Search Engine Optimisation UK The Best and Worst Search Engine Optimisation in the UK Revealed

So how does £2400 ($5500 USD+) for 5 incoming links grab you?!

This is a story about the dark side of search engine optimisation - It’s my own experience in the UK. I’m not going to “out” the company involved as I’m still in legal dispute with them and they’ve shown themselves to be so, well, plain nasty that I’d not be surprised to get a libel summons if I were to do so.

But I hope that having read it you will be able to recognize any similar approach and avoid the problems I’ve had.

The approach to look out for?

Top 10 positions guaranteed for your website or your money back! BEWARE.

I got stuck in an SEO deal with a UK SEO company which has cost me £2400 so far with the only results being a boilerplate on-page optimization report with 2 months of external link building “work” that produced a stunning total of 5 link swaps and has now landed me in a 12 month+ legal tangle where I may end up paying out several thousand more to make them go away or find my company wound up (as I won’t be able to afford to pay them if this happens)

Anyway, back to the tale. After voicing my deep concerns and being fobbed off with the old SEO excuse of “oooh arr SEO it’s a long game my friend” (sure is at 2-3 links a month!) I tried to cancel only to be told that according to their terms and conditions I am contracted to them for 12 months and if I want to cancel then I must pay the outstanding balance for the whole 12 months = £4000+ for absolutely nothing.

Background summary

Approached by SEO company who tell me they can get me multiple top 10 positions in the major Search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) within 3 months - Guaranteed or I don’t pay!

Wow, sounds great, tell me more:

After specifying my 5 target keywords I get a proposal for SEO made up of 2 parts:

On site optimization - They’ll do a plan on how to make the site search engine friendly.

• External incoming link building - i.e., they email other websites asking for a link swap.
• Monthly reports.

And if after 3 months “gestation”, i.e., months 4-12 your chosen phrases are not in a top 10 spot you don’t pay for that phrase that month.

Cost - Start-up/Initial report £1400 and my 5 keywords just over £100 per month each. Base outlay then is going to be £2900 (ex. sales tax) G’tee starts after 3 months so this start up is non-returnable.

How it went…

• Initial report received - All good standard SEO 101 stuff, title tags, meta tags. A bit much on the keyword stuffing I thought. Hard to write them all in and the copy got long and clumsy.
• Stated this concern. Reply was that really popular sites can be keyword light but at the start you have to do this. I don’t agree but I have to do it or their g’tee is not valid. 

Link building campaign

• Done in China in my opinion and also from the look and feel of the email sent.
• They say they’ll find related sites and email them for me with a proven to be very successful link swap request email (apparently)
  • Webmasters - You know the sort of thing “Hi my name’s Cindy, I’ve just been to your great website and would like to invite to you exchange a link with my site” (seriously outdated stuff In My Humble Opinion)
• Plan then is that the replies come to me and I then put the links up.
• Alert alert!! What no article marketing, web 2.0, blog commenting etc?
  • I ask - “well we’re looking into article marketing” is the reply.
  • I start to feel uncomfortable and wonder…are they a one trick pony? Will this work?

NO - Nothing much happens. In 2 months I get 5 agreed link swaps, not many refusals even.

Relevant - Mostly not though one refusal was from a biker shop in Texas - totally nothing to do with my site I can tell you (my site was about audiobook MP3s. I say “was” because this while debacle cost me so much that I had to bin the site. Thanks BBS, very good of you.

On stating my growing concerns to my account manager the reply was - “SEO is a long game and you have to be patient but don’t forget that if you’re not getting the results after 3 months you can claim back the money on the positions not getting top 10’s.”

Err…5 links in 2 months, yes indeed it is going to be a bloody “long game” at that rate.

Reports

My keyword positions after month 1 were quite good but…I’d already done a fair bit SEO like article marketing, Yahoo Answers and Squidoo pages in previous months so this was down to my work, nothing to do with fancying up meta tags and 3 new links - So yes, horrors, I was going to end up paying them for positions that I’d done myself for free!

I’d not mind this, my reason for wantuing to outsource was to free up time for content development etc and I wanted the SEO guys to build on what I’d done - But they didn’t (and then some!) as demonstrated by the appalling results.

So I decided to cancel and get on with my own SEO again. But oh no I’m afraid that won’t be possible.

Problem - I am NOT “allowed” to do this

There is a clause in the Ts and Cs - I can’t cancel in the first 12 months unless I pay them value of the remaining contract. “Odd” how buried that one was.

But doesn’t their money back G’tee mean it’s OK?

What it meant in my case was that the designated keywords must appear in the top 10 search results of either MSN or Yahoo search engines in any given month. If not then you have to jump through hoops and spend time to do these claims, in the meantime your money is earning them interest.

And oh yes, Google is NOT included. 

• It is not hard to rank to Yahoo anyway. I’d already paid $299 for a Yahoo directory placing and had lots of Yahoo Answers work so I already had good Yahoo positions.
• MSN - Manually submit to them and do a load of Craigslist ads and post them in the San Francisco area. You’ll be MSN indexed in days.
• No guarantees about Google results which, unless your site has some strange niche that is really attractive to diehard Yahoo’s or corporate MSN’ers is the only SE worth ranking on anyway.
• They say is that they “hope” to get top 10 placement in Google after about 7 months.

A cynic might say that they’ve already made a tidy sum and given that the work done up to that point is minimal they don’t need to do anything else anyway and any money made after that is a bonus…

And here’s the killer - That Money Back Guarantee actually traps you!

As the reason for not being happy is the fact they’re not delivering results then what can you do? After all you want website traffic yes?

But no sweat, after all with their g’tee you don’t have to pay them if the results aren’t there right? Yes true but think about that in more detail -

OK you don’t pay them if you’re not getting results right? Big Trap when you’re locked into a contract.

You’re in a lose-lose headlock because if you go sort your SEO out by yourself or with another service who do work out and you get those top 10 rankings after all then you’re going to end up paying the rascals for work you or another company is doing! According to their “performance g’tee” they ARE succeeding for you!

Alternatively you can let your site stagnate with no SEO work going on until after the contract ends, Very glass half empty!

Conclusion - The 12 month lock in plus performance based agreement is actually a coldly calculated win-win trap by the SEO company.

Such a contract is fundamentally unfair and restrictive in that it prevents a client taking any other approach to SEO unless “performance” based payments are made for someone else’s work or a hefty total waste of money exit payment is made.

So what’s happened in my sorry situation?

We firstly spoke at length to their sales director who refused to let us cancel but did offer to “let us go” for “just” 60% of the outstanding 12 month balance.

We wrote to him stating why we were not willing to do that.

What happened? No reply from sales director, instead -

A letter then phone call from a credit collection agency chasing the outstanding balance. “Funnily” enough the lady who called form the credit agency who was very friendly (hey it’s only business not personal) said that they get a LOT of work from this SEO outfit…read into that what you will)

By legal letter we informed the debt collection company that we are not paying due to contractual performance issues.

The situation has steadily escalated legally to the courts and that’s all I’d better say for now! Watch the blog for further developments.

Summary of results

• 2 Google PR points lost in first month (October) from 4 to 2.
• 5 very average incoming links after 3 months with £2400 paid.
• Our annual bill approx. about 7.5k UK £
• Extend this “performance” to 12 months and we might reasonably expect to see approx. 20-25 incoming links
• In my opinion this is appalling by any measure.

And as I say, to get out of this nightmare and do something better we either need to:

• Pay them in full to go away.
• Sit tight and claim monthly refunds while our business stagnates
• Or sort it out ourselves and end up paying them as if it was their work on the basis of their “performance”

Or, as is happening, see what happens in court.

Lessons -

• Don’t let yourself get carried away by too good to be true promises.
• Read the small print or better still get a lawyer to check it.
• Unless you have a medium sized company marketing budget you’re better off using outsourced SEO contractors and some of the great SEO software that there is about now.
• I am not I want to make it very clear, slating SEO companies as an industry. I am slating this approach to it and in particular the restrictive contract-guarantee trap that we fell into.
• I am sure that even the company who rolled us can deliver but not for the money we were paying. For a very small business such as we are it’s a lot of money. For them it’s their lowest level of SEO with results to match.
• In summary - Buyer beware.

Had a similar experience? Agrdee? Disagree? Please post and let me knmow about your Search engine optimisation experiences in the UK and anywhere else.

Posted under Search Engine Optimisation Uk