Pretty good, could be better

I have worked with many SEO companies over the past few years and consider myself to be fairly clued up on the work they do. I enlisted the services of Click Consult after reading their good reviews on here because I wanted a professional company I could trust to do the "leg work" for me so I could spend more time developing my website rather than promoting it.

I negotiated a 6 month contract for £720pm inc. VAT which included optimisation of my homepage targeting 6 keywords. Other extras included a couple of articles a month and a couple of blog entries. I cannot judge the results so far because I am only 3 weeks into the contract, but here is a rough summary of what they have done to date:

Submitted my site to around 100 free website directories. As a result, Google Web Master Tools has picked up about 25 additional backlinks. I don't know how valuable these backlinks are, but they haven't cost anything so I have no reason to complain.
Optimised the meta information on my homepage with a description of my site and as many of my 6 keywords as they could fit in the title tag. Be aware that they will NOT take into account any keywords you already rank highly for. If you want to preserve rankings for these, you need to include them in your list of nominated keywords when you agree to the contract or they will be left to die off!
Sent me over some keyword-heavy seo text for the homepage. One nice touch on this was they had taken the time out to customise a free ajax widget that displays tabbed text panels to fit in with my website design so the new text didn't take up too much room. All I had to do was follow the instructions and copy & paste code.
Written a couple of articles. These articles were NOT destined for my website! They were for inclusion on a specialist articles website, which is a shame because they were fairly well written and I would have liked to have included them in my articles section.
Written a blog. On the plus side – they sent over a nice informative document with detailed instructions on how to install Wordpress and integrate it with my site. Again, they had taken the time out to create a custom theme that would fit in with my site design, which was a nice touch. On the negative side – the blog was very poorly written. The grammar was awful and the piece was boring and difficult to read.

When new content is available, they can either upload it straight to your website (if you provide FTP/DB access), or make it available for you to download and manually integrate (which I do). I let them write the blog, and noticed they had published the author as “clickconsult” which I thought was pretty naughty considering I am paying them for the services.

As with all SEO contracts, I have a dedicated account manager. She is professional and knowledgeable, although quite impersonal. I sometimes feel like a number on a factory production line instead of a real person sat at a desk, but she always replies within a couple of hours and has addressed any issues I have had so far.

My overall impression so far is Click Consult generally know their stuff, but some of the staff/departments are better at their work than others. I will be keeping a close eye on the work they do over the coming months to make sure it is consistent and of high quality; especially the blogs. Their prices are reasonable; but some extras seem ridiculously expensive considering they are on a contract. They quoted me “at least £250” for 3 animated GIF banners!

I will continue to see how CC go over the coming months, but as yet I am still undecided if I would carry on my contract on with them when it expires.