Outsourcing SEO Services - SEO Company Reviews
“To Outsource or not to Outsource, that is the question!” OK, yes I did change the quote just a bit, but the question stands. Should a webmaster or even a web design company outsource SEO and other website work? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?
Personally I outsource a lot of work. I have people that I have do some of my SEO, flash and even programming work, in short yes, outsourcing does work! Unfortunately it’s also very easy to get burnt by outsourcing companies. There are many companies in India and other countries that make all their money from scamming companies. They have very good communication skills all the way up to the time you make a payment and then they disappear.
Reasons to consider Outsourcing
For me outsourcing is a great way to get work done at a substantially lower price, usually by very skilled workers.
For example, I have on guy that does .net programming on the side. Quite frankly the guy is an excellent programmer. The work I send to him is not work that I couldn’t do myself, it’s work that by the time I researched how to do it, did the programming and tested and implemented in the site, I would have to charge my client 2-3 times as much as when I have this programmer complete the module and all I have to do is implement into the site.
The same goes with SEO outsourcing. There are very skilled workers and companies out there that are willing to charge $8 - $20 per hour for work that if you hired a company in the US to do would cost you $50 - $150 per hour. Being that SEO take a lot of hours to do well, this adds up very quickly.
Unfortunately while outsourcing website work to off shore companies can provide a huge cost saving the risk also dramatically increases.
Reasons companies are afraid of outsourcing
Over half of the companies I have worked with in India and other countries have either completely failed to do the work as directed, often from a lack of ability to communicate well, or have just taken the deposit and ran, never to be heard from again.
Reasons for that a company chooses not to use offshore companies for their website and SEO work usually boils down to these three questions.
- Is the company reliable and does it do what it agreed to do?
- Does the company communicate well (reports, replies to emailed questions)?
- Does their work provide results (search engine searches)?
The only way to find out is to read reviews of the companies, try to talk with them yourself, and finally send a check and see what happens. This can be a rather intimidating and expensive process. Often the reviews you read are paid reviews (paid by the company getting reviewed), or possible even written by the company and passed off as a real review. It’s not always real easy to tell the real reviews from the fake.
Outsourcing company reviews
Most blogs that write reviews are paid to go to the SEO company website, look around a while and write a review based on what they read. Not a very accurate way to determine if the company will really fulfill their promises. Bottom line, I don’t trust any paid review, and if you only find warm glowing reviews on the review site likely they are not providing an honest review.
TopWebsiteTips.com has recently started offering companies an honest review of their services. The deal is pretty simple, after the company contacts me requesting a review I give them a choice of web pages for them to work their magic on. Once they have chosen the page they would like to work on I record the stats and current progress of the page. Afterword they are allowed to start doing whatever SEO work they think is necessary for the page to start building search engine traffic. As time goes on I will, on a page on Topwebsitetips.com dedicated to their company, document the progress of the SEO work. You, the person considering whether to hire an offshore SEO company or not can then personally check the page they did their work on and read the documentation of what they did and the quality of their service.
The SEO company will be graded on:
- Their ability to communicate well (this include reports, answering questions etc)
- How well they do what they agreed to do
- Finally the search engine results for the agreed on search phrases.
Other criteria:
- All work must be considered white hat by the Search Engine companies
- Only search engine traffic related to the agreed search phrase is used to evaluate the SEO Company’s ability to accomplish their work.
- No paid traffic or referral traffic will be counted.
Have Your SEO Company Reviewed
While we are willing to do a review on pretty much any SEO company that makes a request it is highly recommended that the company first considers whether they are really good enough to stand up to an honest review and if they are really willing to put for the effort to do what they agree to.
In most cases the SEO company review on TopWebSiteTips.com will show up on the first page under the company during a search of the companies name on Google. This review will be used by people determining whether to use the SEO Company or not, so it is important that the company be determined to complete the work before coming into an agreement with TopWebSiteTips.com.
Visitors of TopWebsiteTips.com and people emailing for advice are referred to these reviews to help them chose outsourcing SEO Companies. If you would like to be one of those companies receiving a constant flow of new clients send your request to info@topwebsitetips.com