Wednesday 3 September 2014

How SEO Ruined A Business, But Built An Empire

What you don't know about the lovable rogue John (that's me) is that I run around 20 websites in various niches, all under one flagship business that makes me 6 figures a year.

I run these various websites, blogs and small businesses through outsourcing to various teams. In particular one type of team is more important than the others, but I'll get to that...

You see in my process I run various blogs like this, hosted on WordPress & Blogger to test interest in a new idea or site. This blog has already accrued 750 views from 3 posts.

To me this means that I'm onto a winner and that I can push more ideas onto the blog to refine the topics I want the main site to be about. TechEnthused is already in development, just so you know.

It wasn't always this smooth though, there was a long learning curve with many failures and also a number of growing pains going through different teams for the outsourcing process.

The most important team for me is the Search Engine Optimization Team who help my sites drive traffic from Google searches, making up more than half of each sites referral traffic and becoming the backbone of my ROI.

I went through a number of different SEO teams in the last 5 years, those who think SEO is a joke, believe me it isn't. Without it I wouldn't be driving a Porsche Cayenne and living in ways I never thought possible.

In those earlier years though I wasn't willing to make a big investment, instead I would outsource to places like India, Pakistan and the Philippines. At the time I had one big website that focused on equestrian goods. It was a big money earner, despite it not pulling in nearly enough traffic to be considered at its peak.

I outsourced the task of improving the site to a team from India who promised the world and delivered a world of pain... The site didn't seem to improve at all for months, all of a sudden it jumped up to page 2 and a few terms to page 1. It seemed promising, but within a week the site had dropped off those pages into page 10.

I immediately let the team go, and went with another Indian team who basically did the same thing. I'm not sure what was going on, but the site would get a spike of traffic and hardly give me an ROI from the 'investment' of hiring those teams, before falling back to where it was before, or worse yet, lower.

I had hardly any luck with those kinds of teams, and ultimately went with a team from the U.S who got the site into those positions, it stuck! I was paying a lot more, but I was getting a real ROI because the site was staying in those positions for months. Then Google did some kind of algorithmic update and the site sunk like a stone, it sunk like never before.

The agency I was with were quick to respond to my messages, however they were unable to remedy the problem after several weeks. They became unresponsive, and I was left without an SEO team again.

By this time I'd learned some hard lessons, ones that were hard to swallow... I had taken in more money than ever before though, and for some time I started building more sites and paying my content writers to fill those with content. I didn't want anything to do with an SEO team at this point.

With big investments, no returns and a sinking feeling in my stomach I ended up with no choice but to sell some of my older blogs that had previously done very small revenues, but had largely improved when those algorithm updates had occurred. The sites that hadn't had an SEO team touch them... My equestrian site had actually been removed from Google entirely and the business was all but gone, destroyed and to this day I've never gone back to it.

With the remaining money I had I went out there and looked for a reputable team that addressed the issues I had head on. A team that asked more questions, rather than one that caused more questions. It may seem like little difference, but trust me there's a lot of difference there.

I put them to work on 2 of my sites and within a month I saw significant improvements. What helped was that I'd put so much money into making the content amazing on these sites that it was only a matter of time once the SEO work began until they hit the first page for their respective keywords.

Within 2 months these sites were bringing in more traffic than my old business ever had, we hit a few algorithm bumps in the road, but our sites were hardly ever affected, or if they were it wasn't for long.

This team who I still work with today are solely responsible for my 5 figure a month revenue and what I learned was that writing off all SEO's was a bad move. I wish I'd found them sooner, then again maybe I wouldn't have found them if I wasn't so hesitant.

This particular agency come from the United Kingdom, they'd kill me if they saw me calling them an agency and believe me, they will find this post because that's how thorough their monitoring is of me and my brand, as well as their own.

I just hope they know how grateful I am and that I would probably be working a 9-5 for 30,000 a year if it wasn't for them.

This team are SEO Saves who provide services globally. They're actually providing discount SEO Services at the moment to their local businesses which is a testament to how much they really do care about helping build businesses, and helping people like me achieve their dreams.

SEO Devon - Their local SEO Services page.

As for me, leave me a message in the comments if you ever want to learn to run multiple businesses online, as I also believe in giving back. As for Tech Enthused, all I'll say is expect more and I'll let you all know when the new site is ready.

Your friend,

John


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