SEO Companies - Your Experiences

Agreed - sometimes it's better to pick more attainable keywords and do them all as opposed to one word you will be fighting for - Forever! lol

Attainable with decent traffic, yes.

I just wondered why you thought it had huge traffic when it doesn't.

Sorry - I was talking about the bigger picture.
Huge in comparison with other keywords.
A niche keyword - High results for low competition as a percentage at position 1.

For the sake of others reading this and making sense, I dont consider 7ish searches a day as 'huge in comparison'. That is low, period. It's no better than a keyword with 1 a day, really. I don't want people to think that that amount of searches a day is what they should be considering.

7Ish searches a day?
I don't know where you're getting your information from?!
but my webstats shows a completely different picture!

From Google.

Ahh that explains it...
I'm not going to divulge too much on this as what we do is quite unique.
The figure you're referring to i presume is the broad keyword at around 300 searches per month / 30 = 6.8 daily.

This is actually wrong as this is based on a local query and an average across the previous 12 months. If you were searching for russia world cup, (as thy've only just won the bid to host it) - the result will be totally wrong as it takes into account 11 months when no one would ever have been searching for it. Sometimes - external factors can influence your rankings also!

We get well into the thousands per month on this keyword alone.
It just depends how and when you go about ti.

Anyway - my home time
YES - im working ona sunday.
ugh

The figure you're referring to i presume is the broad keyword at around 300 searches per month / 30 = 6.8 daily.

No. If you read back through my posts, you will see that I was not referring to broad match, but to exact match. That was the whole point of my replies.

I didn't get them from the free keyword tool by the way, but that's irrelevant. Only Google reveal Google's own data so not sure where your Google data is coming from.

'russia world cup' will have been searched on before; they have played in the worldd cup before and as its a generic phrase in those realms, so it can quite well have been searched on in relation to previous world cup tournaments, ie when people are looking to see if they qualified, when they went out, etc. Obviously it will have jumped up recently due to the announcement.

Of course, we all know that a keyword today can be low today then jump high tomorrow if something happened relating to that keyword. So the keyword 'tsunami' will have been a lot more popular 26/12/06 and onwards for 2007, than it ever was before that fateful day. And it will have subsided over time. Google can only ever tell you roughly what those searches were previously, but not sure about your data, but mine isn't a mean average as you seem to describe.

It is a fascinating subject, and I fully admit to getting confused as well, but the reason the OP started the thread is even more apparent as this thread grows.

If experienced people in the know can't agree on certain aspects of SEO, or how to agree on data analysis, what chance does the average Joe stand, who's new to online marketing and leaves themselves wide open to the cold calling tactics of some SEO outfits.

So maybe it goes back to communication and expectations, and how good SEO firms are at explaining what is quite a complex topic to non technical clients.

Be interesting to hear some other real world experiences from members, good or bad, or how they thought the service could have been improved. I'm sure that would be valuable info for anyone offering SEO services.

Be nice to hear some success stories as well

Could not agree more. I spend a lot of time with clients explaining that No1 on Google for terms like 'mortgages' is not possible on a budget of