iias vancouver

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the managing director and therapist at Guiding Light Counseling Center. We’re a group mental health therapy practice providing therapy and counseling services to clients in our state.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with iias vancouver?

We needed help with our SEO strategy.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

iias vancouver provided SEO, MAP ranking, and SEM/PPC strategies. For SEO, they handled a web audit and keyword research, Google My Business (GMB), on-site optimization, backlinks, and tracking and analytics. For MAP ranking, they handled GMB 9-point optimization, geotagged photos, 'near me' search technology, GMB posts, GMB/website synergy, and local citations and directories. For SEM/PPC, they handled keyword research and segmentation, campaign architecture, ad copy and landing pages, bid strategy and budget management, campaign analysis, and performance optimization.In terms of tangible deliverables, iias vancouver provided monthly reports, on-site website optimization, off-site optimization, and citation building.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 2–5 teammates from iias vancouver.

How did you come to work with iias vancouver?

We found them through Facebook ads which was really dumb and naive in hindsight. They marketed themselves as a counseling SEO company, which is hard to find — people who understand mental health therapy marketing for ads and SEO services.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent less than $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from January to April 2026.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We wanted to see keyword ranking improvements and improvements in the local search map pack. However, all the keywords we targeted regressed. The keywords we asked iias vancouver not to target improved, but for the most part, none of these keywords were close to ranking on the first page or the top three in the map pack.

Moreover, iias vancouver put us on the sidebar for portapottymatch.com and other types of poor-quality, irrelevant citations. This produced 2,117 spam backlinks. They promised to clean this up but never did. We didn’t see any substantial positive changes in website traffic, leads, or other business metrics during our time working with iias vancouver.

To be fair, we pulled the plug on the project pretty quickly due to the spam backlinks. It was very clearly offshore work that was done, not work done by North American individuals. It wasn’t industry-specific at all.

Overall, this wasn’t a positive experience, and we wouldn’t rehire them again. They missed meta tags, created a schema that they never put on our website, and forgot H1 and H2 tags. I had to qualify them for mistakes. When I unleashed Claude on them over their contract deliverables, they never completed most of the deliverables without quality control issues. They never added secondary categories to our GMB either. All in all, they had no effective quality control process. Just because they marked a task as done on a spreadsheet didn’t mean they did it right.

How did iias vancouver perform from a project management standpoint?

They had no quality control and delivered low-quality work. By all appearances, it seemed like cheap offshore work.

What did you find most impressive or unique about them?

The amount of mistakes they made was impressive. March 2026 turned into a new complaint every 3–4 days.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Completing the deliverables in the contract they had us sign would have been a good start in a meaningful way to help our business, not harm it.