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Last year my company signed a one year agreement with a large internet marketing firm to handle our SEO. We were hoping to cover ourselves and make a lot of progress by going with a reputable firm. After working with them for a year and becoming more familiar with SEO myself over the year, I would probably classify their skillset as being able to get a website search engine ready rather than really doing any optimization or marketing. I had come to grips with the fact that we probably didn't get our full value out of the year long contract, but they got us moving in the right direction so the process wasn't a total loss.

As part of our contract they provide a monthly report that has a static keyword list and shows where those keywords are ranked on all the major search engines. They also summarize how many top 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 rankings those keywords have so that we can track the progress. After several month's of slow but steady progress, this month's report showed that we increased the number of keywords ranking in the top 1, 5, etc. and in most cases doubling. The ranking summary was accompanied with this explanation talking about how the change occured because of the way the search engines incorporate link popularity.

I was so excited with the progress that I took the previous months keyword ranking report and lined it up with the current months report to see which keywords jumped up. What did I find? Our June report had 6 new branded keyword phrases that they just pulled out of thin air. Really obscure keyword phrases too. Ones that might get one search per year if we were lucky. All of our new rankings came from those words and actually seemed to try to cover up a slight drop overall in our month to month rankings.

Total bush-league move as far as I'm concerned. Not sure if I should call them on it or just play dumb and see what other doody they try to feed me. Feel free to chime in. Right now I'm leaning towards an extremely sarcastic email praising them on their great job.

Anyway thanks to Jill and all of you who post really great information on this forum. You've really helped me manage this relationship over the year as I've probably had to do most of the actual search engine marketing myself.



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