Some Clients and Case Studies

When shopping around for SEO services, you will find Case Studies which are supposed to show you how the SEO company can help you.
Usually there will be an overview of the client, the situation and a brief description of what was done to achieve the goals. They’ll often show you some screen shots from Google Analytics that are supposed to prove everything.
But here’s the thing about that: If you don’t know your way around Google Analytics, you may not have a clue just what it is you are being shown. Look closely at the graphics. Do they say “All Traffic” or “Organic Traffic”? Organic refers to just the visits coming from non-paid searches. Not paid advertising, not from users clicking on links on other sites, and not from someone who typed in the specific address of the website. It is not that all those other sources of traffic are not important, but if you are looking for SEO results, they should be showing you Organic Search numbers and graphs. “All Traffic” could also include all the views of the site by the owner, employees, friends, family… This is part of why traffic alone is not a good way to measure SEO success, but that’s another story.
(skip the rant and go to the case studies)
Another thing to look for – What is being hidden from you? SEOs will often blur out the URL or the company name. Sometimes this is for client privacy, but how do you know just what it is you are looking at? Could be anything, really. I guess you will just have to take the SEO company’s word for it that they did this wonderful job for… oh wait – they didn’t give a name. Got something to be ashamed of, or is this whole story made up?
If you really want to start doing some forensics, take a closer look at what else is blurred in the graphs. Bounce rate? Percentage of new visits? These numbers are important too. If it is a very low number of new visitors to the site, what does that mean? Could be evidence that the SEO team is searching and clicking through to the site to inflate the numbers. Check to see if picture matches the story. If they say the client had a drop in traffic before starting the SEO process, is it on the graph? Is that gazillion precent increase simply a jump from the first few visits on the day the site was launched?

And let’s not even talk about the clowns who proudly tell you how they made “XYZ Company” rank #1 for searches for “XYZ Company” after researching tens of thousands of keywords.

With all of that said, in this section, we’ll show you a few of our recent accomplishments. Do we expect you to take our word for it? Not now that we have increased your mistrust of SEO consultants by 1000 percent!

But, seriously, check these out: