Hi all!
I am so desperate with the SEO of my websites that I hardly know where to start anymore.
I had a first website www dot giftsngadgets dot co dot za which was doing quite well.
We had a contract with an SEO company and the search results were not bad until it got punished by the Panda / Penguin updates with the result that the site basically completely disappeared from all Search Results.
As we are completely web based, this situation resulted into the daunting fact that we now had to get ALL our revenue from Google Adwords. Although our Adword campaigns are doing quite well and although our turnover has gone up, the ongoing cost is putting a lot of pressure on our marketing budget.
On top of that, I had to spend a lot of money trying to get the site going again.
I hired an SEO company (I picked the number one SEO company(!!!) from the local search results at that time because I thought it was proof that they were good) only to hear after 6 months and a pile of money that the site was `sand-boxed" (whatever that may be), and that it was unlikely to ever perform well again.
So I decided to keep using the `sandboxed’ site for my Adword campaigns while we started another website www dot gifts-n-gadgets dot co dot za.
With yet again another web/seo company we started building the site from scratch in WP and we were going to build the site with SEO in mind!
We started adding the products and in the mean time we started posting on the blog in the site.
I had some posts written by "content writers", but they were so full of generalizations and high flying marketing terms that it was ridiculous. I came to the conclusion that one can only write sensible about a subject if you really know the subject so all came back to me. Being a small business owner, spending days on writing post, not even being a native English speaker, is a hell of a task to be added to an already hectic diary.
After 3 months however, I had the feeling that the new site was not coming on as should be and as I was paying for. The functionality of the site was lacking, images were incorrectly cropped, the layout was poor.
We had a serious Skype meeting where I politely but firmly explained my concerns. And we came to an agreement that all was going to be solved within the next two months. And in the mean time I got emails and Skype messages, like ‘ the site is scoring this and that on this and that keyword” and so on.
After another 3 months however the basics of the site were still not all sorted out, I got bills for SEO services but did not get any real proof of any work done so I canceled the agreement as I had enough of it.
The result now hover is, that I have a site that is performing well on a few keywords but that is basically it.
As this whole exercise was never “planned’ the sum of all costs has put a huge burden on our company.
I am now left with very limited budget to really get this new website going AND D KNOWS WE REALLY NEED THIS TO HAPPEN! I also do not trust a single SEO company anymore
Yes, I am at my wits end and this thanks to 4 different SEO companies who all were supposed to be decent companies with good references.
So my question is, where do I go from here? Has anyone here in the community been in the same position and how did you get out of this bloody mess.
Some REAL help would be very much appreciated.
Edwin ?
