Buy a small slice of good SEO not tons of "cheap SEO"

by Jim June 17, 2015

UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘Buy a small slice of good SEO not tons of “cheap SEO”‘

You can watch the video for the full story but I’ll precis it here. This is something I’ve never done before and will probably never do again.

A Former Client SEO horror story

I had a call from a former client from years ago who left us for a cheaper SEO option as we were lifting our prices at the time. Basically it was a disaster. When I look at the 2009 data compared to the same period this year her Google traffic has nearly halved. And for very good reason. I can’t see anything that I would regard as SEO on her site. In fact it’s worse than that. AN SEO company has “worked” on the site but the home page title is “Best {keyword omitted} in Australian” I’m not revealing the keyword in curly brackets as it would reveal her niche. Here are the problems with that page title.

No one is searching for that.
It should have been “Australia” not “Australian”.
It’s not what she asked to rank for.

Where’s the SEO?

I went through every page and I could not find one that had her main keyword in the page title. I know what you’re thinking what did she pay for the last twelve months? $500? $1000? Try $12,000. The troubling thing for me, is that she is not the only one. She has paid $12,000 to halve her business. Sure we have had some very complex sites that we didn’t achieve the rankings (I’ve been doing this since the late 90s in some form or another) I hoped for but we had the key phrase in the page titles at the very least! That’s not SEO101 it’s LOGIC! Sorry didn’t mean to shout.

It looks like her SEO was done by a dyslexic, hallucinogenic robot vacuum cleaner that sucked all the life from her business.

Keyword Frequency Debate

Over the years I’ve read a lot about Keyword Density. In fact it was my first introduction to SEO in 1999. I remember a Melbourne bloke, Tony Anastasi explaining it to me. He was running a hosting company and was an advertiser in my daily tech news show IOB. At that stage he was dominating in Altavista (look it up kids). Since then there have been many debates about keyword density. I have never heard anyone suggest though, that ZERO key phrases is a good idea. That’s right, $12,000 spent and not only are the keyphrases omitted from the page title, they’re not anywhere IN THE ENTIRE SITE!

Super Low Bounce Rates

In the video I proffered that the super low bounce rate of 0.55% was an indication of multiple GA code on the page. Turns out I was right. First at line 25 and again at line 290.

Horrible Canonicals

The home page has a canonical tag that points to her domain .com.au/ but that redirects to the .com.au without the slash. So essentially we are telling Google to go loop itself.

Happy Ending

This story has prompted us to come out with a budget product, we’re only making 10 available though. We can do more in 4 hours for this client than her “cheap” SEO did in 12 months . I’m doing it as an end of financial year special and then that is it. The main difference between this product and our enterprise level one is the resource and the time we spend on it. So she will end up with great results but it will take longer to get there than our usual service.

UPDATE: A very happy start. After 25 mins work by our team client is on page one.