want to rank for those keywords (unlikely with those keywords) but if they wanted to they could out rank you in about 6 months...obviously not with white hat seo as that would take a very long time to out rank you. For many local shops in small towns seo is simple but once theres competition things can get complicated very quickly.

 

[callthatgirl]

I googled your town and I rank on page 1 for my keywords. Looks like my competition is colleges, jobs and training centers. Not one local IT company is there or on page 2!

I think you got some work to do, you could have it all to yourself practically.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

I googled your town and I rank on page 1 for my keywords. Looks like my competition is colleges, jobs and training centers. Not one local IT company is there or on page 2!

I think you got some work to do, you could have it all to yourself practically.

The keywords you have arent local keywords, google classifies certain keywords as local, for example computer repair is a term that google automatically prioritizes local seo. I obtained the domain computer repair tech and decided I was going to take #1 for computer repair technician and computer repair tech just to see how it would go but google gave me a spanking and then changed computer repair tech and computer repair technician to bring up local results....well...im not sure exactly what they did to computer repair technician it doesnt look local but it brings up local places, i assume they changed it to local and local companies just arent targetting that keyword but im not sure.

I only do online repair and honestly I only really have fun doing virus removal and anything else thats more of a puzzle. I could switch to local and just take #1 for computer repair but its no longer my passion, I am shifting my interest into the stock market but if potential client stumbles across my website i'll still take them but its not something i'm actively working on anymore.

 

[callthatgirl]

I like how you said "you decided to take #1" Good goals to get. Took me about 6 months in Minneapolis once I learned how to do seo.