SeoGears & The Endurance International Group
Reviews and Complaints

Hired SEOgears to rebuild and update my website and provide SEO services. Before SEO Gears started working on my site, I had first page search rankings and regular leads. SEOgears destroyed that. My site has no leads and almost impossible to find.

I am filing a complaint today because I am extremely dissatisfied with the service that SEO Gears has provided me. I am a small company that just recently created a website/blog to go along with it. I chose Bluehost as they are the best option for what I want to do. Upon choosing Bluehost, SEO Gears contacted me and offered me a few different packages, one of them being a package that includes web design and social media marketing and engagement - WP full service package. I was very excited because I knew very little about social media, and I wanted to focus solely on writing content for my website.

This package comes with a price tag of 2000+ USD - quite high, but I figured with everything included, it must be worth it.

It was not.

The issues began at the very beginning during the design process. They claim to build a new site from scratch, but in reality they use Elementor-no problem, I couldn't even build a site with a website builder myself, so I figured it's better than nothing. Plus I'll eventually have to manage the website myself, so of course this is a better option.
The designer took super long and threw something together really quick, so I ended up having to request a new designer. I hated doing that because I really don't like to complain, but I had no other option.
After the change of designer, the site came out beautifully! I was so happy and ready to upload content. But this is when they hit me with some disappointing news - they only use fb and twitter for social media marketing. Hm, ok. Well, I was not told that when I shelled out all this money. I'm in my twenties and my target audience is up to around 50 years old - they don't really use fb or twitter. But wait, it gets better (worse, it actually gets worse) after a few months I see they are posting the same articles I had and not using the new content for my social media posts. Not only that, but everything they posted sounded robotic and had no connection with the tone of my brand. To make matters worse, now months in, they reveal to me they do not engage the audience. Meaning no following other pages or social, no likes - nothing. They simply use an automated system to grab recent content and schedule it out a week in advance.
At this point i'm disgusted and decided to halt the last two payments of my plan. There's got to be a way to work this out, right? Well, wrong. They told me I must pay for the entire package, even though i've asked many times to cancel it.
I did not sign a contract, and i'm definitely not getting what I signed up for. I was told that if I wanted to cancel, I would have to pay three times as much as what io owe - if not I must deal with them and their expensive mediocre service for an additional 3 months.
I called bluehost today to inquire about this, and as usual they were as kind as ever. They explained to me that this was not the first time that they're received a complaint about seo gears, and that it is not true that I would have to pay more to cancel this horrid service. So now i'm livid. I shelled out triple the amount than I should have because they really aren't doing anything to help me or my brand. All the advice that they give me is generic and not personalized as promised and to put the cherry on top of it all, I found the twitter account of the supervisor of my current marketing coordinator. Her twitter states she is, and I quote, "hopeful future seo expert, or trophy wife, whatever comes first. Big fan of sarcasm and puns." she has a little over 230 followers...
Look, I judge no one on their personal life, but aspiring seo expert?! How are you not that already?! And this is the supervisor... I could cry. This cost me over 2k and i'm dealing with people who don't know what they're doing and are using me as a test subject. They don't care to learn anything about me or my company, with the exception of one worker, my previous marketing coordinator whom I didn't get to work with because she got a promotion - honestly, she should work at a better company because seo gears is not it.
I've had to contact legal counsel because not only did they lie about the services they would provide, but they are threatening me with fees and the revocation of my website - something bluehost has told me no less than 20 minutes ago they could not do.
I'm annoyed. I just wanted to write and entertain, but now I have to deal with this.

In the past six months this company did nothing to increase my business while taking my money. They hold themselves accountable for nothing! They are more than happy just to take your money and do nothing to actually help your online business. Stay away, you will be dissatisfied and out a lot of money, which even though their system does not work they will offer you no credit, no refunds, nothing. Buyer beware!

I was pointed to SEOgears by Homestead when I asked about getting going on organic performance. It was a nightmare. I had at least 4 different people assigned to my account, and it was not clear if I was talking to SEOGears or Homestead. Their "Customer Service", once I started paying their "management" fee for Adwords was horrible. I had to put in a request for an appointment usually 5-7 days away to talk to anyone about anything I needed to change. I was locked out of my own Adwords account so they could ostensibly protect themselves from my activities on my account that would possible impact their "management" fees. The Adwords log shows their only action was a daily adjustment to my adwords bid, that was the basis for my adwords bid and their fees. These people are slicker than snot on a brass door knob, and have no intention to producing viable results, just getting their management fee. I am happy with Homestead and their tools, but cant understand how they can survive their relationship with SEOGears. This organization has the look and feel of a scam organization. DONT GIVE THEM ANY SORT OF ACCOUNT CONTROL... You will regret it!

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As a new business we were in the market to optimize our web-site and get more business. We were contacted by SEO Gears. The sales pitch was wonderful and the things they promised sounded like this was the step we wanted to take. After spending several hundred dollars for add-words and website help we received nothing but one phone call from some wanting a product that we don't offer. Everything we were sold on and promised was a lie. This company claims to pay directly to google to boost your website and and sales and from first hand experience, DO NOT USE THEM! The customer service is awful! The marketing manager Jarrod Kennedy, had the nerve to tell us that the one phone call we did receive came from a dummy because he chose to call us... I personally spoke to that person twice and he was a mentally disabled person. We informed Jarrod of this and he had no remorse...

We were recommended to seo gears by homestead.com (A website builder) in august 2013. We hired seo gears to handle both our seo content marketing campaign as well as our ppc campaign. Our average monthly spend with seo gears has been about $5000. 00. Seo gears created many backlinks to our website, however we recently discovered that nearly 50% of the backlinks developed by them are bad links, which were not created using google's recommended white hat practices.

We are jewelry company. All of our products are jewelry. For example. One of our product categories is rhinestone sliders. We have discovered that seo gears has created bad links to our website by linking us to automobile sliders, which obviously have nothing to do with jewelry sliders. There are so many low and bad quality links to our website, all of which were created by seo gears, that google severely penalized our website with their latest release of penguin. We contacted our rep (Ryan whitten) at seo gears and alerted him to the fact they created all these bad links and asked that they remove and / or disavow all of them. His answer was no. They would not remove the bad links. Furthermore, we asked them to give us all data collected on our ppc campaign during the past year and surprisingly seo gears again refused to give us the data for which we paid. This company is a fraud. They have no idea of how to implement a quality seo campaign. They are also a complete rip - off. They take your money, produce a half - assed work product, and then effectively steal your money by refusing to give you the data that you already paid for.

Seo gears have put us in the position of having to sue them for the information. Unfortunately, even if they are compelled to give us the data, it will probably be too late for it to be of any use to us. Regardless of the outcome, thieves need to be prosecuted, and we will pursue a legal remedy in court. Beware: seo gears is no different than a thief who robs you in the street. The company has no integrity and is run by crooks. Stay away!

After three months of billing my company for a marketing service that was not provided i tried to cancel my
Account and still could not reach anyone from this company. I am very dissatisfied with the marketing services that they provide and have recently found out that i was farmed out to this company recently by homestead
Who i had for a long that provided these services. I am very satisfied with homestead but beware of this
Seo gears listed as ie hosting support on my credit card statement.

I have been a customer of Homestead, a website hosting company for 14 years. While Homestead is an excellent company, they have been partnering with some less than desirable companies and services. For approx. 2 years, homestead was offering a website SEO program. It was around 100.00 a month. They never really managed to get me in the top 3. I then did some of my own SEO and managed to hold a # 1 or #2 position. In 2013, Google changed the algorithyms. After i noticed my site falling in rank, I called Homestead. They said they apologized for dropping the ball and that SEO GEARS is a whole new concept. They issued me a 300.00 credit to stay with the service and try it. They promised regular phone support. This is what i experienced 1) Either delays of a week or lack of return e-mails with no answers to my calls. 2) A slip in ratings to the point where I was below 100 or more in some keywords. 3) They built more backlinks to foreign websites, etc. when i am small business trying to drive local traffic. After all of this, i read this website and the complaints sounded very familiar. I then canceled my subscription and halted the charges on my credit card. The end result is they wanted to keep working on my SEO, but wanted to manage my pay per click campaign. I offered to consider it only after they showed me some positive results in my SEO, but they did not want to accept the challenge. The bottom line is...Homestead is great, but dont buy into their SEO services they sell !

On 1/3/14 we signed up with a company called SEO Gears for their Aggressive Marketing Package for our website. It cost $499.00 per month and included five key phrases and 2, 000 links to be entered into the three search engines of Google Yahoo, and Bing. The Marketing Manager that was assigned to us, JOEY BELK, told us, via an e-mail sent to us, that we had to wait 3 to 6 weeks for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to post them.

Towards the end of January 2014, we asked SEO Gears to furnish me with some sort of tangible evidence that indeed SEO Gears was putting up 2, 000 links on the worldwide web. Otherwise, how do we know if SEO Gears is doing ANYTHING? SEO Gears refused to reply to my repeated inquiries, which we sent via e-mail to Joey Belk.

Soon after, we found posted on Google unauthorized meta-descriptions about web pages on my website. We did not know why they were there since we, and Joey Belk via e-mail had previously agreed to the meta-descriptions that were to be used. To make matters worse, the unauthorized meta-descriptions were anti-marketing in nature. These bad meta-descriptions had been taken out of context so they 1) did not tell the visitor what my website was about and 2) won’t lead the visitor to other parts of my website to optimize the chance that the visitor will stay on and return to it for more viewing. For example, on one of the web pages in my website called “How to Fight Back” was posted on Google with the following meta-description of “...happiness is generated within your solar plexus...”

We had an agreement via e-mail with SEO Gears - Joey Belk, Marketing Manager - to post five specific web pages, each with a particular key phrase and meta-description into the three above search engines of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. We had even inserted them into the page settings of my website builder. Instead, We discovered on Google and later on Yahoo and Bing that either five unauthorized web pages with authorized meta-descriptions or five authorized web pages with unauthorized meta-descriptions had been posted and the postings changed daily.

When we asked my Marketing Manager, Joey Belk, what was going on he told me that SEO Gears did not post these bad anti-marketing meta-descriptions, Google did. Then he misled us by instructing us to “re-crawl” the links in Google and told us to wait twenty-four hours for results. We did as he had advised but it did NOT remove the bad anti-marketing unauthorized meta-descriptions nor replace them with the good marketing authorized meta-descriptions that we and Joey Belk, our Marketing Manager, had already previously agreed upon in writing via e-mail to post on these three search engines.

So we contacted our technical support advisor at Homestead, THOMAS DAWSON, for assistance regarding the above. He sent us an e-mail promising that he will take care of it and telling us that it may take up to a week to do so. A week later all three above search engines were still posting either the wrong web pages with the right meta-descriptions or the right web pages with the wrong meta-descriptions. The five key phrases along with their corresponding web pages and correlating meta-descriptions that we had paid $499.00 for were NOT getting posted on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

During the interim we noticed a new meta-description on Google that we had never ever seen before. It did not even come from any of our web pages on our website. It was flat out libel and slander – false derogatory statements – claiming that my website was worth $0 dollars and had 0 visitors. Our website already has had 50 visits in the one month that it has been operational. It is brand new.

During the last week of January 2014 we went on SEO Gears Website to discover that our website had a ranking of 0. By now we ought to have had some sort or ranking as three weeks had already passed and SEO Gears ought to have done some work on marketing my website. Getting suspicious we went on the Internet and lo and behold we found a lot of other people who were going through the same thing we was with SEO Gears. For them it was even worse. Some of them had spent thousands of dollars and waited many months only to be disappointed with 0 rankings from SEO Gears. All of them were in agreement that SEO Gears is a SCAM OPERATION.

What bothered me the most about SEO Gears is that it was not enough that they steal peoples’ money by not giving any service for the money that they were taking, but SEO Gears is also maliciously and viciously anti-marketing instead of marketing peoples’ websites. Why? Are the people who work for SEO Gears all INSANE! If SEO Gears worships greed all they have to do is be an honest business that adheres to ethical business practices and they will have so many clients they won’t know what to do with all of the money they are making.

I contacted Joey Belk, Marketing Manager, Jeff, Vice President of SEO Gears, Eli, Director of SEO Gears, as well as, Thomas Dawson, Technical Support, and his supervisor RParker regarding my demand for a full refund of $499.00. Eli, Director of SEO Gears rejected my e-mail. It came back to my spam box posted “rejected”. Jeff and RParker ignored my e-mails. Joey Belk sent me a harassing e-mail that accused me of being a bully by assuming that I deliberately typed on my e-mails to him Joey Belch when I had accidentally made a typo. Imagine that. Joey Belk is stealing my money and I am the bully?

Thomas Dawson…I had sent to Thomas Dawson and his Supervisor RParker the best letter of commendation that any individual can ever receive from any one. I still have the copy of it. Thomas Dawson had done a great job as my technical support advisor for Homestead. So imagine my surprise when he betrayed me by siding with Joey Belk and SEO Gears corrupt organization against me in a BullC**p e-mail that he sent me letting me know in between the lines that not only was he not going to help me get a refund but he was going to help Joey Belk steal another month’s worth of $499.00 by lying to be that the search engines of Google, Yahoo, and Bing will not make any changes in postings until 2/1/14, which was when my next month’s billing cycle began with SEO Gears. Thereby allowing SEO Gears to steal yet another $499.00 from my wallet. Wow! Like they say no good deed shall go unpunished.

The only settlement we will agree to with SEO Gears is a full refund of the $499.00 that SEO Gears has stolen from us by taking my money but refusing to give us ANY services. We are very happy with Homestead and so we will continue our account with them by paying the $14.99 they charge us per month for their Gold Web Builder Package that we signed up for in the month of December in the Year of 2013. That is, if SEO Gears does not maliciously and viciously retaliate against us for our having the audacity to try and recover the money that it cheated us out of by shutting down our website with Homestead.

We have all the documents proving all of the above. We cannot upload them into your website but we can send them to you via e-mail if you furnish us with your e-mail address.

Sincerely,

Michael Laham and Elana Laham

SEO Gears Sucks! I signed up when I created my website for $99 mo to "get on the first page of Google." 92 % retention rate. They post the same article to many different sites which hurts your SEO. When I asked them what back-links they have created they said it's a secret and can't say. The reason they have a low initial cancel rate is because they try to tell people who don't have knowledge of SEO that it takes time and you have to trust us, that is what they tried to do to me I have had other people do my seo and they always show you what backlinks or work they do. (shady) Any reputable seo firm will tell you what work they are doing. DON'T Go With This Company...