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Toronto Internet Marketing Company

Updated on January 19, 2011

Our experience working with a Toronto Internet Marketing Company

One of my hobbies is blogging with the hope that someone or someones will benefit from my own personal experiences. God knows that it's difficult to find a reliable Internet Marketing Company to work with. Myself, being involved in a multiple i-based businesses and blogs, I thought I'd share my experiences in working with a few Internet marketing companies over the past 3 years. Unlike most posts that start with the ugly first, I'll share my positive experience in working with a Toronto Internet Marketing company.

GTA Web Marketing, a Toronto based Online marketing company has been the core of our success in the search engine rankings. After requesting a quote, they compiled a very professional 12 page report on how they would drive traffic, convert our visitors into customers and design a new web layout and design to increase our ROI. I had heard this before from the other Internet Marketing companies that I had contacted, but after a face to face meeting, I was able to gauge a good feeling about them.

Their target is to focus on local Toronto businesses, although not rejecting other online businesses. The feeling I got after meeting with my SEO consultant was that they saw the need for Toronto Search Engine Optimization and wanted to help local businesses get found in the Search Engine rankings. After working with them for 6 months now, they were able to increase our traffic consistently and sure enough our Conversion rates increased simply because people knew what to do once they landed on our websites. No false promises were made, and they gave us solid evidence straight from Google themselves.

How to Hire an Internet Marketing Company:

From this experience, I learned a lot about how to hire your very own Search Engine Optimization Company. The market has become over saturated from what I can see and I have learned a lot of dos and a lot of do nots when hiring your own Internet marketing company.

Dos:

  • Make sure that they tell you exactly what they'll be doing to your website. You should know where your money is going and if they'll be using any malpractices to 'optimize' your website.
  • Let them speak and let them know what they can do for you. Don't go in with an over ambitious attitude thinking you'll receive Google page one rankings for all the search terms you want. It's impractical and you'll be let down every time.
  • Look at what they've done for other companies. Google is your evidence! If they have permission from their clients, they can also show you some statistics of what they've done in the past.
Do Nots
  • Never ever believe a company when they say that they will guarantee you Google page one rankings. Straight from Google's Blog, they state "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
  • Be weary of the, "Just let us do it" people. These are people who tend to have secrets in what they do.
  • Companys that tell you that they will be link building by submitting your website to 1000 directories at a low cost are usually a waste of money. Directory submissions have lost a lot of weight than 10 years ago. Although some are good, a lot are not worth it anymore. I've seen this happen from the previous companies I've worked with.
  • Do not respond to e-mails from 'SEO Companies or people' that send you random e-mails saying they will increase your traffic. Those people are 99% of the time scams, fraud and people who have no idea what they're doing. Most of those e-mails are sent out by automated robots.

Bad Experiences with 2 Companies. Watch out!

I'm not here to bash any specific company names and would prefer to keep this as professional as possible. Maybe I was naive when I first started, but can you blame me? I knew absolutely nothing about Search Engine marketing and came across a company in Montreal who promised me Google page one rankings in 30 days. They told me their strategy and sure enough, it sounded promising. I'm sure you can guess that after 30 days, I didn't have any search engine rankings. In fact, I had spent over $4000 and lost it all in the blink of an eye. These guys were great salesmen and do great in the salesforce, but have absolutely nothing to offer. Be careful with the arrogant salesmen who promise you what Google can't even promise you.

The second company I worked with was a company in Ohio. They had a beautiful website and put up some big name companies out there in their portfolio. I asked if I could contact them or if they could provide proof of their clients. They said that they couldn't because their clients didn't want to be contacted. It appeared to be very believable. These guys didn't guarantee me any kind of page one rankings in x amount of days, but they were very thorough in what they would be doing for my website.  They pushed the idea of thousands of directory submissions, a bunch of dedicated permanent links on high page ranked sites and lots of traffic guaranteed. 

I worked with them for 3 months until I found out that my site had gotten penalized.  I did some more research and apparently they had linked to us from sites that Google does not promote such as gambling and pornography sites.  We had to manually get reincluded into Google, and we did give them the boot.  As I'm sure you can understand, I felt a little jaded about hiring an Internet marketing company.  But I knew there were good ones that existed.

If you're in the Greater Toronto Area, I strongly recommend contacting GTA Web Marketing.  I've had a great experience in dealing with them and now have a good working and personal relationship with my SEO consultant. If you're in another City/Country, it doesn't hurt to contact your local search marketing company.  Hopefully the dos and don'ts will help you out.  Best of luck to all of you searching for your Search Marketing company! 

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