Can anyone recommend a good SEO service?

[LinkBright Media]

I provide e-commerce website design and development and my clients are always asking me for a recommendation for SEO services (I stopped offering SEO 18 months ago due to it being so difficult/time consuming to see results these days!)

I have one client who's just been paying £320/month for SEO for the last 3 months. I checked work done and the offpage SEO and couldn't believe the small amount of spammy links created on old bookmark sites and even an adult theme site.

Can anyone recommend a good UK-based SEO service?

Thanks!

 

[antropy]

Have a chat with [email protected]

 

[Simon.P]

or learn the skills you need to do it yourself for clients www.freshbananas.co.uk

 

[antropy]

or learn the skills you need to do it yourself for clients www.freshbananas.co.uk

The OP has already said she doesn't have time to do it herself.

 

[tony84]

Ive spoken to someone called George at www.sitewizard.co.uk
He seems quite helpful and knowledgeable. I have not used them yet, but I do plan to once I have a few other things out of the way.

 

[GuyMor]

Have a chat with [email protected]

@antropy doesn't provide SEO (according to their website)

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

I can hear the 'thud, thud, thud' of private messages promising @LinkBright Media the earth.

 

[LinkBright Media]

Hahaha SEO Oil!! I have had one interesting PM and will also check out sitewizard.co.uk

Thanks for the suggestions

 

[Novevan]

why not do some banner ads on some related website?

I think banner ads is also a good choice!!

 

[ilya]

I come from an online SEO environment, and I know quite a lot of people providing SEO services.
If you can PM the budget and keywords they are trying to rank for, I'll have a chat with a few people I know

 

[CoolHandCol]

Find a service that is payment on results - you only pay as your keywords move up the search engines. I have used a UK company in the past with good results Samson SEO

 

[James Lees]

My former employers Visualsoft have really put a lot of resource into their SEO service over the last 12 months. If you speak to Simon there he will be able to advise you further on how they could help.

 

[David G Rees]

Seo can be a minefield, its not just good quality back-linking but on page optimisation, correct keyword selection and lots more. Just beware of people offering no 1 on google etc , you cannot guarantee that, but if done properly you will see results in a few months depending on keywords chosen and competition etc.

 

[macmacman]

Er I can tell you who not to use if that helps! It's quite a long list. Most are on here.

 

[David G Rees]

Go by recommendation, someone who has used an SEO service and was happy with the ROI and the work done.

 

[Ian J]

Er I can tell you who not to use if that helps! It's quite a long list. Most are on here.

Starting with anyone who contacts you via PM but doesn't post on this thread

 

[Amy POPContent]

Hello! Not sure if I'd be of any help - I'm a content marketer and have setup popcontent.co.uk . Just wrote a giant guide (literally 14, 819 words) on promoting ecommerce sites; happy for you to check it out and decide whether or not they might like my style!

Sorry can't link directly yet

Happy to help if I can,
Amy

 

[Mistahclarke]

If I got as many sales as emails from SEO companies I'd be a happy man. I get at least 10 a day. But no-one seems to want to provide a money back guarentee for all their bold claims. Pretty sure 99% of companies are in it to take your money in return for poor service for as long as you'll pay.

 

[Amy POPContent]

Hey Mistahclarke,

I totally agree; it sucks being up against so many scammy companies. Plus, if someone's been burned by a scam previously, it's even harder to convince them you can help.

It used to be the case that you could simply spam out lot's of links and guarantee people results; but it just isn't anymore. If there's any sound advice out there, I'd have to say, unless they are charging thousands and are allowed to take over your website completely, anyone guaranteeing rankings/traffic are more than likely trying to scam you.

The reason no one can provide a guarantee that is doing the right things, is simply because there's hundreds of ranking factors, and no one knows the exact algorithm Google uses - not even Google themselves, they are now using a version of AI, so it's literally self learning and self editing.

We do know this though - backlinks and content are the biggest factors effecting ranking at the moment, quality of backlinks is important to note rather than just number.

The other thing is, providing a guarantee is impossible without knowing what you want to rank for; if the competition is incredibly heavy, don't expect to beat out top websites, like wikipedia or newspapers, without some serious work.

I hope that's kind of helpful; if you're trying to figure out whether or not to work with someone, I'd assess their blogs, see if they seem useful, it's an extra good sign if they're particularly long (Google likes 'long form' content, 2000+ words) and then get in touch and simply get a feel for their style of advice/work. If they're really cagey about their methods, I'd be very wary. Last thing you want is a lot of dodgy links that rank you in the first couple of weeks then damage your website permanently.

 

[Mistahclarke]

To be fair, that was a cracking response and well impressed. It's such a shame there are so many people out there giving the industry a bad name, when there are clearly some good ones out here which are hard to find.

SEO is expensive to do right, taking more and more work to get results.

 

[Amy POPContent]

Thanks, I sincerely appreciate it! It does genuinely annoy and frustrate me too; people scamming small business owners out of their hard earned cash and not doing anything for it; or worse, doing the wrong things that will ultimately damage their websites!

I personally like to work in collaboration with business owners wherever possible; not just for transparency but I think great content is key to ranking well, and the best kind of content comes from those who know their industry best - which is usually the business owner themselves!

If you can't afford to get an SEO agency on board, I think the next best thing is to train yourself, or at very least, make sure you do the basics yourself:

- Write good content. Spend time making sure you're being clear and helpful, not too salesy. An afternoon editing your homepage might seem a lot; but if it's going to be read by thousands, do you want to draw them in when they land on your site or let them move onto a better site?

- Answer your customers questions in your content. That's what they're searching for anyway - answers!

- Add your business listing to local directories, especially Google Local+ if you're a local business. It'll give you some legitimate backlinks, even if some are "no follow"

 

[altwebdesign]

Scott D Smith www.scottdsmith.co.uk great guy and posts on here, have worked wiht him for years and consistantly gets top rankings on Google no matter the algo update!

 

[acornia]

It's the usual problem, what's happening is the middlemen are going to Ahrefs, Majestic and getting overwhelmed with the volume, and to save time they post to the low hanging fruit. You can look at below, it was an internal system, they released it for client use but you can use it as well, it cuts out the middlemen.

Clients can create the links themselves, if you need any codes can get a few, it's not charged for at the moment. If you have any comments can pass them on as it was internal so needs some things added like domain keywords.

ukbusinessforums threads/how-to-know-the-backlinks-of-a-web-page.360577/page-2#post-2683526

Just point them to Zerys if they need content written, you can choose different levels of quality and the whole thing becomes very streamlined. Supposedly they had to throw away 95%+ of the Ahrefs data as it was 'stale' which is why the tool was developed, took too much time to filter out the quality.

For ranking you need the backlinks, as mentioned it's proven that 2,000 word articles are optimal taking around 8minutes of reading time. They take around 1day to write and another 1-2days to create backlinks for ranking, so you can say around £150-200 for low quality and £300-500 for a mid quality 2,000 word article.

There are other ways but you need enterprise technology to make Google think your site is a $multi-million website, use the technology that does this and it usually gets a new site 30% indexed in a few days but they keep that mostly internal, it's too complex to explain.

 

[MattKramer]

Hey there! You can always do something with your conversion rates and gain crazy results without any voodoo, or foul magic Visit capturly's blog if you want some free tips, we develop website optimization tools. Hope I could help!

Matt

 

[Black Bird]

We do SEO, but we rarely advertise it because we still have the belief it should organically come from your online presence. Most SEO companies *That is ALOT* use automated software that builds layers of links to your website. Therefore, what you're buying ends up being spammy links pointed to your website.

Sadly, if that worked everyone would be at the top of Google SERPs. Many industries shouldn't be touched because they are so saturated and got a huge barriers to entry, where all your efforts will be rendered useless. What I suggest is focusing on local SEO and manual link outreach to blogs and such in your target market.

 

[Thomas Harvey]

Many industries shouldn't be touched because they are so saturated and got a huge barriers to entry, where all your efforts will be rendered useless.

I completely disagree with this, there's always an incentive to be going for any industry, however you've got to have realistic expectations. You can't expect to rank for "television" however you could work at getting rankings for "32 inch black television with red cable" (longtail keywords).
That's the problem with the SEO industry, there's people who say they can rank for anything, yet the realistic SEO's who say "We can't rank you for a 100k a month search term, instead lets try rank you for a variety of 100 searches a month terms" they will usually go to the people who end up scamming them because they want to be the biggest and best.

 

[Black Bird]

I completely disagree with this, there's always an incentive to be going for any industry, however you've got to have realistic expectations. You can't expect to rank for "television" however you could work at getting rankings for "32 inch black television with red cable" (longtail keywords).

Sane argument. But what about markets when even Longtail Keywords are saturated, how about Payday Loans? Can you give me an insight of any keywords I should try to rank for in this market?

 

[UKSBD]

loans and mortgage related - https://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk/keywords-all/loans and mortgages/