Review of a PAYING Customer Part 1:
ABOUT:
I went and ordered the 1HOTH TRIAL for a new domain name in a niche that has roughly 36000 searches a month. The competition is pretty solid, but I feel that a good Off site SEO package could land me front page. Other than On-site SEO, so far nothing else has been done at present.
CUSTOMER SERVICE:
First I want to thank Alex and his team for the great customer service. Just being available at set times is a huge plus. I spoke with him twice via the support chat. The first time was prior to the order. All the questions that I asked was answered promptly. The second time I spoke to him I wanted to verify my order status. I was asked for the confirmation number and assured that the order would be delivered on time. (I mistakenly thought it was due on Tuesday, but in truth, the quote was for Wednesday.) Even still, the effort was made to make sure.
ORDERING:
The Hoth website is very professional and provides a lot of information on what exactly the service is. I would like to call attention to the the order form (
http://www.thehoth.com/pricing/) as it clearly states what each of the packages are, and what you get with them. I have more to say on this further down though.
After paying for the order a confirmation letter arrived containing very clear instructions on how to submit your urls and keywords.
Once you follow the link and provide the info, another confirmation email is sent that parrots your input, the package you ordered, and provides a delivery date.
Overall, I got the sense that a lot of effort was put into the site design and ordering process.
DELIVERY EMAIL:
Roughly around 9 PM EST. I received an email that contained the following:
"Hi Erik,
Attached is your HOTH 2.0 reports including:
1 Blogspot blog with 1 article
1 Wordpress blog with 1 article
1 Squidoo Lens
7-15+ Web 2.0 Properties
20-40+ Social Bookmarks
100+ Profile Links
PLEASE NOTE: Each 1 HOTH includes 300 article submission, which are not included in this report.
Since we slow drip article submissions, acceptance reports are batched and sent out weekly."
I looked through the report, which contained links to each post and the login information.
QUALITY OF SITES:
I am extremely impressed with the look of the Squidoo page. It looks as if a lot of work was put into collecting images for that, and the other two sites. I'd say the page they made exceeds the current one that a competitor owns, which is currently ranking well. With a little work I feel that I can knock him out with this one.
The wordpress site used a plain theme that matched up the color scheme of the product I'm promoting. Again, it looks like someone actually thought about which theme would look best for this article.
Blogger is blogger, so you know. But again it looked nice.
QUALITY OF ARTICLES:
Since I was on just the trial, only 1 article was created for my package, which was then super spun. I read through the article that appears on each site. It is clearly written. None of the sentences or paragraphs, seem odd. All the important information is present. Obviously, after you read the first one, the other two seem strange considering it's the same info, but from an outside prospective any visitor to any one of the 3 sites will not any any trouble with the article and I doubt they would assume it was anything but original human writing.
BOOKMARKS AND PROFILE LINKS:
I clicked through each one to make sure they existed. Some of them were down, but for the package I ordered, the amount that contained live links fell well within the parameters quoted.
ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS:
Like the other reviews, I can't quite comment on that yet, as they take time to do. I have no doubts that I will receive the report on time and I am also sure that if I check the report, they too will fall within the quoted parameters. Even still, I will provide an updated review later to see if there has been any changes based on the submissions
RESULTS:
So far, the site has moved from Page 5 to page 4 of google. Additionally I've hit Page 1 of both Bing and Yahoo. Based on Market Samurai the links aren't showing up yet, so I don't know if any of these changes are directly linked to the HOTH.
HOWEVER, The site has made 3 conversions. Prior to the order. The site had not yet made a sale, so if Hoth did have something to do with it, then it has already paid for itself. I will be monitoring the rankings closely for changes. I am hopeful that it will move further up on google.
CLOSING THOUGHTS:
I'd like to go back to the packages. 1Hoth 5Hoth 5x5 Hoth... (?) First, I wonder where the hell the name came from. All I can think of is Star Wars, but fail to see any relevance to SEO. The name is memorable though. But I think the package names and pricing structure is confusing. I'm sure most people do a double take when they first saw 1HOTH cost more than 5HOTH and then realized the price is on a per Hoth basis. That is why I mentioned the ordering form. It clears it up. But still, I'm curious why these package names were chosen. But, considering that is my only complaint... I'll be using the service again, and I will highly recommend it to anyone as part of their link building stratagy.
I'll just shut up now.