Pay for Performance SEO
-
Does anyone have any thoughts on, or experience with, pay for performance SEO companies such as Results First?
Thanks
-
Be careful with anyone who does pay for performance that they are doing white hat seo - look at work they have done for others thru yahoo site explorer and ask for references- you dont want to wake up one day and see you have been penalized by google
-
doesn't surprise me one bit.
-
Thank you for your excellent analysis. When I spoke with one of their representatives I had a feeling that I was on an outsourced phone bank.
Don
-
Without having direct experience with RestultFirst, I can't speak to their ability to obtain results, however a careful review of their site points out several serious concerns.
1. They carry a "Best in Search" "badge" from TOPSEOs. TOPSEOs sells badges for a price, they do not award these based on actual proven or independently verifiable success.
2. The site is chock full of grammatical flaws, the type of which generally come from outsourced solution providers where Americanized English is not the native language. It's actually quite poor when reading content in its entirety.
3. The claim of "white hat" SEO actually appears to be misleading at best. They describe in their services section, how they provide content - if the content they provide is written as poorly on a client's site as it is on their own, this itself would be a turn-off to many would-be clients or customers. It's highly unprofessional. So even if they could get a site ranked, there's just as much likelihood that many of those visits would be lost before conversion to clients or customers.
They then go on to state:
"the product & services of the client are made popular on social networking site and else, so as to spread the word of the brand. Numerous articles with targeted keywords are submitted on the submission directories which act as a link to the client’s site and this is another of the steps taken by the SEO Services Company to help attain a higher rank on the search engines.'
Ignoring the poor writing, they come right out and say that their primary link building method is what is actually considered a very low quality method of obtaining links, not high value nor SEO best practices.
In one of their "case studies", they state:
"In less than a month’s time, the website achieved rankings in the top 2 pages for keywords". Honestly, if the best they could do was get a site into the 2nd page of Google, that's not very good. And it's another validation to me, in my experience, that they don't really do high end work, but "just enough low quality methods" to get a site "sort of" ranked.
Now, they very well could do much more than I was able to ascertain, or than they claim on their site. They could even implement best practices, and not just "questionable" tactics. There's no way to know from their site however. And nothing on the site indicates they do truly high quality, long-lasting work that isn't in the "gray-hat" arena.
So - exactly what is their promise? How much does it cost? What does the guarantee specify, and what are the loop-holes in that regarding the possibility that some of the tactics they use might eventually fail due to search engines devaluing low quality methods?
Many questions need to be asked, and much written documentation would need to be presented for anyone to ever truly have the knowledge based confidence to want to hire them.
So please - be very cautious if you choose to proceed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Google shopping listings affect SEO rankings?
Hello everyone. Here is my question: Until 4 weeks ago we used to have just around 2,000 product/pages on Google shopping of our product pages, then we added over 40,000 more items/pages to it, and our Google natural search rankings dropped on most of our long-tail keywords pointing to the same product pages. Do you think that's just coincidence or could the number of products/pages on Google shopping affect natural search results?
Paid Search Marketing | | fablau0 -
Ad Rank and Performance for PLA
Hello everyone and happy Friday from London! I have just launched a Product listing Campaign and I can't get to find any information about ad rank and how it's performing. From AdWords all I can see is: 1.number of click 2.CTR 3.Position which is zero Any suggestions? Cheers
Paid Search Marketing | | PremioOscar0 -
KeyWord Spy Expert Needed: Will Pay $100 For A Report
I need someone with a KeyWord Spy subscription and experience (or a similar tool that has Canadian data) to do a one time CPC report that answers these questions: (1) Who are my client's main competitors in paid search? (2) What is the estimated ad spend by the the five top competitors? (3) What keywords and ads are working best for the competitors? (4)) What is the CPC for the top 20 keywords in the niche. (5)) Any topline suggestions for my client re: next steps. That's it! I don't want to be overwhelmed with masses of extraneous detail. This should be an easy assignment for someone with required expertise. Possibility of more work to implement and/or optimize CPC campaign. Reply via PM with experience. Ideally, send a sample past report (okay to black out client names)
Paid Search Marketing | | DanielFreedman0 -
Does sitewide SEO affect PPC Quality Score?
When evaluating a PPC landing page for Quality Score, does Google evaluate the other pages that the landing page is linked to? For example, if we have a well optimized page on the site for "Widgets", can it outscore a well optimized PPC landing page that is isolated in a "disallow" directory with no links into or out of the page? I'm not sure if I am making myself clear...
Paid Search Marketing | | CsmBill0 -
Will a javascript rewrite of city names on a home page from PPC traffic affect SEO negatively?
We have a client that was originally based out of Orlando and the entire website is SEO'ed for Orlando. In the long term we will start SEO'ing for Tampa. But In the short term, we want to drive traffic from Tampa to the website but we want that traffic to know the business specializes in Tampa service (he has local teams there). We are already using a ?_vsrefdom=changemynumber to change the phone number dynamically to a tampa area code for tracking purposes. We want to dynamically change all iterations of 'Orlando' with 'Tampa' using the same javascript. Does this cause any SEO problems or trip any alarms with Google?
Paid Search Marketing | | Highforge0 -
Will PPC elsewhere on my domain help my organic SEO?
I have an e-commerce site with a small product line which an on-going organic SEO campaign. As a side project, I'm planning on doing some PPC testing with a highly converting product squeeze page, which I'll run Google ads to gain traffic. (this is PPC only and for this page I am not concerned with organic SEO traffic - although of course the page itself will be fully optimized). I am wondering whether to run this squeeze page on a sub-domain or sub-directory of the existing site, OR to host it on a completely fresh domain? I would like to know if as side-effect my existing Website benefit 'organically' from some of the PPC traffic, helping with it's domain authority, etc.,? or could this possibly do any harm? p.s. Bear in mind this is not going to be a page visible on the on the main site itself, it's a separate entity for PPC. Would be great to have some expert Moz eyes on this and opinions. Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | GregDixson0 -
PPC + SEO - Both well ranked, which penalty if there's any.
Hello everyone, I have a doubt about the PPC and SEO. For example if i rank at first page ( something like 5th position ) for one specific keyword, and then I decide to add this keyword to my PPC campaign. My 5th rank will be penalized by google if i buy the PPC keyword ? Thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | augustos0 -
Have you seen a correlation in between running a PPC campaing and increased SEO ranking for a new site (< 3 months old)?
I have read many conflicting articles on this topic. I understand that running a PPC campaign at a launch phase of a site can get a lot of insights such as exact traffic patterns etc. But the question is: is there a correlation or not with increased rankings position for new site as search engine are forced to crawled that given landing page to give your ad a score? Thanks in advance for your answers and opinion
Paid Search Marketing | | OlivierChateau0