Methodologies

Our review methodologies are primarily composed of price, reliability, and quality. Below we take a deeper dive into how we think about each of these metrics when reviewing a service provider’s services.

Price

Price is defined as cost per unit. For traffic service providers, we would measure this on a CPM or cost per thousand impressions or visitors. For guest blogging services, we would measure this on a cost per blog post of similar word count. Having a consistent and measurable metric is important for us to accurately gauge a SEO service provider’s pricing against one another. Depending on the review we’re testing, we would explain to readers which measurement we’re measuring the provider on.

Reliability

Reliability is defined on the following sub-categories: transparency, timely support, and consistency of results.

Transparency refers to the service provider’s ability to accurately and clearly explain to customers the produce and services customers would be buying. A high transparency score would mean having consistent language in emails sent to customers, and actually sending emails as opposed to leaving customers guessing when they’re orders would be delivered. Generally speaking, service providers with high transparency scores will leave customers with less questions before and after ordering their services.

Timely support is fairly self explanatory. When customers do have questions, it’s important they receive the support in a timely manner and have their questions answered. Having chat bots link to knowledge guides isn’t as helpful as an actual person replying to an email with a tailored response to the customer’s questions.

Consistency of results is an important metric when providers want returning customers. it’s difficult to build long term relationships with providers when customers are always guessing if what they paid for will be delivered on time. For providers who offer white-label services, this is even more critical as customers may have a tier 2 customers they must provider the service to by a specific date.

Quality

Quality is our gauge of how useful a service is, and what we feel is the single most important metric of the three. Of course, this metric differs from industry to industry. For traffic campaigns, high quality means the ability to target the niche customers want, receiving traffic with comparable bounce rate and visit duration to industry averages, and preferably actual conversions in the form of email form opt-ins or sales. Ultimately, price and reliability doesn’t matter if the service provided doesn’t provide any value. Hence, our quality score has the highest weighting of all the three.