Steven Conner

Review of RYNO Strategic Solutions

I hired Ryno Strategic Solutions (RSS) to build a ...

I hired Ryno Strategic Solutions (RSS) to build a website for my HVAC business and I also paid them a monthly fee to handle an SEO and a Pay Per Click advertising campaign. Three weeks after the SEO/PPC campaign had launched, Google still did not know that my company had a website. One of my customers pointed this out to me and he actually submitted my website URL to Google, (while I stood there watching), and the next day, Google knew that my company had a website, instead of asking me to provide a URL to my website. When I contacted Ryan Faust, the owner of RSS, and told him that I felt that he should have submitted my website URL to Google, he actually told me that it wasn t his job to do that. I was shocked to say the least. When I told a customer of mine who runs the online presence for a major clothing manufacturer, what Ryan Faust had told me, he told me that was ridiculous. The same customer also told me about a thing called Google Analytics. This enabled me to analyze my Google Pay Per Click campaign that RSS was running, so that I could see what search terms I was paying for, and how much I was paying for each click. This is where it really got interesting. Instead of taking the time to find out what services I offer and EXCLUDING the services that I don t, I discovered that RSS has a one size fits all shotgun approach to marketing. RSS was advertising services that I didn t even offer and I was being charged, each time that a customer clicked on my ad. As a matter of fact, the third most popular search term that people clicked on (Duct Cleaning), was a service that I didn t even offer. To make matters worse, when people clicked on the service, the landing page on my website didn t even reference the service, and therefore, Google would penalize me by lowering my quality score. The same thing happened on services that I did offer. For instance, when a customer clicked on Ductless Heat Pumps they landed on a page for Gas Furnaces , when they clicked on Air Purification they would land on the Central AC Page. The services that the customers were searching for were not even represented on the landing pages. Therefore Google would penalize my company for misleading customers and wasting their time, by lowering my quality score. When I brought this to the attention of RSS, I received this response from RSS:
I linked them to the AC or Furnace Services landing pages, with the idea being that a user would still be likely to call or fill out a form if they saw the service they were looking for in the ad text and they saw it was the type of business they knew they were looking for .
How about just linking it to a page that addresses the service that the customer is looking for?
Regarding my concern that my quality score was being negatively impacted, RSS responded to me by stating the following:
It sounds like he either misunderstood or was given false information in one of his conversations with Google customer support.
I didn t misunderstand anything, and it wasn t only Google customer support who told me about the effect that this incompetence had on my quality score.
Needless to say, I cancelled my contract with RSS because I had lost all confidence in their ability to market my company. Although they let me out of my contract, they refused to refund any of the money that they wasted on my PPC campaign including the $500.00 that they charged me to set it up. I have since retained another company that provides SEO services and the first thing that they did was to provide me with a comprehensive questionnaire that asked all of the questions that RSS should have asked, but could not be bothered to ask. Unlike RSS, they also did not try and lock me into a long term contract. At the end of the day, I feel that RSS relies on the fact that businesses will just send in a monthly check for SEO/PPC and not pay attention to what's going on.