We contracted an SEO firm late last year. Six months on, and we have seen no improvement in organic traffic and definitely no ROI.  Their link building work and article submission seem pretty comprehensive.  We have a PR of 4, so not a bad starting point for them, but at what point should we stop throwing £000s at this issue and take it elsewhere?  We are watching our competitors slowly rise above us for many of our key terms.  When we try to discuss our concerns with the SEO firm, they point us to their other very successful (quite high profile) campaigns and tell us our keywords will, honestly (!) improve.  How long should we give this company?

I agree with Neil. Although SEO is a process and it's often difficult to predict when your investments will really start to pay dividends, if you feel that you're flushing your money down the tubes, it's time for a frank discussion with your SEO firm.

It's quite possible that your SEO firm is working hard and making a real attempt to deliver results. But don't let them brush off your concerns. Pointing you to the results achieved for other clients and asking you to give them more time is not acceptable. If I was in your shoes, I'd be up front:

• Make it clear you're not seeing any ROI.
• Ask for specifics as to what they're doing and how it's going to produce the results that you expected when you hired them.
• Ask for a list of milestones with anticipated timeframes for the achievement of each.

Once you have a list of milestones and anticipated timeframes for their achievement, you can make an educated decision about whether it makes sense to continue working with this firm.

It sounds to me like you hired that SEO company to do link building and article submission. Could you confirm that they are doing a lot more than that?  eg. seo analysis, competition analysis, website structural/code changes, etc etc.

Because if you expect to see a huge difference from just link building, I do not think you will see what you expect, even if they've done a great job.  But if they are doing a lot more than just that, then I would agree with Neil McCarthy.

regards,

Denis
www.naxtech.com - web development and online marketing specialists

Hi,

I think an approach which generally works is by clearly identifying your objectives. A simple objective could be to rank for a particular keyword on the first page of Google.

Before the SEO company gets to work you could track with many software available on the Internet your existing position. A month later you could run a comparative report to see if there is any positive outcome.

It would be difficult to make a decision on whether the company is performing or not  depending on the keywords targetted. For example if the niche is extremely competive for example weight loss then 6 months to a year is understanable.

If it is a fairly "long tail keyword' we normally see positive results within the first month especially after the initial On-Page optimization crawl.

Merely submitting ton's of articles, press releases may mean nothing. Quality relevant inbound themed links is what you may require.

I know that saying this may stir some controversy, though I am not a beliver of Page Rank. If you have a high page rank does not mean you will rank highly, or vice versa. 

Thank you to everyone who has replied to our question.  

We did ask for an up-to-date site audit from the Search firm (following their initial one) to check the architechtural changes we'd implemented. According to the company, on the whole everything seemed ok.  I like the suggestion of getting an independent audit which could either give us the reassurance or confirmation we need regarding this firm.

What is coming out loud and clear from your responses is that, going forward, we need to set agreed and carefully defined goals as well as targets.  Note to self - do this at the start, not the middle of a campaign!