BT Offering SEO – BT SearchSmart Any Good?
Back in the office for the new year and I noticed a new name advertising on the term “SEO” – BT.
There’s been a few posts recently about how you get what you pay for with SEO services, so it doesn’t look great for BT’s new SEO service know as SearchSmart which starts at a chirpy £74.99 a month. There’s a £100 set up fee and also a minimum 3 month contract.
For £74.99 I’m guessing that the key phrases selected are long tail and local.
It sounds pretty much an automated service (bar the audit doc) with tight control on any phone conversations with a consultant. If you need extra consultancy time it’s £100 an hour, a little expensive for the UK.
It’s hard to judge the service, so far they have only got one testimonial Brand X PR who haven’t implemented the work and guessing haven’t had any link building as they have no links according to YSE. But a quick check on the BT site and they don’t rank for their own content.
So they have a duplicate domain “http://www.latitudeorganic.com” which is strangely owned by “Scott Sargeant” who works for the Latitude Group.
In conclusion is BT SearchSmart Any Good? Well it’s seems it’s just SEO by Latitude.. If your going to resell at least do a good job of separating ties from the company who are going to do
EDIT – Article from SEOCO about this too http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/bt-now-offering-seo-ppc-services/
It will be very interesting to see what customers think about this new BT service. BT Customer Street had truely terrible feedback with many complaints from poor service and rude cold calling. Here are just some of the BT complaints about this service:
http://www.btcomplaint.com/2009/01/bt-customerstreet.html
I spoke to a company who signed up for this package about five months ago, and i gave my reservations about the results at the time.
I spoke to her last week and she said she hadn’t noticed any movement at all.. and yes it was long-tail local keywords. Not a great start.
I mystery shopped these guys as soon as they started doing PPC for the term “SEO”. The results were shocking, the operative had to go and check what ‘SEO” actually stood for and then said it was “search engine optimiser”. Needless to say she had no idea what SEO entailed. There was no mention of Latitude as well, have they always done this for BT?
This service looks like it is born out of frustration at SEO companies taking all the business away from BT as so few businesses now (quite understandably) use traditional local advertising such as the yellow pages etc. You rightly point to the price as revealing the quality of the service, £100 set up fee? That seems way to cheap. Given that SEO is highly profitable, just what do they think they can offer for this much money. I think they are exploiting their brand to sell something they have no idea how to implement.
having moved from a large company who employed an seo agency, to a much smaller company who didn’t have the budget, I made the decision to go with this new BT service. I went for the 349 a month option – thinking that for a grand over three months, i’d get a decent number of quality links and some keyword tracking (which we can’t currently do in-house).
have to admit, it was a waste of time – its been three months and I’m cancelling – the lack of contact/reporting is atrocious and Barry is right – the staff are no experts!
can’t believe i was gullable to fall for it to be honest! have made far better improvements to our site/rankings etc using experience learned from my previous seo company than bt have managed!
lesson learned!
Thanks for the comment, good to get the view point of someone who has used the service.