TechRadar Verdict
The HOTH can help manage SEO no matter what your budget thanks to scalable services priced a la carte. However, keep in mind that the content placement isn’t always the most organic.
Pros
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Very scalable SEO management services
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Affordable link building options
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SEO experts available for consultation
Cons
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Sites for link placement don’t get much traffic
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Different pricing tiers based on writing quality
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Less than transparent pricing
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No direct phone or email support
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The HOTH—short for hit’em over the head—is an SEO agency capable of fully managing your business’s online presence and SEO tools. Also, it’s a viable option for a la carte SEO services, such as hiring ghostwriters from The HOTH to write blog posts and generate backlinks, or, you can have the company run a Google Ad campaign for new lead generation. Other SEO agencies will also find The HOTH useful for their own clients as this company offers white-label reseller services.
Is The HOTH the right choice for building your SEO? Let’s take a closer look at what this agency offers.
The HOTH: Plans and Pricing
Pricing at The HOTH depends considerably on what services you need. Annoyingly, on the main page, the pricing is opaque, unless you provide a name and email to create an account.
A main service of The HOTH is link building, which means creating backlinks to your website posted on existing websites with good search engine rankings. The HOTH calls these packages ‘Foundations,’ and offers them in three sizes: Small, Medium, and Large. Small costs $60 and gets you 6 backlinks across three blog posts. Medium costs $200 and gets you 32 site links distributed across 4 blogs, 1 with a single post and 3 with 5 posts each. Large costs $250 for 48 links, among 8 blogs across 32 posts. There is also an upgrade to a Premium plan that upgrades to ‘Premium English,’ raising a question of what is used for the lower plans, non-premium English?
Another example of a service The HOTH offers is a managed Google Ads campaign known as HothPPC. For $500, the company will design a custom landing page on your website, research keywords and your competition, and run an ad campaign for you. Be aware that this service requires a minimum $1,000 ad buy.
Of course, the HOTH also offers a fully managed SEO service, which it calls HOTH X. HOTH X starts at $500 per month with a $250 setup fee. For that price of admission, The HOTH does keyword research, competition analysis, and design a custom strategy for your business’ online presence. beyond that, the company then gives you $500 worth of link building and content services every month. HOTH X plans can be modified to fit any budget up to $60,000 (in budget friendly $500 increments).
The HOTH: Features
The HOTH offers a wide array of SEO services and tools for business owners and other agencies.
SEO management
The main attraction for the The HOTH’s is its SEO management services. This service puts an array of services at your disposal:SEO specialists, web designers, and ghostwriters, which allows you to dramatically boost your online presence in minimal time. The HOTH works well with just about any budget, which makes it an attractive choice for setting a price tag for SEO, and then not thinking about it again.
A particularly effective use of The HOTH is the creation of a blog for your website and then setting it to autopilot. You can either offer a list of post titles, or give The HOTH’s writers free rein to create content for your website. For sites built on WordPress, The HOTH can even post your content on your schedule- without any additional input.
The HOTH also manages your website’s entire SEO or assists in running a pay-per-click ad campaign. Once engaged, its SEO specialists then manage the keyword research and ad copy for you. A web designer can create a custom landing page for your website for visitors to be directed towards, and which can be used to generate new leads.
Other managed services that The HOTH offers include video production, website optimization, and reputation management. Each of these can be a pillar to helping you rank your site higher in search engine results.
Link Placement
Link placement, an important part of The HOTH’s Foundation package, remains one of the company’s most popular services. Let’s take a closer look.
Backlinks can be ordered, and you’re essentially hiring a writer to write a guest post on an existing blog. There is a choice to link to more than one page on your website with any order. Furthermore, you get to choose the anchor text for every link.
One notable item, as mentioned above, is that there are two pricing tiers for content writing, as it depends on whether you want ‘Standard English’ or ‘Premium English.’ We found this somewhat disconcerting, as The HOTH makes a promise of high-quality, original writing for every project.
Many of the blogs that The HOTH contributes content to are certainly well-established sites, but visitor counts can be seriously low for the amount of blog content on them. We found one example site that had roughly as many monthly visitors as blog posts. It seems rather likely that The HOTH owns these established sites itself, or that they are primarily used for backlinking, so managing expectations, we’d say to not expect much organic traffic on your posts.
The HOTH: Interface and use
We find The HOTH as incredibly simple to use, and is part of the attraction to this platform. You simply need to input your website’s URL to be underway with most of the services. More granular control is available as well— such as being able to specify the anchor text for backlinks, or offering titles and content outlines for the blog posts.
Another highlight of The HOTH for agencies reselling the company’s services or businesses with a large marketing budget, is the user dashboard. Go ahead, and easily dig into any order in your history visualizing the ads that were run, the links that were placed, and the results obtained. This becomes a significant benefit as even non-SEO experts can easily track whether the campaigns that The HOTH is utilizing are producing the desired results.
The HOTH: Support
Customer support for The HOTH is available by a support portal or through live chat. There are no hours of operation listed, no direct email, and no direct number for phone support.
The website has a comprehensive online knowledgebase, which is quite useful for navigating the user dashboard and API after you’ve already ordered a service. If you have further questions about what services your company needs, there is also the option to schedule a call with an SEO expert at the company, but we would prefer for them to be more accessible.
The HOTH: The competition
The reality is that there aren’t too many companies offering the precise range of services as The HOTH. That being said, for those primarily interested in link building, Love To Link is a strong alternative. While Love to Link is more expensive than The HOTH, its posts often end up on blogs with a lot more organic traffic, which translates to getting more SEO bang for your buck.
The HOTH: Final verdict
The HOTH is a strong entry for business owners wanting to put the task of managing their online presence into someone else’s hands. The fact that you can buy content creation, link building, and campaign management services piecemeal is an advantage as you can still use The HOTH within a limited budget. Overall, The HOTH does perform well, but keep in mind that many of the third-party sites where your links appear have low organic traffic.
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