Boostability's performance was exactly as lousy as demonstrated in reviews from the past six years and as you can see in the dozens of "unrecommended" reviews below. Though the employees were pleasant enough and some of the fresh graduates bright, no one showed ownership for the enterprise as a whole, and Boostability repeatedly failed to honor their assurances in providing SEO and SMM.
Given supposed high rankings on industry websites (that I have since learned may be pay-to-play), I originally purchased both SEO and SMM on the condition that Boostability deliver compelling business plans with benchmarks. Since my business targets a specific niche, the salesperson Kevin promised me exceptional expertise from account managers for SEO and SMM, strategic plans from both teams, the creation and management of many ads to target and refine my Facebook advertising, and running the Facebook ads from my Facebook account so I could retain ownership of the data. None of this happened in Boostability's SEO or SMM services.
Regarding SEO, the SEO team led by Claire proposed two sets of keywords, and seemed to have done zero research into choosing good keywords or even to have read the one paragraph summary I wrote them about my business, which would have helped them target their keywords along the four dimensions my business needs. First, they targeted six keywords, some that appeared to have as little as one search a month, three of which differed by the same word (e.g. "expert tutoring" and "expert tutoring services"), and which would be expected to bring untargeted traffic to my website. After I told them to go back and do their homework, they came back with six keywords (three of which again differed by one word), which were extremely competitive with no credible plan they could express of how I could credibly compete against companies 1,000 times bigger with a much greater head start. Their supposed analytics team seems to have done no traffic or competitiveness analysis; at least the account manager could not show me any nor knew it without looking it up as I was speaking with her. Further, they explicitly avoided any benchmarks of performance of work that I could count on after the first or sixth month. Time after time, I asked her for data, a compelling business case, or any shred of evidence to support their claims. Time after time, Boostability simply told me to trust them.
Regarding SMM, Boostability also largely failed to deliver. Though Boostabilty sales had promised to provide account managers with substantial experience, their social media team included three staff two of whom apparently about 6 months out of college and one who had a year and a half of experience. The team and their manager flatly refused to run the number of ads to target and refine my prospect niche or as promised to run the account from my Facebook account. While the industry norm is for management fees to be 10%-40% the ad spend, Boostability's management fees were 4-6 times the ad spend. They never let me know who they were targeting and refused to run my account from my Facebook account, which would allow me to retain ownership over the data, optimize the ads, and scale any ads that might be successful. Though the regular Facebook posts were not bad, the three Facebook ads had no strategy they chose to share, refused to apply standard A/B testing, appeared to generate likes from unqualified prospects, and was not run from my account.
When I complained repeatedly from the beginning citing the sales assurances, which included the ability to get a refund if these assurances were not adhered to, Boostability's account teams refused to correct the situation and then said they could not perform as promised. Instead of immediately refunding my money due to services not rendered, Kay only offered a refund on condition I sign an overly aggressive contract that:
* offered no benefit that was not already rightfully mine--the right to a full refund as promised
* pretended Boostability had demonstrated "full compliance with the terms of the Contract" when they had not followed through on their promises
* asked me to "forever [agree] to release, and discharge Boostability...from any and all claims" including those "occurring in the future"
* an additional clause of a type denounced by the FTC, prohibited from form contracts under federal law, enforcement of which Yelp warns against, that is incompatible with the BBB's Standards for Trust, and that would aim to prohibit me from writing this review
This is for a situation where Boostability failed to honor its sales commitments and for which I could simply initiate a credit card chargeback. Boostability manager Kay ultimately processed a refund; however, overall, Boostability failed to honor its sales assurances for SEO or SMM, had no concept of strategic planning or credibly proving their value, and made the process to get them to perform or to get a refund painful. read more