Content Factory

I paid this seo agency for keyword research and competitive analysis and they delivered the report back in January. The order also involved editing my website copy and including some of the keywords they came up with during the research. After almost a year now of significantly building my website authority, most of the pages they edited have not ranked for the target keywords which they presumably researched before. The keywords provided are just highly competitive, which is contrary to what they said in their proposal; "All keywords will be vetted to make sure you actually have a chance of making the top 10 of the SERPs". Furthermore, the recommendations for social media and PR are generic, which is basically to avoid focusing on social media marketing and utilize HARO for PR, regardless of the competitive analysis results (they probably suggest this to every small business). Another thing, their edit for one webpage was not good, they omitted a lot of the important details. Lastly, I found out (after double checking their report) that they actually haven't delivered several items required including one-hour technical seo consultation, list of recommended tools for tracking ROI, and list of journalists and media outlets to target. While the website copy editing was okay overall (excepting the one page), the keyword research and competitive analysis they performed was pretty much useless for me. After communicating with the agency owner about all this and my dissatisfaction with their service, she later showed she doesn't really care about customers complaining; "the only refund I'm offering here is $350 – and I do not even have to do that according to our contract. You can take this offer or leave it, but I'm not open to negotiating the matter further.", and she hasn't provided that tiny refund for 2+ weeks now (and this refund is definitely unacceptable considering their very poor service).