Holy sh*t at this type of business paying $5k a month for an SEO firm (and a crappy one at that, that title tag is horrendous). feldo is giving you good advice though. Good luck.

And when I say I am taking over the web and seo duties I mean I am going to manage them and hire the right team/company and stay on top of them.

I do appreciate everyone's help here. I hope it continues with this and other things that may come up.

Have that "SEO Firm" associate estimated traffic with those keywords.

One of the big scams of local SEO is that they rank you for keywords that intuitively 'feel like a big deal' to the business owner- because he's in Houston and he sells Pavers and ranking P1P1 for "Pavers in Houston" seems like something that should matter- but the fact of the matter may be, absolutely nobody is searching for that... or the conversation rate is nil.

He's ranking high for something that is not bringing in customers that want to engage, if it brings in anyone at all. He may be a lot better off ranking for something a lot more generic but at the bare ass minimum, that $5K a month "SEO Firm" should be presenting him with not only what his keyword options are, but what it actually means to his business when they get a certain string to the promised land.

I ran the search numbers and its between 20-60 searches per term a month. Not a lot but he thinks he is getting about 50 estimates a month via what they are doing. I havent talked to the firm yet and I will have the authority to change firms if needed. I wanted to learn and build a solid understanding/plan before I talk with them so I dont miss the big, easy, and obvious stuff.

20-60 searches or 20-60 clicks.

and how is he getting the 50 estimate number?

This user doesn't appear to exist any longer, and all the rest are obviously not Yelpers. One way to improve your standing on Yelp would be to offer some deal through Yelp and treat the people that come through that like gold. Any Yelp Elite review won't be filtered. Obviously a lot more difficult for a paving company than a bar.

Searches.

Not sure why he thinks he gets 50 estimates a month. That's just what he told me.

Why don't you respond to the bad reviews, Fix the issues and have them edit or update review. IMO, Yelp is mostly accurate with a few outliers.

Search metrics are voo-doo if not reconcilled against actual business conversion.

For a service industry like that, its a bit trickier to manage than a web based business where the user is managed from start to finish but I sure hope he's paying $5000 a month to rank for keywords that are actually bringing people into his business. This is where SEOs can be hucksters. They rank you for some string that may appear relevant to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at, but won't ever cause the cash register to actually ring.

Searches broad/exact, clicks, it's all just the bull**** that becomes a game lost of the point, which is that the whole effort is supposed to lead to a real hjuman being opening their wallet and making a purchase. Geo targeted keywords tend to convert a lot better and geo + specific service tend to be even better yet but if this guy is spending that kind of money on SEO, he needs to understand how that money spent on SEO relates to his businesses cash register and not his 'hunches' about what good internet marketing looks like.

With what I know and what I have seen itt, I'm calling the SEO company 100% bull****.

I do happen to be an expert in the field, and even though I spend a tiny fraction of my time working on it, I have spent $0 and rank for major technology terms (competing with people like Microsoft + IBM) that are bringing in thousands of searches a month, with us in the top 3 results.

It is not difficult at all. You do actually have a paving company in that area. You are looking for more customers. If you create decent content, you can use some local business directories to rank keywords successfully.

I haven't looked but I imagine they are using black hat techniques, and if they are for that few of search results, that's just deplorable.

Not to mention runs the serious risk of an AIDS-like serp penalty against the poor guys website who won't even realize it until its too late.

so "byc".com is the company's original website, but the SEO company created and is ranking houstonpavers.com for them right? looks like "hp.com" gets maybe 200-300 clicks a month. Depending on how much a client is worth, the company may be getting an ROI on the 5k/month cost but that's still way too much.

For the yelp question, I own a small resturaunt in a rural city and can tell you that all the negative reviews will stay after you open a business account on yelp and they will also call you up saying they can help you manage your negative reviews and possibly remove them for a min of 299 a month which includes ad service.

There is an article I read in a Sacramento newspaper 4/5 months ago with 3 pages of different businesses discussing the way the filtering has taken a lot of the positive reviews away even when the person(s) has 4 or 5 other reviews, yet keeps 1 star reviews when the person has 8 negative reviews written no positive

I have stopped using yelp as often unless it's for the quick menu access or business directions. But its a company trying to make money so it is what it is

I would as that you didnt use the actual www . com domains here.

Are you upset that the results are negative and accurate or falsely negative? I have never seen good or great restaurants complain about Yelp.

So I looked into it.

They are doing some things "correctly" but are also using black hat tactics. Overall I could re-create exactly they did for you in about 1-2 hours of my time. For a total beginner that is pretty intelligent, I would expect no more than 10-15 hours total, maybe 20 hours if you are bad at writing.

Here is how I would do it:
1) Create a Wordpress site using an existing business theme I would purchase for $10-$50 dollars, hosting would be $20-$30/mo.
2) Outsource the initial content to a content marketplace such as Zerys for $100 and then edit it myself
3) Purchase some press releases for $100-$200

That is all white hat, and they are doing exactly that. What they are also doing is linking from other client's sites. That is black hat, and could get you in trouble as they build a pool of these sites all sketchily linking to each other:

(http://tileroof|houston.net/links/)
http://seismicre|trofitcalifornia.com/resources/

remove red bar obv

Can I ask how/why they have links from those sites? The origin sites arent even in the same business.

And how do you find every site that is linking in? The SEO company has all the access and I was told I would have to go through them to get it.

The next thing I am afraid of is if we stop using their services, what happens to all their work? Do we have to start from scratch again?

They have links from those sites because at some fundamental, most basic, never repeat this to anyone ever, terrible advice level, all links are worth something.

This is one of the tools I use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...iccmpknp?hl=en

even simpler is this: https://ahrefs.com/

Depends on how sketchy they are to what happens to the site.

Do you own the website?
If you pull the plug on them do they take the website down?
Do you have access to the wordpress back-end as an administrator?
Do you have access to the hosting environment?

If the answers are not: [yes/no/yes/yes] then they are sketchy and unethical.

The first thing to do is get admin access to everything. Then when it becomes time to pull the plug you change the PWs for the Wordpress site, and change the PW for the hosting environment. Also, they may have SSH access to the hosting account, this is unlikely, but possible, if that is the case take their keys away.

Then you have control of the website and they cannot do anything.

If I were you, I would go with the angle that you have some content you want to add to the site, and that you want to do it yourself. If they do not allow you to add content to the website then they may have a stranglehold on it.

If that is their strategy, to hold a strangle on the website, there are more options.

I will be getting answers next week. I hope to meet with them and discuss.

I own a small business and I have dealt with some negative reviews on yelp. The way to combat them is to post dummy reviews on dummy accounts but do the work to make it be believable. I have had great success with this and made about 4k in profit from at least one person that came into my store based on the dummy yelp reviews.

That means you find some random photo on the internet of some jack and put it up on the dummy account, make reviews of other businesses before hand and space them out over weeks and months and then write the review of your business, make the actual reviews of your business believable, plug info into the profile for the dummy accounts, and continue posting reviews periodically of other businesses maybe once a month on the dummy accounts.

It works, and it's a hassle but you just get a lower level employee to do it in his spare time for 50 bucks and keep it up over time. The problem you guys did is you only posted one review for each of those accounts and didn't do your diligence in making the account believable so yelp flagged you, so now even that one favorable review from the person who actually is a real person is not showing up. So I don't know at what point of believability yelp is going to start allowing the positive reviews to go through, though you'd have to think eventually they would.

Why don't you do good work and make sure you don't get negative reviews?

You try to do good work but you can't please everybody. We deal with the public, meaning plenty of unintelligent, disagreeable, and overly demanding people. Besides there are many industries where people are misinformed as to what the business can do for them and have unavoidably bad experiences because of this, a good example of such an industry is the auto repair industry. Even the best ones of those get negative reviews. We're the same. It's the nature of the business and you deal with it.

Good reviews on yelp don't mean crud anyway. I've been to a number of places based on yelp reviews that were obviously real and got crummy service. People who have the time and inclination to actually post reviews on yelp are yuppies and dweebs who have nothing better to do.

For example look at the posts for doctors and dentists on yelp. Everybody who posts glowing reviews seems to do so based on the fact that the doctor "actually listened to me" or "had great bedside manner" or "really cares about his patients", as if any of that really matters. What matters is that he does his job and diagnoses, treats, yanks the tooth out without your face looking like a bloated piece of rotten fruit afterward.

Maybe this is true if you are in a very small city or town but not if you are in a major city or population center. Look at any business in a major city with 20+ reviews and you will get a great idea of what to expect. In New York City, there are restaurants with 400+ reviews mostly very detailed and very accurate.

I deal with many small business in my line of work and those with your attitude don't last very long. Yelp, Angie's List, Trip Advisor, etc. casts the light on bad service or quality. Look at the reviews for Di Fara pizza in Brooklyn, NY or Franklin BBQ in Austin these businesses know about quality and the reviews back it up.

Yelp sucks.

Their algorithm for filtering is terrible.

They are a shakedown company.

But...they 'own' the 'honest' review industry.