Date: September 4, 2006
Anderson Creations has a number of different
business areas. One is providing web design and promotion
for a number of clients. Another is selling our own fine
art photography on the web. In both cases, we have used
pay-per-click for a number of years, and had tried some
other approaches to improve "natural" ranking
with little success. While we knew we could increase traffic
with more and more spent on PPC, we wanted to also bring
into play more traffic from the main search results. Thus,
we started looking at SEO offerings. While we had downloaded
some "self-SEO" tools, it became clear that significant
time and energy would be needed to seriously affect our
ratings, and certainly there are tools that appear to be
quite powerful for this purpose, we concluded that a more
effective use of our resources was to focus on what we did
best and pay someone else that did SEO all the time to do
it for us.
Hence, I searched for SEO companies using the Yahoo search
engine. I searched for the term "SEO". eBrandz
was one of the many listings in search results. Some results
were irrelevant - how to do it yourself sites selling tools.
I had already tried that, and decided not to take that path
(after having purchased some tools, looked them over, and
realized that a lot of time would be required to do it right).
There were some very impressive SEO sites, with long lists
of what they did, with big names of customers, some even
with downloadable PDF files with details on "how to
select an SEO company" and the like. I contacted some
of them, only to learn that we were talking 20K to 50K per
year! This was way outside our budget. When I found eBrandz,
they had a similar list of things they did, but the rates
were considerably lower. I was familiar with India and other
countries as a good place for low-cost engineering, and
the rates being offered were very attractive.
Sure, there was concern. Dump money into an ecommerce page,
and hope... But then, I had previously tried a different
company (which shall go unnamed) that was in the USA. They
took the money, built 3 "promotion" sites that
did absolutely nothing, and ran. We were unable to get any
satisfaction or money back, even though they were in the
BBB (as we are). And, they were a lot more expensive. So
being in India did not concern me - Americans are just as
good at ripping people off as any other country….
Since I have had even more trouble with some American companies
(such as the one noted above), I would say the communications
were adequate and... well, true. I could actually believe
what was said, and if something was promised, it was delivered.
Or, if I asked for something that was not automatically
provided, such as a comparison of search engine ranking
from start to current month, it would be provided without
question in a day or two. I feel I can rely on eBrandz opinion.
For example, I got an email offering a service for dramatically
increasing cross-linking. Sounded great. I asked eBrandz’s
opinion, and got some good feedback, which suggested that
I should give it a pass (which I did).
For my client website, it’s easy to see vastly improved
natural rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN as a direct result
of eBrandz work. That is our primary measure of success.
We went from 8 search terms with page one and two rank to
31. We had no ranking on Google, ended up with 4 page one
terms and 4 page 2 terms. That is a pretty major improvement.
Note that this site had been in-place since 2001, and already
had a high traffic. Thus, the SEO effort greatly enhanced
our visibility for our chosen search terms. The work certainly
increased our visibility. In this business, visibility in
search results is key. While selling books, tapes, and CD's
is certainly important, having people read the content on
the site is just as important, and often results in sales
at a later date.
For my own site, prior to the SEO effort, I had not invested
in any PPC. The visitor rates were rising, but we were talking
a few thousand per month at the time I signed up. We started
seeing a significant increase in traffic very quickly, and
it is now running at over 10K visitors per month. We are
also seeing potential members asking about signup (members
would sell their fine art photography online at our website).
When this started, I knew we were beginning to get traction.
I am selling into a tough market - fine art photography
- with a lot of competition and a basic difficulty of product
display. While monitors are nice, and the photos look great
on a good monitor, they do not represent effectively the
quality of the print. It is difficult to overcome this on
the web for serious buyers. We are still working on this
problem. I do not expect to see significant sales until
we reach 40K visitors per month, since most visitors are
just looking for "pretty pictures" and not fine
art. However, the value of increased visibility has already
been seen for local sales and reputation for both artists
on the site.
Yes we would definitely recommend eBrandz as they provide
very good work at excellent prices.
