small consumer brand- outsourcing SEO/SEM (advise please)

MizMix

Hi,

About a month ago I outsourced my SEO to a freelancer who seemed very reputable. UK based promised white hat techniques. Quite quickly I could see he was optimising for a keyword which isn't a huge focus for my business yet (ignored my main product range- possibly as it's more competitive). I checked out banklinks and they are all low trust scores- random gaming websites etc. I got contacted by another freelancer who initially flagged this and I did a check and found 100s of links, all in unrelated industries with low trust scores.

My question is as a small consumer brand (I design and manufacture baby design led accessories and achieve sales through social media only) is there merit in outsourcing SEO or should I focus on internal and manual ways to build links e.g. sending bloggers packs etc?

I guess I feel a little disillusioned by the current guy as he totally sucked me in. I'm not ranking anywhere versus competitors and feel I need some initial help for several months at least. If I go with another freelancer what should I check out? Is there any official qualification or standard a reputable SEO freelancer would have?

REgarding these links unrelated to my industry and what I consider 'spammy'- is it likely I could get penalised for these?

Ronan_wals

It could be more of a technical issue rather than a lack of links.

This sounds like definite black hat techniques, and yes you could get penalised for these.

If you want I can take a look if you post/dm your domain name if you'd like another opinion.

MizMix

Thank you. I'll pm you the url now. I called him out on it and he claims it's a proven 'multi tiered' approach that works. I'm pretty sure he's spoofer given if this is the approach there should be a solid foundation of level one high quality links. Plus if he was so confident of this approach why didn't he explain it in the beginning instead of alluding only to high authority backlinks. I signed up for a trial to see my backlinks- only for that I would have no idea of the dept of spammy links (gaming sites, chinese, russian- pretty much all no follow links).

When I hired me he aggressively chased me for PR, blogs and high level content before even fixing technical issues (stating how urgent it was etc)....he hasn't used this content so it was a smoke and mirrors strategy so I would think he was aiming for high authority backlinks.

My view at this stage is- if I ensure the tech issues are ok (e.g. I don;t think he optimised for my main product range) then I'm better off trying to achieve backlinks organically. Or perhaps someone legit could offer something above and beyond this.

M.T.D

In general, we would first do the keyword research. Then make sure the site is structured properly (navigation, tags, titles etc.) Next is appropriate and sufficient content on the website, not just the sales blurb for each product. This would be followed by the Google sites and social media. If you do this properly you will often be already ahead of any competition. Only then should you be looking for links because with out doing these steps first you would not have the content to link back to. Then to start the linking process, write articles for your own site and link back to them from your own social media accounts and anywhere else that you can put guest posts.
If you want further details give me a call or pm.