Hiring a professional audit for Google

Hi there,

My current situation is I am doing incredibly well with Yahoo and pretty well with MSN, but am nowhere to be seen in Google. This has been the case for probably about 2 years and I've been desperately trying to figure out why.

I have not over optimized (AFAIK), got a good set of keywords and inbound links going. I have perused WMW and any information i could find about not tripping Google filters and have been quite careful.

As a result I am at a loss. I need a fresh pair of professional eyes to go through and figure out where I am making errors.

Does anyone have any recommendations on companies and/or services that are not only reliable, but will do a paid audit? (as I do not need to have the site optimized... I just need information)

Thanks!

anybody can audit no problem; why don't you post it in the review section for now?

Will give it a try, thanks!

Getting an audit entails much more than a site review. While on-site optimization is important the strongest SEO factors will be off-site.

What you need is a full benchmarking analysis of the top ranking websites for your target keywords. If you want to do this yourself a good place to start is the SEOmoz Blog Article #1457 (A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available). Compare the top 5-10 sites for each keyword and any site that appears in the top 30 for multiple keywords. Some variables will be obvious, such as backlinks. For others you will have to look for trends. For example, W3C validation is not considered to be an important ranking factor, however if the top ten all validate then you would probably want to do the same for any competing website in that specific sector.

The idea here is to move beyond generic SEO practices and uncover exactly what you must accomplish to compete for high rankings when searching for specific keywords.

Well, I've posted a thread for the website in question but haven't received any responses yet.

As for off-site factors, I've definitely researched backlinks and such things are somewhat incomparable. Most other sites, for example, have lots of incomming links from MySpace accounts that are made specifically for the sake of promoting those sites. I'm not willing to really go in and do that.

But other than the different backlinks, I'm not certain what else to check for. In regards to onsite variables, I'm quite certain I'm more efficiently optimized than most of my competition.

The primary problem is not ranking: I am penalized for the keywords I target because I do not exist in those ranks. not on the first page and not on the tenth.

Whereas I'm #1 on Yahoo.

Decius,

do you want to post your domain. From the sound of it you're in a fairly competitive category.

What sort of budget did you have in mind for the audit? Ball park.

Well, I would leave it up to an SEO expert to offer me the price. But I'm not new to this. If you check the site you will see quite uniform and reasonably well implemented SEO techniques so I'm not in search of a complete overhaul.

All I want to know is why Google is penalizing me for the keywords I'm targeting.

More info at (the actual review thread):

http://forums.seochat.com/site-reviews-17/http-www-icecoldtshirts-com-116207.html

But I'm also not going to spend money on "possible" theories. If someone provides me information that is feasible and it works in a month or two I would be willing to pay quite a bit (as the opportunity cost is quite high)

Edit: The "competitive industry" argument is not valid, for the third time, because I am #1 for the same phrases on Yahoo yet I am nowhere on Google. This isn't the result of competition.

He already did in the site reviews.

Budget is totally unimportant right now. If you offer benchmarking, or what is essentially a competitive analysis, then you'd have a flat rate I'd guess, not something 'tailored to the client' since they need all the info they can get.