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Submitshop is a web marketing company. In their own words, in fact, they are “a search engine optimization submission, web promotion, internet marketing and ranking placement company.” Are they any good? Let’s find out.
Who and What is SubmitShop?
Submitshop is a generalized web marketing company with a lot of buzzwords in their profile. They talk about search engine submission, internet marketing, and web promotion services, which is fine. So what do they actually offer?
As an internet marketing agency, Submitshop handles a lot of different forms of web-based growth. They divide their services into four categories.
Category 1 is SEO. They handle on-site organic SEO, by using keyword optimization and research to guide content production. They can take on local SEO for both B2B and B2C marketing. They do link building, which I’ll discuss in a bit more detail later. They’ll optimize a site for mobile SEO, and they work with resellers to sell their SEO services.
Category 2 is outreach. In this section, they list blogger outreach, content writing, conversion rate optimization, content marketing, and digital PR as different services. All of these are basically different facets of the same practice, but hey, targeting different segments of the audience with different synonyms isn’t a bad idea.
Category 3 is submission services. They will submit your sites to directories, submit your articles to content directories, submit your RSS feed to RSS directories, submit blogs to blog rings, hit up regional directories when applicable, and so on. Other services in this section include UK directory submission, webmaster directory submission, “guaranteed directory listing”, and blog commenting.
Their fourth category is simple “other” and includes a bunch of additional services. These include social media marketing, management, advertising, and content marketing, as well as reputation management.
They also offer citation services, with a lot of local services including local citation auditing, business listing, and citation management. Finally, they handle paid media, with PPC management, lead generation, display advertising, and email marketing, with analytics on top of it all.
Free Tools
Before I get into their paid services, I should mention that Submitshop has a handful of free SEO tools available for anyone to use.
The link checker is a tool that, well, doesn’t do much. You plug in a URL and it will scrape that one specific page – not an entire website, just the page – and will show you the links on that page. It categorizes them as internal or external, tells you their HTTP status code, and tells you if they’re considered a healthy link or not. What makes a link healthy? Who knows! It’s not a very useful tool in my opinion.
The indexing checker presumably checks a list of URLs to see if they’re present in search engines. I have no idea what it does specifically, though, because when I try to test it out, it throws a fatal error in its PHP.
The social bookmarking tool allows you to… generate a social media post? You plug in a URL and a title and it gives you a list of social bookmarking sites – ranging from Twitter and Tumblr to Myspace and LiveJournal – where you can click the button and post. Why the hell you would ever need a basic browser tool like this, I will never know.
The website submission tool is apparently a search engine submission tool. It submits your site to “over 100” search engines. When you run it, you see power players on the list like “snipsnap” and “xianguo” and “amagle” and “pingomatic”. I don’t know about you, but none of those seem important for my traffic sources.
The online meta tag analyzer is a simple analysis of meta information with an SEO audit attached. It’s actually surprisingly in-depth, but it also redirects you to an insecure page with a layout that looks like a page failed to render. Ironic that their best tool looks the worst.
The bulk DA checker is simply a scan that can check the Moz Domain Authority of up to 25 URLs at a time. Sure, that’s fine, they’re just using the Open Site Explorer API they probably pay for.
The XML sitemap generator does what it says on the tin; it crawls your page to generate a basic XML sitemap based on the URL you plug in. It’s fine, but there are a ton of generators that work just as well out there.
Finally, the robots.txt generator lets you create your own robots.txt file. Plug in a directory you want noindexed and choose the useragent you want to block, and generate your file. Frankly, there’s not much reason to use this, you don’t really need to block specific useragents from specific directories, and there are easier ways to do it.
Paid Services
Submitshop has a wide range of paid services, as I listed up above. I’m not going to go through every single one of them to go through their pricing and features; you can do that by visiting their site yourself. I’m going to pick a few that I think would be most relevant or irrelevant and discuss them.
First up, their organic SEO services. It’s not a bad idea to hire a company that can handle your basic day to day SEO, so what do you get and how much does it cost?
They have six tiers of service for SEO. The basic plan gets you an audit of your homepage – just your homepage – and a check for Google penalties on your domain. It lets you specify two focus keywords, gives you two guest posts, gives you two local citations, two link profiles, and ten social sharing posts. All of that costs you $150.
You can bump up the numbers to five keywords, five guest posts, four citations and profiles, and 20 social posts, and add in “top social media profiles setup” for $350. I don’t know what “top profile setup” is, but it sounds meaningless.
For $500, you get even more higher numbers and they add in internal page analysis. So it costs you five hundred bucks before they even look at a page other than your homepage. I dunno about you, but that seems steep.
For $1,000 they will bump up the numbers even more, give you a complete SEO audit, will install Google analytics and the Google search console, optimize your title and meta tags, and do some keyword research. I really, really don’t think anyone should every be paid $500 just to link a Google analytics account. Really? Seriously?
For $1,500, they add in keyword mapping and they’ll write blog posts for your site instead of just guest posts. For reference, at this point you can choose 20 focus keywords, they’ll give you 22 guest posts, and 200 social media posts, so that’s the scale of service you’re looking at.
Finally, for $2,000, they add in structured data and a backlink audit. Unless you’re optimizing a site with tens of thousands of pages, I doubt your backlink audit is worth 2K.
The second service I’d like to look at is their content generation service. This is a fancy way of saying “we write blog posts for you”, and they have three “tiers” of service, which just means the tiers are different lengths. A 500-word blog post with “quality writers” and “informative blog writing” and plagiarism detection costs you $15. For a 1,000-word blog post, with US and UK copywriting – so they don’t focus on US or UK English for their shorter posts? – plus “peer editing” and “hassle free service” is $40. So, question here. With hassle free service as an upsell, does that mean they hassle you at the lower level?
The third tier is a 1,500-word blog post with “expert writers” and unlimited revisions, and “complete content ownership” which sounds to me like they don’t give you he copyright for the cheaper, shorter posts. It’s $60.
These are content mill prices, and not even high quality content mill prices. These are a couple steps above PBN spinning prices. I wouldn’t be confident in what I get for those prices, to be honest.
The third service I want to look at is directory submission, because directory submission is basically a dead technique as far as I’m concerned. It’s exceedingly gray hat at best, and spammy at worst.
At Submitshop, they charge you $16 to submit your site to 100 directories for 1-2 days. They double that for $30, with a week-long duration for your links. $70 gets you 500 submissions and a dedicated account manager, which I guess could be useful? This continues to scale up until you’re paying $250 for 2,000 directory submissions over the course of 20 days. Keep in mind that these are global directories, so they may not even be applicable to your audience.
Red Flags
In my mind, there are a lot of little red flags with regards to Submitshop, all of which add up to a less than stellar impression of their company. Some of them can be written off as quirks of the creator, but all together they just don’t make me excited to use them.
First of all, they talk about search engine submission as a primary service in their company bio. Anyone who knows anything about internet marketing knows that search engine submission is largely a scam. Anyone who claims to submit your site to dozens or hundreds of search engines may well be doing that, but think about it: how many search engines can you even name? How many of them have any significant amount of traffic? The big ones, like Google and Bing, don’t require submission in the first place. There’s not even a real way to submit a site to one of them.
I’m also a stickler for little details. Submitshop, for example, has “in business since 15 years” in their bio, but their header logo is celebrating 19 years. Have they simply not updated their about page in four years? That’s never a good sign. If you don’t care enough to update one of your core pages in nearly half a decade, I really don’t want to trust you with something important to my site.
Their selection of free tools range from literally broken to actually fairly useful, but the very fact that one of them is broken is kind of another red flag. On its own, maybe I’d write it off as a temporary issue, but combined with everything else, it’s not looking good.
As far as services are concerned, I’m always hesitant to recommend any company that puts a huge amount of faith in directory submission. Directories are almost always very low quality and the links you get from them are virtually worthless. Sure, maybe in massive numbers they can have an impact, but a small handful of high quality guest posts can do even more for you.
Oh, and if you hunt down these powerful web marketers on social media, you can see such great results as their Facebook profile having about three posts in the last four years, with a whopping 227 followers. Not the high-tier enterprise-grade company they make themselves out to be.
Basically, for a company that has been in business for nearly two decades, nothing at all gives me confidence in their ability to be a worthwhile marketing agency. I would stay away from it entirely.
