I've been Homestead customer for few years now, and I have several accts with them, including SEO. In 2013 I received notification from Hometead that my SEO acct was transferred to SEOGears, and nothing changed. First I thought it was just regular transition from one company to another, and I had no suspicion anything would go wrong, confindence when I found out they are connected to one or another.
In early 2014 I gave a birth to my first child, so I wasn't really pay attention that much to my business, and busy with my new born. Up until beginning of August, I noticed I didn't get my monthly report that I usually received notification via email from SEOGears. I contacted SEOGears and spoke with couple of their acct Managers, some how something lost in transition between Homestead and SEOGears, with no apology both of these Acct Managers told me that the reason I wasn't getting monthly report anymore, because there was no SEO activities/maintenance since May 2014, and one of them even questioning me if I have been paying my monthly dues, which I've never been late.
After talked back on forth with SEOGears, one of these Acct Manager assured me that he wil submit my site to Google search engine, and it will take 4-6 weeks to crawl. Few weeks passed by, I contacted again SEOGears in September because I didn't see the difference as far as the number of visitors coming in to my site, and spoke with the same Acct Manager, addressing my issues and frustration, then he told me that I had to write my own content of the keywords for target Phrases. The next day I found really surprising when he asked my user id and password to Homestead site in order for them to update my site with the content I provided, at first I had to refuse their request concerning the site has my confidential information such as the pin # and/or credit card #, then he told me they could use other site that has none of these information, but I still had to provide them with my user id and password, I had no choice since there was no other way especially after I brough up my concern to him andt he Homestead, hoping there may be other way, but then I changed my password right away after they were done.
I finally got enough, when I saw I had none and hardly any visitors on Saturday and Sunday, this last weekend, I contacted SEOGears, and got response from the same Acct Manager that it will take 3-6 weeks for search engine to pick up the content they just put in, overall takes 4-6 months before I can see the rank improvement. In the same time I kept bringing up if there was a possibility if I could get the refund of the three months when there was nothing done on my site, and I've been paying them diligently. The excuse I got this time, that they kept working on my site since the campaign began, eventhough the report they provided me showing none.
As far as I'm concerned I don't think I will see the refund from them, it's not about the money but it's a principal, basically I feel SEOGears just wasting my time and money. I've been wondering , over a year since the transition from Homestead to SEOGears, if it's required a content for target phrases and it takes few months for my rank to improve, why they didn't do the content of target phrases in first place? And I don't think they care about their customers, their customer confidentiality or privacy. I've been calling SEOGears to have my acct escalated to Manager of their Acct Manager to call me, but what I was getting only email from them to schedule appt. So I cancelled my SEO Acct.