Wired SEO Company

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are Velleman Inc., a wholesale company selling all kinds of electronics and tools, power supplies, kits, and test equipments. We also do wholesale for North and Central America, as well as Canada from our office here in the U.S. We are part of a worldwide development group and we are in 85 countries all over the world.

What is your position?

I'm the Chief Executive Officer [CEO] of the North American Division at Velleman.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Wired SEO?

We have been in business for years. We started in the U.S. in 1997 and have been working with distributors all over the country. We saw that the buying pattern of end users has changed over the years. It's all now more and more web-based, and that's why we started looking to expand our online presence. Early this year, we started creating our own website, but we did not have the knowledge in-house to know how to optimize our website and that's why we spoke to Wired.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

It has been a combination of different projects. It started off with Wired looking into our new website that we had just started up because it needed to be optimized. Since we already had our regular website from Velleman Inc., we hired them for the development of our store website and just copied that original website. That's when they came up with making the changes on the duplicate content, making sure that our ranking goal is being met using Google Analytics. At the same time, they also started working on our social media network, and promoting it, making sure that we get more into the direct visibility of the end user.

As far as social media management, pay-per-click campaign management, Google Adwords, Facebook and other social media channels, that's what they are still working on right now.

How did you come to work with Wired SEO?

We looked up all kinds of SEO companies from this area, the DFW Area Metroplex. We saw that there were five or six that really stood out. We contacted them and had a personal meeting just to see what the possibilities were in working together. We were looking for a young and dynamic team and that's what we found with Wired – people that we can talk to and people that are available. The relationship has been working very well so far.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

So far, it has been below $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June [2015]. There was a lot of work that involved avoiding duplicate content. We have close to 2,000 different products, so that's a lot of work. We are estimating that this could continue to somewhere around February or March of next year [2016]. We are planning to continue working with them after that. Now, they put in somewhere around 30 to 40 hours a month but later they will put in less.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Well I knew from day one that starting up a new website and starting something totally different would not give the results in the first six months. That's something we all knew. But over the last two weeks, we have seen the growth on clicks on our website. We have also seen the growth on orders that come in, and we have seen some significant changes here.

What distinguishes Wired SEO from other providers?

The team at Wired SEO is young, dynamic, and personal. Those are the three main words I would use to describe their company.

Is there anything Wired SEO could have improved or done differently?

No. I don’t have any experience with other SEO companies, so obviously it’s difficult to compare. But personally, I have not experienced anything negative with Wired.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Partcatalog.com is an e-commerce site for car and truck accessories.

What is your position?

I’m the owner of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Wired SEO?

It's a new site, so we're working from the ground up. We hired them about a year and a half ago to do some content strategy for the links as well as onsite SEO.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

I came to Wired SEO with the site already built. It wasn't responsive or anything. Clint [Henderson, Founder of Wired SEO] was pushing me for a responsive site. I didn't use Wired for design but they gave quite a bit of input into it.

Our site's rather complicated. It uses Magento and there's a lot of custom development to it. I have some Magento developers that did the development when I needed something done.

Wired has done a few Facebook ads for us but that was mostly to get our Facebook page going. As far as they're concerned, we were mainly focused on organic SEO.

How did you come to work with Wired SEO?

I first found Clint on Elance. He was a freelancer at the time, just working by himself. I vetted a couple of different companies. I went with a different local company, initially. They did a terrible job. I fired them pretty quickly. I talked to Clint again and, honestly, he was able to do in two days what that company had taken two and a half months to do. I’ve been with him since he was a freelancer. His team has grown since then and he has some employees now.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I know that the initial price I had with him is a lot lower than what he charges now. We stopped working with him around the end of October. Before that, he was month to month, and I felt like we were getting a steal. We went up on some prices and did a contract, which I wasn't ready to do yet. I highly recommend him and we'll probably use him again in a year or so, but for now, I feel that we have a good strategy. I don't know what his prices are now because we haven’t gone through the renegotiation process yet.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started around April of 2014. It lasted roughly 18 months. As I said, it’s probable that we will hire Wired again sometime in the future.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Everything they did was all white hat, which is what we're looking for. Wired SEO did a few content strategy campaigns to build up links through related auto sites, car clubs and sites of that nature. After those campaigns, we saw a huge boost in traffic. Again, we basically started from nothing, but Wired has built us up a pretty solid base of traffic.

What distinguishes Wired SEO from other providers?

The first thing I noticed is that they are very hands-on. In the first few days, Clint sent me ten different emails. As I mentioned earlier, our website is rather complicated. Wired handled the strategy and basically told us what to do, and then I would figure out how to implement it. Clint would have implemented it himself. I just didn't want hands in the system that weren't specific to our development team.

So their input was more strategic, focusing on the things we needed to optimize. He also went in and changed some things like Meta descriptions. As far as interlinking category structure, product structure, getting product reviews in place, Wired devised strategies to work in the content. They got the ball rolling really quickly on that.

Is there anything Wired SEO could have improved or done differently?

That's a difficult question because with SEO there's always something to work on. If anything, we had too much that needed to be done. I know that sounds really odd, but it was mostly me working on my development team. I have a couple of other agencies that I use, so implementing everything on the timeline that he wanted was really difficult. From my standpoint, that's a little bit difficult to work with but that also speaks highly of Clint and his team. It put a bit of pressure on my end but I can't really think of anything negative. It was one of the better relationships that I’ve had with a vendor.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are C. Whitney guitars. We currently market a product called Dragon’s heart guitar pick. It’s a guitar pick made out of a high grade material with a very particular design. It’s a product that I came up with.  I’ve been producing it for about 2 years now. We have a couple of products in the pipeline nearly ready to be released. We produce and sell online, all over the world.

What is your position?

I am the owner of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Wired SEO?

The internet is huge and just having a website, a Facebook page and Twitter isn’t enough to be heard. You’re one voice in billions. My issue was exposure, getting people to notice me not only with SEO but also with social media engagement, etc. My background is in manufacturing, design, engineering, mechanical and electrical. I’m good at building and inventing things but I had no understanding of how marketing worked or how the internet worked for business. That’s why I approached Wired SEO, so they could assist me with learning these things, and help me with some of the things that needed to be done.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Their responsibilities were mostly SEO. Most of the web design was done by a friend of mine. Later on, I took that over. I did receive a lot of input and suggestions from Clint and Wired SEO, but it was more on consulting as far as web design, instead of actual implementation. Social media engagement was their task initially. I’ve done some Pay-Per-Click [PPC] advertising and we tried some of that.

For our profit margin, PPC advertising doesn’t make a lot of sense because it’s too costly for how much we make per sale. The PPC work that we did was headed up by Clint and Wired SEO. We tried banner ads and a weekly contest that’s still going on through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Wired SEO gave me a lot of input on keyword search terms. They gave me directions on how to optimize my blog and target certain terms that will rank in Google to get us exposure.

How did you come to work with Wired SEO?

I’m fairly focused on keeping everything made in America. With any of the Business-to-Business [B2B] stuff I do, I try to find a business as close to home as possible. If I have to go out of state, I’ll do that, but I would prefer to stay not just in Texas, but within the same city. It just makes doing business easier because I know I can take 20 minutes to go find someone and talk to them face to face, which for me is always much more effective than trying to connect over Skype or email.

The selection process was simply logging onto Google and searching for SEO firms. Wired SEO was one of the ones within the radius I selected. I called several of them, but a lot of the results that are optimized and have good ratings are big firms which handle large accounts. I’m a very small business that doesn’t sell high dollar items. I needed someone who was willing to handle an account as small as mine and work with me from the ground up.

There was another independent individual that I worked with before Wired SEO and she was awful. The few sales that were trickling in when I launched, she brought to a screeching halt. After that, I did a little more digging and talked to some of Clint’s references and they all had good things to say about him. We saw quite a bit of growth initially and it’s continued to grow at a fairly steady pace.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I’d prefer to keep that information confidential.

What is the status of this engagement?

I think we started in July of 2014. The work is ongoing. I had them on board for 9 months, and then we took a break for three months. Now I’ve got them back on again trying to push some new products out and to kick start a little more growth. If I think I can afford to keep them on, I will keep them on, at least until we get a truly solid audience and repeat business, which we’re starting to see. As a startup, your income is feast or famine, and my product lasts really long. One pick can last nearly a year. So if I sell a couple of picks to someone it’s going to be a while before they have to order again.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

In terms of traffic we were getting probably less than ten visitors a day. Maybe on the weekends, I might spike up to 20, but I would go through days where no one would visit. Now, my average daily audience stays at around 280, which is a pretty big jump from last year. Back in August we had a couple of great videos get released on YouTube and we were sitting around 700. I have had 63,404 unique visitors in the past year. That’s a monthly average of 5,283. That’s somewhat shy of our end target. We wanted to be somewhere around 15,000 per month. In October we were half way to that goal, and in July and August we were right around 10,000.

I also like that they’re willing to work with a wider range of customers. There are certain marketing firms that refuse to work with you if you’re not willing to pay between $3,000 and $5,000 per month. Wired SEO is willing to help someone smaller. They helped us with specific things and they adjusted their rates to fit our budget and our needs. It’s a more personalized service. Personal interaction is better; it’s not just cookie cutter style. Instead, we look at what’s going to work best for us and if it doesn’t work, we won’t do it. Wired SEO stays on the white hat side of the internet, remaining current with Google’s rules and policies to make sure you’re not going to violate any of that.

What distinguishes Wired SEO from other providers?

For what they do, I don’t feel that there’s anyone else out there that would do a better job than them. I’ve talked to a lot of people and no one has ever impressed me quite the way that Clint and his team have. He has an eye for talent. Anthony was working with him last year, and he’s one of the sharpest young men I’ve met in my life. Clint and the new guys are sharp as well.

I was a United States Marine for 13 years. I have trained thousands of young men and women, and I’m used to working with high quality young men and women. The quality of personnel that Clint and his team have has blown me away. There’s no one that can hold a candle to them. Even some of the marketing firms that have presented themselves very professionally, they just don’t always get it. They say things cost money, but they don’t seem to be worried about the return on investment [ROI]. That’s one thing I’ve discovered and it irritates me that a lot of the marketing individuals that I’ve spoken to don’t understand what ROI is.

They don’t understand that the money they’re spending has to come from somewhere. You have to have money coming in, in order to put money out. If you’re putting money out and it’s not bringing more back in, that’s not how a business works. Wired SEO has been good about that concept and right-sizing our efforts to be sure we’re not spending imaginary money and not throwing money away. That’s pivotal for a startup.

Is there anything Wired SEO could have improved or done differently?

I haven’t ever tapped into the full spectrum of their services, and I don’t need anything else from them. I couldn’t say where they could improve.