Anyone know anything about this seo company.

jrochie

Hi guys,

I've started my own web design business recently and today got a phone call from some guy in england, saying he had found my number on my website. Anyway the conversation basically was about how his company would guarantee me first page google placement for a set number of keywords of my choosing. I was caught off guard so i asked him to send me an email with all the info which he duly did less than 5 minutes later!

The company name is First Search Consultancy and there website is firstsearchconsultancy.co.uk. I'm not really to interested in this as quite simply I can't afford there £295 fee, and am very sceptical about their service, because I cannot see how a site that is less than 6 months old could get into the first page of google on a service term such as 'web design'!

Am I wrong? Has anyone seen or had any dealing with these guys?

D.W

Its a common "scam" of sorts. They will use adwords not organic serps and will pay Google a fraction of what you pay them. AVOID.

pixeldesign

This sounds like spam.It is possible to get on the first google page even your site is not so old, but to get on the first google page for the term "web design" could cost you few thousands not £295 .That term has 445,000,000 queries .

tomED

jrochie wrote: »

Hi guys,

I've started my own web design business recently and today got a phone call from some guy in england, saying he had found my number on my website. Anyway the conversation basically was about how his company would guarantee me first page google placement for a set number of keywords of my choosing. I was caught off guard so i asked him to send me an email with all the info which he duly did less than 5 minutes later!

The company name is First Search Consultancy and there website is firstsearchconsultancy.co.uk. I'm not really to interested in this as quite simply I can't afford there £295 fee, and am very sceptical about their service, because I cannot see how a site that is less than 6 months old could get into the first page of google on a service term such as 'web design'!

Am I wrong? Has anyone seen or had any dealing with these guys?

There are thousands of companies out there offering the exact same service. I suggest you steer well clear of them!

RedFly

Very common "scam" and the hard sell is pretty... hard. IN this day and age, any company that offers that service that is worth their salt does NOT need to cold call.

tiresmokindad

Hello,

Some of the sites are not reliable. You must know the seo company well because some of them are not reliable. I try to look for First Search Consultancy. But I encountered it before. Be careful of looking for a SEO company.

femur61

I got similar call from a company called PageHog. They are so annoying you'd nearly cave in just to get him (Scouscer) to stop phoning. I just starting ignoring his calls.

RedFly

RedFly wrote: »

Very common "scam" and the hard sell is pretty... hard. IN this day and age, any company that offers that service that is worth their salt does NOT need to cold call.

Too right.

mr.spids

well firstsearchconsultancy.co.uk has a pretty good alexa ranking at 353,786 which is good when you consider the millions and millions of sites they have and their 20,010 ranked in great britan which is really good.

look at it here

not sayin they are a scam not sayin their not just givin you a couple stats

cormee

mr.spids wrote: »

well firstsearchconsultancy.co.uk has a pretty good alexa ranking at 353,786 which is good when you consider the millions and millions of sites they have and their 20,010 ranked in great britan which is really good.

look at it here

not sayin they are a scam not sayin their not just givin you a couple stats

Quoting Alexa, how cute.

mr.spids

cormee wrote: »

Quoting Alexa, how cute.

what in the hell do you mean by that????//////?/??//?//?//

jmcc

mr.spids wrote: »

what in the hell do you mean by that????//////?/??//?//?//

Alexa is not a reliable gauge of the popularity of a website due to the ease with which it can be manipulated and how some of its data is collected.

Regards...jmcc

cerealjoe

jrochie wrote: »

Hi guys,

I've started my own web design business recently and today got a phone call from some guy in england, saying he had found my number on my website. Anyway the conversation basically was about how his company would guarantee me first page google placement for a set number of keywords of my choosing. I was caught off guard so i asked him to send me an email with all the info which he duly did less than 5 minutes later!

The company name is First Search Consultancy and there website is firstsearchconsultancy.co.uk. I'm not really to interested in this as quite simply I can't afford there £295 fee, and am very sceptical about their service, because I cannot see how a site that is less than 6 months old could get into the first page of google on a service term such as 'web design'!

Am I wrong? Has anyone seen or had any dealing with these guys?

I didn't encounter them yet but I think they are just a scammer. From the story that you tell I am sure that they are just scammer. So AVOID with them.

FarmerGreen

http://www.lancerregister.com/showthread.php?t=321491

Stevokenevo

Definitely avoid them like the plague - I have to deal with businesses that have been approached or successfully scammed by the likes of these guys on a daily basis.

The hard facts are that nobody - (read: nobody) - has an agreement with Google to offer a preferential rate for AdWords ad placement. Everybody enters the auction when using search campaigns, no exceptions.

The basic con:

Pay them e.g. €200 for 'top placement for a set number of keywords'

You give them the keywords you want, they bid aggressively at first to ensure you have a high placement for the first day or two, but set a low daily budget on AdWords so that there's no way that your campaign can spend over the amount they set (normally a minute fraction of what you are paying them).

When you ring up to cancel (almost always an overseas number in continental Europe) they put the hard sell on going for another month with 'discounted' keywords - extremely confusing for people not familiar with the system.

Some ones to avoid:
Storm Media
Precision Media

PaulPinnacle

Stevokenevo wrote: »

Definitely avoid them like the plague

Huge +1. There are a large number of honest and ethical SEO/PPC companies out there, who do a great job, it's just a pity that there are also such a large number of cowboys running this type of scam.

Stevokenevo wrote: »

The hard facts are that nobody - (read: nobody) - has an agreement with Google to offer a preferential rate for AdWords ad placement. Everybody enters the auction when using search campaigns, no exceptions.

Once you hear the words "guaranteed number 1 placement", have concerns.

In SEO (organic listings) there are just too many variables for any company to be able to guarantee a given position. What an SEO company should be doing is helping you to identify the terms which will provide the best returns and then helping you to rank for those. If your target market is seriously competitive, this might require you to focus on more targeted phrases rather than the general high level keywords. If someone 'guarantees' you to rank first for 'web design' or something of that nature, it's a promise they simply can't keep as it has too many factors outside of your or their control.

They CAN guarantee you to appear first on the paid listing, but again, they shouldn't. The only way to guarantee a 1st place PPC listing is to pay the top rate. If that rate is above the price at which you'll obtain a return on investment, ranking '1st' for that term will simply cost you money in the long run. A successful PPC campaign isn't about being '1st' for the big terms, it's about having a good ranking on a selection of terms that provide you with a low CPA and strong ROI.

They continually blur the lines between SEO and PPC rankings so to confuse the client and leave them unsure of exactly what is happening. Any company that uses 'confusion' as a sales tactic or customer service technique... run a mile.

Stevokenevo wrote: »

Pay them e.g. €200 for 'top placement for a set number of keywords'

When you understand how the system works, that each click has a cost associated with it (so the more clicks your ad gets the less profit this company makes), it's clear to see that they have a clear interest in limiting just how many visitors you receive (as Stevo has pointed out).

Sure, your term might be at '#1', but you'll be paying a rate that might not be providing value for money and you can be sure that if the ad is successful and attracting clicks, they will have the daily budget set low enough to ensure that their (very healthy) profit is always retained, so always providing poor value for money for you.

Stevokenevo wrote: »

Some ones to avoid:
Storm Media
Precision Media

There are so many threads around about this company, or other similar companies adopting a similar con, that it's almost impossible to keep track of all the aliases being used.

MOH

Just look at their own testimonials page, and check out some of their clients - which they bizarrely link to from the text of their comment, rather than the business name.

They've keyword stuffed:
- the keywords tag: ok, but irrelevant to all the main browsers
- the title tag: bit spammy, not best practice, thought it might actually help a bit. Except they've identical title tags on every page, which is daft and definitely not recommended
- the description tag: if any of their clients do show up in the SERPs the snippet displayed is a nonsensical jumble of keywords, instead of a useful description that might encourage you to visit the site. (Though fortunately in some cases google ignores this and actually shows a useful snippet)

They've also stuffed a load of keywords into the footer of their own pages.

It gets better - for some of their clients, First Search Consultancy have duplicated the client homepage on their own site, and then linked from that to the client site. In some cases, they've done this more than once. Cos duplicating the content multiple times tells google that it's really, really valuable. Oh wait, no it doesn't.

They seem to be quite good at Keyword Stuffing Optimisation (TM), but they don't seem to do much in the way of SEO.

egan007

They will hound you - they are FOS