Complaint Review: roi.com.au

I own a small manufacturing business in the outskirts of Melbourne, Victoria. We decided our very outdated website was only bringing in a few good leads here and there, so we thought we would replace it with a new website and have it optimised.

This is what we were looking for: -

• No contracts - we had been ripped off by another company several years earlier, we were locked into a contract and had to negotiate our way out of it. It was a terrible experience and one we hoped to avoid ever happening again to us.

• We wanted to pay for the website with progress payments.

• We wanted to pay for the search engine optimisation program on a monthly basis, incase poor results were achieved, so we could walk away without any hassles from which ever company we decided to use.

• We wanted a proper functioning website, which was easy to navigate.

• A website which was designed to be different from most other websites & have plenty of photos with some interesting writing

• A website which was optimised to bring in plenty of quality sales leads, which would be of good quality.

We decided to use ROI.com.au, they ticked all of the boxes and met all of our requirements.

ROI did build us a good looking website, it looked the way we wanted it to look, it was easy to navigate around and it worked well, a job well done.

ROI's SEO for our website, we recieved the following after 4 months: -

• Content was okay, not great. I questioned the content and got told "we are the experts, leave us to do the content and you will get good results." So I did, I had to trust the "SEO experts," as I knew little about SEO practices, I was merely making observations and comments.

• About 30% of the keywords are weak. One keyword was ranked 91, in the space of a week it jumped to number 8. What does that tell you?  

• We have recieved 10 keywords which all rank on the first page of Google, 3 of them are ranked number 1, and 4 of them are ranked between 2-5. Even with these good ranks, due to the keywords being weak, they drive little traffic and few leads.We received little traffic and few sales leads. We do have another 10 keywords, 3 of them are ranked number 100+, the other keywords vary between 12 to 70.

• ROI gave us a false traffic report, I complained how we recieved fewer enquiries after they had a fiddle with the website. ROI told me the website was going really well and had a 73% increase in traffic for the month, which I doubted. They sent me a PDF report as proof. Three days later, we recieved an automated computer generated report for the website traffic for the previous month. It showed a -23% drop in traffic to our website. The real figure was only -86% different to what I had been previously quoted as a 73% increase in traffic!  

• If I questioned anything from one SEO expert, he didn't answer the question, he would accuse me of starting an email war, which was incorrect, I was simply asking questions about the website results.

• They agreed to upload more relevant content to the website, nearly a month later it still wasn't approved and uploaded to the website.

• 3 months into our SEO program, the new website was only averaging   5 non branded organic visits a day.

• 4 months into our SEO program, we had a 16% increase in non branded organic traffic, we were now averaging 6 non branded organic traffic visitors per day for the month.

• 4 months into the program we still had not recieved a quality lead which even put us close to getting a job, through a lead from the website. I realise it is not their job to sell, that is our responsibility, their responsibility, was to provide content which would generate quality leads and plenty of them, that is what was sold to us.

• We repeatedly kept asking for help to get the website producing more leads, as we had only recieved a handful of leads over the whole 4 months of ROI's SEO program. We were very much ignored and just told the same spin line - it all takes time, be patient, results will come in time.

• Due to not being under a contract with ROI, we decided enough was enough, we were going to stop using ROI for our website's SEO program, so we would cease our monthly payments.

• We recieved an email from ROI, attached was a copy of an invoice, a screen shot of an email we sent which said, "we will proceed with SEO" that was all that was on our email. Written on ROI's email to us, they said we are under a 12 month contract and basically said we had to keep using them. This was garbage, we didn't sign any contract, if we had to, we wouldn't have used ROI at all.

• After replying stating our case and finalising to ROI we were ceasing to us them for our websites SEO, we recieved another email which read,
• "please note I am not writing this to be threatening, but just to present the facts.

       When I submit the termination, it will be acknowledged by our finance team that you are 4 months into a 12 month contract therefore, an outstanding figure will be payable."  

• ROI have used intimidation and heavy handed tactics to try to trick us into paying for services which they have no right too, and attempted to presure us into continuing with their poor service and poor results.

• We found ROI did not listen to what we had to say, ROI was like talking to a brick wall.

• ROI over promise and under deliver. The salesman we had was going to generate lots of quality leads for us to make sales with.

• ROI didn't seem to care the results were poor, they really didn't want to put to much effort into the SEO unless they really had to, that is a good reason for the results obtained.

• ROI didn't seem to hold anyone accountable for anything, to our knowledge at least. We were never contacted by a manager to state their case, or to explain a situation. The managers were faceless people. I asked to be put into contact with a manager and never received any contact details, the comment was just swept under the carpet.

• It appears to me, ROI's SEO program really consists of supplying content to put onto your website, have a little fiddle with the content every now and then and collect monthly payments for doing minimal work.

ROI may have been good at providing a SEO for websites years ago, but they provided very little benefit to our business.

Before I we stated our website's SEO with ROI, I purchased a DIY website so I could advertise a smaller part of our business which really isn't important. I thought I could compare the DIY website's keywords to see how hard it actually was to get onto Googles first page. I put some information on two pages of the DIY website which were some of the same products as on the new ROI website. I also used some of the keywords ROI suggested for us to use on the website they built for us.

I built a DIY website, put photos and my own content on, then I shot it into cybre space to see what would happen. Now at the 4 month mark, the $500 DIY website with a $200 optimiser booster added to it (ROI's website cost us $5,000, + $450 per month for the new websites SEO) a couple of the keywords on the DIY website are actually on Googles front page, ahead of the ROI's SEO website. Other keywords the DIY is either just in front or just behind the ROI website.

One keyword the DIY website is one and a half pages ahead of the ROI website. The ROI website has 20 pages of content which they can use for optimising if they wanted to, while the DIY website only has two pages which I have alloacted to the same products which are on the ROI website. I know nothing about websites, SEO therories and I have little in the way of computer skills. In my opinion, forget about the rip off SEO companies out there. Have a go and do it yourself if you have the time, or simply just make the time. The results will probably be similar in any case.

If the "experts" at ROI struggle to beat a DIY website which has been put together by someone with no experience. The new DIY website also had a zero page ranking when it started and absolutly no history to draw from. How can they call themselves "experts," maybe I was just lucky!