Am I on the Right Track?

My business has been in place for over a year and our site has undergone quite a few changes in that time. I have been the designer/webmaster/co-owner for this business and am looking for some advice from you talented and knowledgeable folks. I'm new to this forum and would really appreciate any help I can get.

We seemed to be doing fine with our site - showing progress in page loads and returning visits, but it was taking up too much of my time to manage the keywords and track ranking. We decided this past Fall to use a SEO company to help boost our already growing numbers, and take the burden off of my shoulders. We figured that at the rate we were going, if we outsourced that part of our business management we would be in even better shape. Our site is set up through CityMax, and we were told by the SEO company that they had to set up a mirror site but do it under ourdomain.net rather than .com and point to our .com site (CityMax is a template-based web hosting company). We also paid another company to set us up with a handful of keywords on Yahoo, MSN, and Google so that we would always be on top. Because of budget constraints, and because we saw a drop in business rather than an increase, we stopped using both companies. We had many more hits but no good hits.

Am I right in assuming that, since the number of good hits (meaning that they actually turned in to jobs) increased since we dropped these companies in December '06, we are on the right track in just working on the site ourselves? Only 2 weeks after we dropped those companies, we were on the first page on Yahoo and MSN for the exact keywords we had been paying for (I think we're still in the sandbox with Google though)!

We use StatCounter to track our stats and also just set up Google Analytics (thanks to some recommendations on this forum). I also use Search Engine Buddy to analyze our pages to get the right keywords to match our title, body text, etc. Does anyone have any other tools they can recommend?

We also dabbled a bit with AdWords and AdSense but were not using it in conjunction with Analytics. We're contemplating starting that up again too now that we understand the true potential of Analytics. I'm also working on some articles to post on our site (with the hopes that they are picked up and linked to), and I've set us up with some reciprocal links on some link exchange sites.

Am I on the right track with all of this? Where do you think I will get the best return on investment with my time?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Keep in mind that I can only speak to you from my own experience here, people like Fathom may have another take on your situation.

I don't know that I would necessarily infer from what you've stated here that the SEO company had nothing to do with the first page placements you were talking about. You would have to go into detail about what they did vs. what you did after the fact to solve that issue.

Analytics - I would say that moving from Stat Counter to Urchin was a smart move, I've used both and Urchin tends to be much more robust and user friendly.

Articles - there is no substitute for well written, original, keyword rich content. though I don't know that simply posting them on your site will be enough to drive the traffic you seek. I would consider press releases in conjunction with some social media buzz. Whether that means that you digg or del.icio.us your own articles or just pay to do a press release I don't know, but you may even go so far as to (not that I'm advocating this) create sock puppet accounts on Yahoo answers and ask a question to which your article provides an answer. If memory serves, YA doesn't use the no follow.

Link Exchange Sites - This concerns me. I don't necessarily know what you meant by this, but understand that there are good quality links to be had out there, and there are bad quality links. What you are after to drive traffic are one-way links, not recips. The important thing to remember is that the recips don't count as much as the one ways, so leverage the article you're writing to get as many one ways as possible. If you get too many spammy links (which you are likely to get from a link exchange site) then you will either get penalized, or not move as quickly as you would like.

that's just my $.02; hope it helps.
~5yb

Yea, you should really have done some research on the SEO companies before hand to save heartache Maybe you did...

Track your progress.... You should get an idea with the Analytics about which keywords your users look for. You should be able to track what kind of traffic leads to more sales too. That's the key. You found out yourself that any clown can drive traffic to a site, it takes a smart person to drive targeted traffic. You want to increase sales not hits, so it appears you made the right choice.

No, I don't think we did research as well as we could have. I'll chalk it up to a learning experience - just a rather expensive one.

Well, we reactivated our AdWords campaign with a much narrower focus this time and are using it together with Analytics. I'm very encouraged by what I'm seeing - Analytics definitely takes alot of the guess work out of AdWords.

I think we're on the right track because our PR also went from 0/10 to 4/10 this week - a good sign.

Also got registered on DMOZ so we'll see if that has any long term benefits.

I guess it all just comes down to being patient and letting it come to you. I don't think I'm going to do the sock puppet Yahoo thing, but I did like the look of digg so I may try that with the article. We also contacted some of our better customers and asked them if they would submit some articles about their experience (sort of a step beyond a small testimonial/quote) and they were actually very excited to do that for us. We're very fortunate that we have some awesome customers! They even said they want to have a link to where their article is listed so they can mention it to their family and friends - sounds like a much better way to get links than recips.

Thanks so much for your feedback!

Yeah, it would be best to consider this as a learning experience. But the next time you approach any SEO company, keep in mind one thing, that SEO would be such so as to maximize your ROI. It's not just having a No 1 position in the SERP. Proper keyword analysis, extensive research on the subject of the site and very careful selection of your targeted keywords would be some of the things that would make you reap greater benefits out of your SEO campaign.

It's not traffic that counts, it's the targeted traffic that converts into leads. Best of luck with the site !!