Digital agencies from India?
- Thread starter Amazin
- Start date
F
Faevilangel
Having been involved in a large project recently with an Indian company (I was bought into manage the work) I found the following:
- they need lots of hand holding
- they require a lot of feedback on what they are doing, they will build to the brief but won't ask questions if they don't understand something
- they are motivated by time, they will only work the XX time on the job e.g. you pay for 5 hours, you get exactly 5 hours.
- they cannot design, the designs they come up with are what we saw in the early 90's
Put it this way, I wouldn't pass a job to them if it was less than £10k and I had someone technical enough to be my project manager. I would get all design work done by someone else.
For projects under £10k, it's just not worth the risk to get the job done in India, you will get a poor job unless you really want to spend a lot of time back and forth with them to get it right.
From your previous posts you want to get a website built but don't / can't spend the prices of a UK pro. If you really want to outsource it then head to Poland / Bulgaria as they are more UK like in their thinking but do come in cheaper.
- they need lots of hand holding
- they require a lot of feedback on what they are doing, they will build to the brief but won't ask questions if they don't understand something
- they are motivated by time, they will only work the XX time on the job e.g. you pay for 5 hours, you get exactly 5 hours.
- they cannot design, the designs they come up with are what we saw in the early 90's
Put it this way, I wouldn't pass a job to them if it was less than £10k and I had someone technical enough to be my project manager. I would get all design work done by someone else.
For projects under £10k, it's just not worth the risk to get the job done in India, you will get a poor job unless you really want to spend a lot of time back and forth with them to get it right.
From your previous posts you want to get a website built but don't / can't spend the prices of a UK pro. If you really want to outsource it then head to Poland / Bulgaria as they are more UK like in their thinking but do come in cheaper.
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To add to the above:
They can create a standard site using prebuilt scripts and plugins. They are hopeless at doing anything bespoke.
They haven't got a clue about SEO. They still plug away at the old blog comments, social bookmarking, directory submissions and other pointless methods. They try to do guest blogging but it's just spun junk.
They can create a standard site using prebuilt scripts and plugins. They are hopeless at doing anything bespoke.
They haven't got a clue about SEO. They still plug away at the old blog comments, social bookmarking, directory submissions and other pointless methods. They try to do guest blogging but it's just spun junk.
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L
Lou P
I used a guy once for an infographic: it was bad. Was just copy and paste text from my website surrounded by 90's graphic images which appear in any 'SEO' search on Google Images. Only cost £5, but it was still a waste as I binned it!
They are also *generally* terrible at SEO. I had a client in the Summer who wanted me to do some work on his site. Long story short, we couldn't agree on a fee and he went off, paid cheap, and now his website has been banished to Google Hell! Moral of the story: Cheap work. Cheap results!
So to answer your question; no they are not (generally)!
They are also *generally* terrible at SEO. I had a client in the Summer who wanted me to do some work on his site. Long story short, we couldn't agree on a fee and he went off, paid cheap, and now his website has been banished to Google Hell! Moral of the story: Cheap work. Cheap results!
So to answer your question; no they are not (generally)!
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- Original Poster
- #7
thank god I made this thread and asked. Deep down I know what you pay for is what you get and I certainly don't want to save money in areas where its important to spend the money. I also got contacted by this American company and had skype call with them. They offered to do the job for $450 and $200 per month for SEO. sounds good to me but I'm still bit skeptical.
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I have used them for a few different things SEO, Graphic Design, Website design.
I have had good and bad experiences. I definitely wouldn't use them for SEO, unless you know exactly what to do yourself and just want to outsource the mundane tasks. I got a website penalised by Google and it cost me more to recover from it and lost 6 months of ranking because of poor SEO practises (and some negative SEO from a competitor).
I have had mostly good experiences with Graphic design. Most of my logos and designs were from India and Philippines.
Web design can be half half, but you will not get follow up service, which is fine if you know what you are doing and have it hosted yourself. Just watch the don't put other crap sites on your server if they have FTP access.
Regards
John
I have had good and bad experiences. I definitely wouldn't use them for SEO, unless you know exactly what to do yourself and just want to outsource the mundane tasks. I got a website penalised by Google and it cost me more to recover from it and lost 6 months of ranking because of poor SEO practises (and some negative SEO from a competitor).
I have had mostly good experiences with Graphic design. Most of my logos and designs were from India and Philippines.
Web design can be half half, but you will not get follow up service, which is fine if you know what you are doing and have it hosted yourself. Just watch the don't put other crap sites on your server if they have FTP access.
Regards
John
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Do what for the money? You are an East london cleaner, getting your site to rank well (and more importantly convert) will not need a monthy spend. Sign up as a full member here, get your site reviewed and you will problably find your problems will be solved.
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It sounds like low quality junk and they don't know what they're talking about.
One of those that are still talking like it is 90's SEO but trying to adapt by inserting the words 'quality' to modernise it.
It's meaningless.
X Campaigns? What does that entail?
X Keywords? What does that mean? They'll rank you for X keywords? 95% of which will probably not even be searched for...
X Crawled pages? Huh, what does that matter? A web crawler will naturally crawl any well built site as many pages as is allowed by the site's directives. This is just a meaningless guarantee and pointless even saying it.
Includes reports? Reports of what?
Just what are they going to do for your business?
What have they researched?
How are they going to solve the problem for your target audience?
What sort of content are they going to write?
Where will it be published?
Who's going to find it?
What metrics are going to be measured?
If it's a membership site, what are the plans to monetise it?
This is so poor if this the final proposal and I'd bet my bottom dollar that you'd see no improvement from anything going with this...
One of those that are still talking like it is 90's SEO but trying to adapt by inserting the words 'quality' to modernise it.
It's meaningless.
X Campaigns? What does that entail?
X Keywords? What does that mean? They'll rank you for X keywords? 95% of which will probably not even be searched for...
X Crawled pages? Huh, what does that matter? A web crawler will naturally crawl any well built site as many pages as is allowed by the site's directives. This is just a meaningless guarantee and pointless even saying it.
Includes reports? Reports of what?
Just what are they going to do for your business?
What have they researched?
How are they going to solve the problem for your target audience?
What sort of content are they going to write?
Where will it be published?
Who's going to find it?
What metrics are going to be measured?
If it's a membership site, what are the plans to monetise it?
This is so poor if this the final proposal and I'd bet my bottom dollar that you'd see no improvement from anything going with this...
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All sounds a bit ropey to me. It probably won't help your site very much.
Although digital marketing proposals can be a little bit on the slim side, in order to stop companies simply taking the ideas and doing them themselves, that's just empty.
There's no original thoughts on your brand or current site, they haven't even said anything specific to your business. I echo the thoughts of others here...
5 Campaigns - What are they? How will they work? Is one a social media campaign? Another a content marketing campaign?
300 Keywords - Way too many for that sort of budget, even if you managed to get a good deal. Bottom line, they will probably target 300 keywords poorly as opposed to 3 well - meaning it won't benefit your sites rankings.
50k Crawled Pages - No point in crawling any more pages than the ones on your website. I think this might mean generating backlinks on other sites though - and if you're creating 50,000 of them you can bet they're not all going to be on authoritative and relevant domains.
15 Social Accounts - Again, unnecessary. There's much more benefit to 1 social account that effectively targets your audience and engages with them. There's no advantage to having a higher number of accounts - in all likelihood it will just clutter your web presence and be ineffective.
Reports - Well, it's good to receive reports on your marketing campaign with things like rankings for target keywords, referral traffic from backlinks created and other insights like organic search traffic - but they haven't specified any of that. Bizarre, as they should know that's what a client would want to see - they need to demonstrate the value they add so they should be making an effort to say exactly what they will report on.
I'm sure there are legitimate and effective marketing companies in India, but that doesn't sound like 1 of them.
Although digital marketing proposals can be a little bit on the slim side, in order to stop companies simply taking the ideas and doing them themselves, that's just empty.
There's no original thoughts on your brand or current site, they haven't even said anything specific to your business. I echo the thoughts of others here...
5 Campaigns - What are they? How will they work? Is one a social media campaign? Another a content marketing campaign?
300 Keywords - Way too many for that sort of budget, even if you managed to get a good deal. Bottom line, they will probably target 300 keywords poorly as opposed to 3 well - meaning it won't benefit your sites rankings.
50k Crawled Pages - No point in crawling any more pages than the ones on your website. I think this might mean generating backlinks on other sites though - and if you're creating 50,000 of them you can bet they're not all going to be on authoritative and relevant domains.
15 Social Accounts - Again, unnecessary. There's much more benefit to 1 social account that effectively targets your audience and engages with them. There's no advantage to having a higher number of accounts - in all likelihood it will just clutter your web presence and be ineffective.
Reports - Well, it's good to receive reports on your marketing campaign with things like rankings for target keywords, referral traffic from backlinks created and other insights like organic search traffic - but they haven't specified any of that. Bizarre, as they should know that's what a client would want to see - they need to demonstrate the value they add so they should be making an effort to say exactly what they will report on.
I'm sure there are legitimate and effective marketing companies in India, but that doesn't sound like 1 of them.
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- Original Poster
- #16
lol, you certainly don't sound impressed. If I know what you know about SEO then I probably feel the same.
Thanks for that, I will certainly question them further. Btw, thats from an American digital agency.
Some very useful questions there and thank you so much for proposing them. The site I'm trying to create will be targeting London only for young professionals.
Its an American company if that would change your opinion?
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No far from impressed, personally, I wouldn't even bother continuing the discussion further with them. I can practically guarantee you that they aren't the 'agency' to help your business.
Why are you using an American company to target a niche in London anyway? I'm not saying it's not possible but wouldn't it make sense to work with a company in the UK that will be more familiar with the country and location?
If you go to them with those questions, they'll just spew out some blurb about 'high quality', 'authoritative', 'high pr', 'quality backlinks', 'quality this', 'quality that'. Yes, quality is what is needed but they wouldn't know quality if it smacked them on the forehead. It's just a word to them to win your business, nothing they do will be quality to a search engine or humans.
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F
Faevilangel
The average hourly rate for a decent seo freelancer in America is $60-$120 an hour, so you're potentially only getting less than 3 hours "work".
You will probably find, they say they are american but are actually in India (or farm the work out to India).
Most Indian companies now have american and english telephone numbers to seem local.
I get emails / calls every week from "British SEO's" but digging down the website is hosted in India, the phone number redirects to an Indian number and the person speaking (on the phone) has a really poor grasp of the english language.
You will probably find, they say they are american but are actually in India (or farm the work out to India).
Most Indian companies now have american and english telephone numbers to seem local.
I get emails / calls every week from "British SEO's" but digging down the website is hosted in India, the phone number redirects to an Indian number and the person speaking (on the phone) has a really poor grasp of the english language.
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- Original Poster
- #21
again thanks for the useful info.
It is not easy to tell I have to admitt. I spoke to them over skype, the guy was Afro American, its basically more of a family business. run by 3 brothers and 2 friends.
thats their site:
http://www.nwiremarketinggroupinc.com/about-us/
I just saw them and emailed them to get a quote but I do have a friend who's best friends with Owner of web design company based in Essex. They quoted me £750 for the web design (they told me they gived me 50% discount because of my friend's friendship with the owner) and £250 per month for SEO.
Is it important to use a UK company? I don't know
It is not easy to tell I have to admitt. I spoke to them over skype, the guy was Afro American, its basically more of a family business. run by 3 brothers and 2 friends.
thats their site:
http://www.nwiremarketinggroupinc.com/about-us/
I just saw them and emailed them to get a quote but I do have a friend who's best friends with Owner of web design company based in Essex. They quoted me £750 for the web design (they told me they gived me 50% discount because of my friend's friendship with the owner) and £250 per month for SEO.
Is it important to use a UK company? I don't know
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There site is awful loaded with basic, useless information about their services. Just regurgitated tosh that you can find on Wikipedia - probably with some incorrect details here and there and plenty of stock imagery that appears on the first page of Google for 'seo' or similar.
It might be a family business but they don't know the industry. It's a few brothers that probably thought we can make a quick buck here seeing there is nothing stopping us from being an 'seo company'. The industry is littered with mediocre websites like this that offer no value like the people running them.
I can instantly tell these people a mile-off now, it often only takes a glance at a website or listening to a sentence or two from what they've said. It's become so natural to spot these after being in the field and having come across so many hundreds over the years.
When you compare that kind of content to something like this or this, it's hopefully quite clear, the difference between the two and whilst this is one of our websites, I appreciate, it is still far from 100% perfect also. But that's the difference between 'seo is the process of...', 'seo stands for...' and real content that users want to know... how we can help and what we're going to do. Transparency goes a long way and installs trust in an already polluted line of work.
Did that not sound like a reasonable deal to you then or...?
Not necessarily, depends on your business. Targeting a niche in London (geographical based optimisation and targeting) is one reason right there to use a local agency though.
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- Original Poster
- #23
tbh I also feel the same way and I don't even know that much about design & SEO.
I'm really unsure about it tbh, Few people mentioned to that I can probably do it myself by using premium plugins and templates. I want it to get it done professionally because I'm worried that if I try to do myself then soon or later I will run into problems especially it comes to taking payments and online security.
I want to use an agency based in London but they're so expensive. I phoned few agencies but they want 1000s just for design. I don't think its necessary for the site I'm trying to develop and I need the money for SEO. anyways, I just got an email from my friend's best friend company, this is what they're offering:
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That one line would be enough to send me running.
And if they are using an in house CMS it means you can't go anywhere else - you will be tied to them forever.
And there is no portfolio so for all you know they could be hopeless at building websites
And they reccomend 1&1 for hosting. Aaaaaaaargh!
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Yeh, what he said ^^^
It's better than the Americans but it still doesn't convince me that they know what they're talking about. With the design or the SEO.
I'll be honest though, if you're looking for something 'cheap', this is the best you're going to get really. A mediocre company that doesn't really excel at either service you're after and can barely talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.
Most agencies in London are pretty damn good. They know their stuff, they have large teams that specialise in areas that matter like usability, user experience (UX), responsive design, retina support, typography, branding etc etc. All the stuff that will drive the business forward.
What kind of website are you wanting built anyway?
It's better than the Americans but it still doesn't convince me that they know what they're talking about. With the design or the SEO.
I'll be honest though, if you're looking for something 'cheap', this is the best you're going to get really. A mediocre company that doesn't really excel at either service you're after and can barely talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.
Most agencies in London are pretty damn good. They know their stuff, they have large teams that specialise in areas that matter like usability, user experience (UX), responsive design, retina support, typography, branding etc etc. All the stuff that will drive the business forward.
What kind of website are you wanting built anyway?
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- Original Poster
- #27
sigh* I guess what you pay for is what you get. If thats all I have access to then I might just have to accept that.
what's wrong with meta tags? I'm bit scared now that you mentioned that I can't go anywhere else if they're using inhouse CMS! Please enlighten me if there are other stuff to lookout for!
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Why do you have to accept that? No-one should have to accept this work. This is the reason the quality of the industry has been driven so low because businesses keep lining the pockets of companies that aren't really that clued up about what they're doing.
Why not save up to invest or seek funding if your initial budget is low? From what I can gather, you're after a membership website that specialises in a niche in London? A membership website is a huge project (I've got experience with this, I'm the founding director of Clubnet UK (social network for a nightlife community) which we designed and built on an open source platform) - it's an immense project and any serious projects you're going to be looking at £5k + for something that fully does what you want. You can lower costs via various routes but if you just opt for something mediocre, your website will unlikely succeed and drain what money you do have until you eventually shut it down - we've seen it so many times already.
Anyone bleating on about meta tags is living in the past, it's not overly significant to any decent strategy online these days. If that's the best they can come up with, then they're not worth going with because that will literally be, the best they can come up with which isn't going to help your business grow at all. Meta tags perform probably about 1% of our marketing strategy.
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You can't judge someone's ability from their website or the cut of their suit. Doing so is likely to lead you straight into the arms of those who can pay for appearances, but don't necessarily have any ability. Those with ability will usually be very busy...
Look to people you know and trust to recommend someone. Then start small and aim to have any campaign pay for itself. Anyone who can't do this, I'd be wary of hiring. Marketing that doesn't pay for itself isn't really worth having IMHO.
A good marketer should be able to produce results that pay for themselves, so any budget should be flexible and seen as an investment rather than a cost.
There are probably good people in any country, it's a matter of finding them. It's unlikely someone offering packages as described is going to be effective. Anyone who immediately jumps in suggesting x keywords for y pounds/dollars without taking time to understand your business is likely to be ineffective.
IMHO design is overrated. If you are on a budget, focus more on copy-writing. A plain and simple design with good copy will pull more than a fancy design with mediocre copy.
Look to people you know and trust to recommend someone. Then start small and aim to have any campaign pay for itself. Anyone who can't do this, I'd be wary of hiring. Marketing that doesn't pay for itself isn't really worth having IMHO.
A good marketer should be able to produce results that pay for themselves, so any budget should be flexible and seen as an investment rather than a cost.
There are probably good people in any country, it's a matter of finding them. It's unlikely someone offering packages as described is going to be effective. Anyone who immediately jumps in suggesting x keywords for y pounds/dollars without taking time to understand your business is likely to be ineffective.
IMHO design is overrated. If you are on a budget, focus more on copy-writing. A plain and simple design with good copy will pull more than a fancy design with mediocre copy.
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What we don't know yet is the scope of the project. Membership for what? Numbers of memebers? Location, services offered, payment options, marketing strategy and so on.
It's possible that a small wordpress site with a few plugins will do the job or you may need a bespoke platform. Why not put something in Tenders to give people an idea on the size of the project.
It's also possible that a small operation may winn the contract but not have the skills to deliver the level of complexity you require - meaning a cheap deal might end up with a website that just doesn't work.
It's possible that a small wordpress site with a few plugins will do the job or you may need a bespoke platform. Why not put something in Tenders to give people an idea on the size of the project.
It's also possible that a small operation may winn the contract but not have the skills to deliver the level of complexity you require - meaning a cheap deal might end up with a website that just doesn't work.
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Maybe not, but you can from what they say in their proposal. And that was the killer factor in what the OP has provided.
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To follow on from this, OP, you may wish to check out Wordpress with Buddypress bolted on. Wordpress is cheap and simple to get up and running and Buddypress converts Wordpress into the elements you'd want with a membership website - all the social media side of it.
It's far from perfect but it's open source, has plenty of plugins and plenty of ready made themes and documentation to get you started on a budget.
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I hadn't read that as a proposal - I thought it was a sales pitch...
IMHO any proposal should define a measurable objective and define what constitutes success and how that would be measured...
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- Original Poster
- #34
well, I can potentially pour more money into it but i'm not sure how well its going to workout and I need some of that money for other business use. I certainly don't think its a good idea to invest too much money simply because I really don't know much about websites in general, I feel quite vulnerable in that sense. At this stage I need someone to design a reasonable site for me and some SEO to get started to see how it goes. I will invest more if necessary. I just had a look at your site and its going through upgrad at the moment?
I will only be targeting London for now and I don't want to give my idea away. Ideally I want to get to 15,000+ members, not sure how long that will take usually but its certainly lot of work.
never used them before, I think I will give a go.
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This is why you should use a consultant for advice (like we're doing now) to advise you on what's good and what isn't.
Before investing money into a website, you should have researched the market, the audience, the competition and have an idea of where revenue can be generated in the business model that you deploy into the website - no consideration to any of that will just result in a website being built blindly with no direction in a 'trial and error' approach. You may as well throw your money away or seek a DIY cost effective solution like Wordpress and Buddypress to test the water leaving funds to expand to a bespoke website further down the line if the business gains traction.
We pulled the plug on Clubnet UK (view it archived though) a while ago purely because the network wasn't monetised to my satisfaction and we faced so many limitations working with open source platforms/scripts and frameworks with what we had built upon so the aim is to go back to the drawing board with a completely revised business model and rebuild a platform bespoke.
No-one is going to be able to advise you accurately without knowing exactly what you want to do and what the business goals are.
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- Original Poster
- #36
I think my site will be similar to yours once its finished. It look good btw. I have done some research and so far I have 2 major competitors and they have huge share of the market e.g. 70%. My idea will have enough USP to attract people to sign up and the rest will depend on execution. I'm not a huge fan of market research unless there're strong evidence that you should stay away from a particular market. Sometimes if you ask people what they want, they might tell you they want a faster horse instead of a car.(Henry Ford)
I can potential go down the DIY route but I know it will end up taking me ages and probably won't look anywhere near as good. I want the site to be up and running ASAP. I will study and learn more about web design and SEO as time goes on.
I do have few ideas to monetise my site but largely depend on how many members and how they respond. So open source plateforms can limit you that much? oh oh, I hope its not too much work to make the necessary changes.
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Yes but you're in India anyway so it's hardly the same as a UK business hiring an agency in India. And if they were very good completing tasks at right time then why do you not still use them? (You said "used to outsource").
I can hardly see an Indian freelancer/company out sourcing their digital marketing to a UK company somehow.
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