I’ve wanted to write this article for a long time. The Fact is, 90% of SEO companies are worth a tenth of the money they are charging. They don’t know what it takes nor how to get to page one of Google.
I am about to show you who are the top SEO companies in UTAH.
How do I determine who the top is?
It’s simple. We see which Utah companies practice what they preach. Do they play the same game they tell others to play. That’s why I like sports so much. You either have the talent or you don’t. You perform or you go home. You know immediately whether the guy you just picked to be on your team can shoot or you got hosed.
It’s all about performance.
The only way to know if the company can rank your website is to see if their own website ranks. How much organic traffic do they get from their organic search?
Now…
I know you are going to get a ton of companies say. “But Jace, we don’t have time to work on our stuff because we are working on client work.”
That just means you don’t believe that SEO will bring you customers. If you did, you would be doing it.
So here we go.
Here’s the quick list if you do not want to read any further.
- Disruptive Advertising – 393,591 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Boostability – 21,334 Organic Monthly Traffic
- RED Digital Marketing – 12,196 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Big Lead – 3,280 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Epic Marketing – 1,328 Organic Monthly Traffic
- JEMSU – 943 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 97th Floor – 739 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Indiesem – 4 Organic Monthly Traffic
I am going to break down the following companies and show you which Utah Marketing agency has the most Organic Traffic .
Let’s start with a simple google search. If I type in “SEO Companies in Utah” I will get the following marketing agencies that are paying for ads claiming they know SEO.
- Epic Marketing (top ad)
- HawkSEM
- Indiesem (total Fraud)
- Jemsu
The four above are Google Paid ads. They do not rank organically for these keywords so they pay to play. This is a great strategy. They want you to hire them to do their SEO. So how do you know if they are any good or not? Here are the numbers.
Epic Marketing (found on paid search)
Epic Marketing – Epic gets about (1,328) organic visitors a month and ranks for 2,160 keywords. Not too bad, we will see worse.
- 2,160 Organic Keywords
- 1,328 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 49 Domain Score
- 2716 Backlinks
HAWKSEM (found on paid search)
- 1,405 Organic Keywords
- 501 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 6 Domain Score
- 179 Backlinks
HawkSEM looks to be climbing so you are basically rolling the dice if you hire them. Maybe they have figured it out, or maybe they have not.
INDIESEM (Total Fraud)
- 70 Organic Keywords
- 4 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 3 Domain Score
- 85 Backlinks
JEMSU
- 3,285 Organic Keywords
- 943 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 61 Domain Score
- 15,026 Backlinks
Take note of the amount of Backlinks that Jemsu has. This just shows you SEO is not all about backlinks. It’s about the quality of backlinks. They have gone out and bought a bunch of spammy backlinks hoping it would boost their rankings. Google doesn’t fall for that any more. It looks like the backlinks have an impact on their Domain Score, but not on traffic.
You would want to be very careful with JEMSU. Their SEO strategy could be to build lots of spammy backlinks.
Now that we have wrapped up the guys running ADS for SEO in Utah, lets jump over to some bigger agencies that are growing or look like they are growing.
Some of these agencies focus on SEO and their sales rep will tell you they are the best, but we know better.
Here are a few of the top agencies in Utah that have big offices, lots of employees, and money.
Disruptive Advertising (most SEO traffic)
I knew Disrupting was going to knock it out of the park. They have spent a lot of time and money on great content. The funny thing is, Disruptive is a PPC agency. They don’t even push SEO stuff. They understood the game a long time ago and played it well.
They really do produce great content and Google loves disruptive. Their content has brought them 111,167 backlinks. That’s big and it would be hard to take them out now. It would take millions to outrank them on their main keywords.
- 223,263 Organic Keywords
- 393,591 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 80 Domain Score
- 111,167 Backlinks
97th floor (biggest disappointment)
97th floor is one of the most decorated agencies in UTAH. They love awards and recognition. It’s a good strategy to wow clients because most don’t know the difference. Plus, they do operate more like a traditional Advertising agency. I have been to a lot of presentations where they show you how they drive traffic to their clients. They talk about all their successes with organic traffic but it’s lacking on their own.
When I saw the amount of organic traffic they get to their own website, it was a big let down. Now I am confused and not sure if they know how to do SEO at all. They do have a lot of backlinks, but that doesn’t mean they have traffic. 97th Floor deals with big companies that have huge budgets, so I am not sure about what happened here.
- 2,380 Organic Keywords
- 739 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 71 Domain Score
- 23,729 Backlinks
Big Leap (thought they would have more)
Big Leap specifically advertises for SEO. You can see all the SEO keywords on their website. Plus, they are continually putting out new blog articles every week. They’re pushing out more blogs than anyone on the list. They should get a lot more traffic, but they don’t. I think they have over-optimized a bit, and their articles don’t have any meat. You can see that by the organic monthly visitors and the lack of backlinks. Nobody is linking back to them because the content isn’t interesting or shareable.
- 10,318 Organic Keywords
- 3,280 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 68 Domain Score
- 1,877 Backlinks
Boostability (pretty good)
Boostablitiy is where I would think they should be. They have been around a while, and they know the game. They know backlinks and you can see that by the amount they have. It’s interesting to note they have 65,972 NoFollow backlinks. That’s a lot, considering they have 72,890 and 65,000 are NoFollow. That tells you they have some link building capabilities.
- 54,147 Organic Keywords
- 21,334 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 89 Domain Score
- 72,890 Backlinks
What do we learn about SEO from the Top SEO Companies?
Do backlinks really matter?
The companies above all have a different number of backlinks. Some have a lot, some have a little. Here is a company that has over 167,403 backlinks and they only get 3 organic visitors per day.
Backlinks only matter when they are high quality.
How do you get backlinks?
Create really good content. Disruptive Advertising is a great poster child for good content creation. Google loves what they do and they have been rewarded with a lot of traffic.
Best to niche down to a specific group of keywords that are related
Each company had niche keywords that they showed up for. My site shows up for a lot of things YouTube. I fill like Google gives me authority in that space. Whenever I create content about YouTube or video Marketing, I move up through the search engines.
Focus on creating content around the keywords you want to rank for and group them. You are not everything to everybody.
Content is still king and 2500+ words gets rewarded
One 2500 to 5000 word article that covers an entire subject completely will get ranked. Short 300 to 500 word articles do not rank in most cases. Even if you build them every week. Kind of like Big Leap. They are putting week articles, but they do not get a lot of organic traffic. Big Leap would be better to generate 1 really good article per month that covers a topic completely.
What about RED? There is always a storm.
Let me tell you a little bit about my SEO journey. I started a company called YDRAW in 2011 that hit the inc 5000 in a couple of years. We dominated SEO. I was creating crappy content and buying some backlinks. Nothing too crazy. Google was rewarding me and putting Ydraw in the #1 positions for a lot of keywords.
Life was great until the rules changed.
I was speaking at a Pubcon conference and decided to check out the expo booths. I came upon SEMrush and they scanned Ydraw’s website. They told me that 2 days prior Ydraw had 1500 backlink with the same anchor text. I did not order these links. Normally this would have been a good thing but Google just started coming down hard on website that had too much anchor text. Couple weeks later, our traffic dropped like a rock.
I had zero power to stop it. We spent a lot of time and money building content and doing everything we thought Google wanted. When the rules changed, we suffered.
Google gave me a bad taste and I shifted everything into paid search. I never looked back. The rules will change again and you have to be ready to jump ship and get on a new one.
Should you do SEO?
SEO is a good thing. I have ranked my current website for a lot of very competitive keywords. I built some quality backlink and created a lot of good content. I have one simple page that pays me about $5000 a month just from the organic traffic. I will save that story for another day.
Focus on creating the highest quality content and building high quality backlinks. That is it.
There is no other secret, gimmick or magic potion. Create content that will answer people question and that they will share.
Here’s where I stand with the little content I have created.
RED Digital Marketing
- 16,386 Organic Keywords
- 12,196 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 65 Domain Score
- 3,693 Backlinks
Just because you are ranking, doesn’t me you make money
Traffic doesn’t equal money. Traffic needs to produce leads, buyers or a dedicated audience. Have an idea of the keywords you want to rank for and build the content behind it.
That’s it.
Here are the top SEO companies in UTAH in order
- Disruptive Advertising – 393,591 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Boostability – 21,334 Organic Monthly Traffic
- RED Digital Marketing – 12,196 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Big Lead – 3,280 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Epic Marketing – 1,328 Organic Monthly Traffic
- JEMSU – 943 Organic Monthly Traffic
- 97th Floor – 739 Organic Monthly Traffic
- Indiesem – 4 Organic Monthly Traffic
If you would like to do these searches yourself, you can use the FREE tool that I used. It’s called ubersuggest. It’s a great tool to track your organic rankings and see what kind of traffic your website brings in each month.
Good luck and keep marketing.
