Boostability
Reviews and Complaints

I worked here for 3 years, worked my way through a lot of positions because I excelled. I was considered one of the top employees in almost every position I held.

Furthermore, I had some AMAZING team leads and managers, so this review isn't for them.

1. When the BLM movement became critical in 2020, I spoke to HR about holding a book club for people who wanted to help with anti-racism. I was told no, and had to fight to be heard. I had to have numerous conversations convincing Taud in HR to please hear the voices of BIPOC and to make their safety in our company a priority. They finally let me have the book club, but wouldn't let me advertise it because they didn't want to "hurt anyone's feelings". Then, they ended up adding onto the website how inclusive they were. So, they were performative in their allyship, but not really caring about their BIPOC employees or how we as a company could support them especially during tumultuous times when they really needed it.

2. When I found another opportunity, I gave my 2 weeks notice as a courtesy. They let me go a day before I hit my sales quota, so they wouldn't have to pay me for my month of sales that I had earned. It was extremely shady and disappointing to see them treat an employee who had won multiple awards within the company, and who had given such incredible service to them and their customers. I'm extremely disappointed with their behavior, and they do not represent their own motto of "Be excellent to everyone" or "honestly be honest".

3. Matt Tennison, the VP of sales was extremely inappropriate and made a lot of women, including me, feel uncomfortable. I worked under him for a few months, and when we were supposed to do the required trainings for sexual harassment/inclusion etc. he told me to just fast-forward through it and guess the answers, since that's what he did. He scans women up and down making them feel like a piece of meat, and would make inappropriate comments and jokes consistently. I mentioned this at my exit interview, but not while working there because I saw that money and sales were more important than protecting the people that worked there (see the BLM movement comment above to paint a picture of that.) and I didn't want to put myself in a vulnerable position with my job. I would tell women who work here or want to work here to steer clear of him. Furthermore, I did want to mention it since I know the company will not be holding him accountable, but my Google review will.

I would have given one star, except I did have a great experience with a lot of people, managers, willingness to work with my schedule as a single parent, etc. but the things that were poor, were extremely poor. Do better.

PS I added a photo of one example of awards I had one for being a top performer, just in case.

well, what can I say? Very bad. I am very disappointed that I used your service.
I worked with a very unprofessional guy named Mike who didn't know how to do his job right. I got no customers, no results. I found it out when I started checking what exactly he was doing. I paid my money for absolutely nothing.
I understand that this company is relatively new, but it doesn't mean your service has to be terrible.

A lot of things should be improved. They are not ready to deal with customers, they don't deserve any cent of yours.
The most important thing is their customer service department.
I dealt with five people from customer service and all I can say is that they are a little bit clueless. Not trained enough. Sometimes they have no idea what I was asking about even though they have to know those things much better than me.
I think they were in a rush trying to start their business as soon as possible.
Well, as people say, haste makes waste...

When they spoke to me about doing seo work I made it clear I wanted them to focus on on-site seo before off-site. After the first month they only did off-site. I spoke to my manager and told her that I didn't want to continue for another month until we reviewed it together. They went ahead and charged me for the following month and then wouldn't prorate it when I wanted to cancel. Also, the 'content' they wrote for me was so poor I had to disavow the links. I do not recommend them.
2017 Update: We received no refund from Boostability and the content was very poorly written. Notwithstanding the backlinks they provided did harm to our website Google ranking. Whoever, Mr. Shelton is at Boostability better look in the mirror, because Boostability is operating the same online scam today, that they did when we hired them. Don't believe us? Just look at all of the negative reviews this business has online. The only positive reviews this business appears to have online is those written by Boostability employees.

I loved my job, the work I was doing, and the people I was working with; the company as a whole, however, was a BIG joke. (This is all written from a management perspective) Here is why:
1. They underpay their staff significantly. This was brought up on multiple occasions, only to be met with your typical "we're looking into it" response.

2. They claim to have a transparent atmosphere and hold an Ask Me Anything meeting with the execs. You really can ask them anything, but their answers are not up for discussion, and they are not willing to look at any ideas besides their own.

3. Over the last 4-5 months they have gone through at least 3 rounds of lay-offs (they like to think of them as forced attrition). When you are laid off they provide a "generous" severance package that amounts to one weeks pay, but only if you sign a gag order to not bad mouth them. I have to believe this is because they know they are failing, but don't want to let that particular cat out of the bag just yet.

4. The company is only 6-7 years old, and its first several years saw a ton of growth. Once things slowed down, they slowed WAY down. They have also been losing customers at an alarming rate, but more on that in a bit. Their Q2 Goal for 2016 was a huge bust, so for Q3 they set an easy goal of 1 net (new) customer. Execs knew we hit goal at least a month before the end of Q3, but did not trust the rank and file enough to give them that info (those were the actual words spoken by the executive team). They have so little faith and trust in their employees that they were worried that everyone would stop trying.

5. Promoting people not based on merit, but on who they can pay the least amount. This happened time after time, and because such standard practice that most qualified people stopped applying for jobs internally. People are also hired largely based on their relationship to execs, not based on qualifications.

6. To go right along with # 5, they get rid of their most skilled employees first with lay offs, most likely because the most skilled are also the highest paid.

7. The quality of work is extremely poor. They say that the reason for this is that they sell the products at such a low price, that they are essentially selling low quality, and a failure rate. Quantity is most definitely the goal, even at the expense of quality; this has caused a lot of in-fighting amongst departments.

8. They have a very hard time keeping clients on board, and typically lose clients within 6 months to a year. A big reason for this is the poor quality of work, the constant shuffling of clients from one account manager to the next, and general frustration on the part of clients. They also provide absolutely no products that clients can move to once their initial SEO campaign is done.

9. Other SEO companies will often not hire Boostability employees because they do not believe, based on previous experience, that Boostability employees know what they are doing. They say this based on former Boostability clients that have switched over to those legitimate SEO companies; those clients complain and compare the poor work Boostability did, with the work being done for them by their new SEO provider.

Finally, the executive team, as a whole, is pretty unfriendly and unapproachable.

President/COO- Got the job because his brother started the company.

CIO-Very arrogant, and seems to think that no one outside of the executive team is capable of a good idea.

CFO & CMO- Are both really nice guys, and the exceptions out of the group.

VP of Fulfillment-Got his job because he was one of the first employees. Not because he was good at his job, but because he was present. This guy could not manage a garage sale. #thisishowweboost

VP of Support/Account Managers-Very unfriendly, and will not interact with the common folk unless she is forced.

VP of Sales- Also very self-centered, and a bit of a bully.

VP of HR-has the warmth and personality of a wet blanket

I think I dodged a bullet. They called often and I finally picked up to listen to what they had to say. They told me everything I wanted to hear, and what I've heard from countless other SEO companies. They told me how wonderful they are and what they could do for my site (www.kempermedical.com) and then handed me off to "his manager" who took up the selling to another level. While he talked I was on review sites and as soon as I mentioned the high number of single star reviews they had, I was hung up on. I thought maybe we had been cut off somehow so I called the number back that they called me from. I got a message that this number had been disconnected. They never called back.

I'm learning SEO on my own. Pay yourself the money you would pay them and learn this skill. I need to learn it anyway and so do you.

Well I had a long hi pressure sales person Jesse .call twice today pushing their product. He looked at my web site and said it was looking great. Asked me what I expecting of my web site. Asked where I wanted to be placed etc...then gave me a few words or phrase to google search, bingo there I was on the 1st page. However, no one would ever think to word the search phrase in that fashion. I am glad I ran across this site to read abut other dis satisfaction... I will keep my credit card in my pocket. I got taken once by a web hosting company in Phoenix AZ. Named ipower - STAY FAR AWAY FROM CROOKS since then I research everything in depth and prefer to spend my money where I can actually get my hands around somebody's throat in person.

Here is my boostability experience. I own a political website that features impartial summaries of political views and scandals.

Before hiring them, I spoke with a rep at length. I was clear as to what I expected. I wanted someone to look at my site, look at my competitors, and then tell me what I was doing wrong and assist me in developing organic traffic. That service simply was not performed. Furthermore, the service that they did provide was of extremely poor quality.

After hiring boostability, I sent an email with the same information I gave to the rep I spoke with before hiring the company - a list of my competitors and a list of possible keywords. A few days later, I received an email with "on-site recommendations". These recommendations consisted of changing an image tag and adding an h1 to my home page that contained the phrase "political representatives updates online." Although this phrase made no sense to me, as it seemed to have never been googled before, I made the changes and called the rep to ask questions. I was never able to get ahold of him.

No long after that, boostability created 6 articles that highlight this phrase and link it to my home page. The meaningless of this phrase can be seen by doing a simple google search for "political representative updates online" and seeing that the very articles they wrote appear on the first page results for that phrase.

I contacted their management and asked how these keywords could possibly help my website achieve traffic. They agreed that this was poor work and told me that future work would not only be better, but that the past work would be made up for in some manner since it would obviously present no benefit to my website and was not something I agreed to ahead of time.

I expected that there would be some research done on my site with some suggestion for on-site optimization, some suggestions for keywords to target, and some plan for the future of my site. I sent emails, as I had done in the past, with lists of my competitors and other things.

After receiving more emails simply asking me what keywords I wanted to target, I gave up on convincing them that this was the very reason I hired their company and suggested going after the phrases "political positions" and "election calendar." I sent them an email denoting which pages to attach those phrases. Boostability then posted three articles linking the phrase "election calendar" to my site and one linking the phrase "political positions".

One of these articles proclaimed the benefits of purchasing an election calendar. I know that google has no idea what the article is actually about and doesn't care that I don't sell election calendars, or even that such items do not exist. However, the article demonstrates a level of competence far below adequate. This is further exemplified by the fact that the article is not linked to the page I asked it to be linked to in my email. A second article, also highlighting the phrase "election calendar, " also links to my home page and not my election calendar page.

This means that after paying several hundred dollars, I received 10 articles links. All of the sites containing those articles have almost no domain authority or page rank. The sites seem to exist only to provide boostability customers with links. Six of those articles link the main page page of my site to the phrase "political representative updates online, " something that can only be detrimental to my site in the long run. Two articles link my home page to the phrase "election calendar, " one links the election calendar page to the phrase "election calendar, " and a final one links the phrase "political positions" to my home page.

That makes two articles which have any possibility of providing a benefit for my site for the keywords that I chose.

The only SEO that Boostability seems to be capable of doing is taking whatever phrase that you give to them, and then churning out meaningless articles linking that phrase to your site. They couldn't even perform this task correctly.

In addition, this practice of using low quality sites solely to anchor keywords to domains is frowned upon by google and was smashed by Panda and other updates. If these articles have any affect on your rankings, which is doubtful, it will be negative.

What Boostability attempted to do to me was not new. They target an unused phrase and then get your site on that first page of results for a phrase that is never searched. In this manner, they can make the claim that "they got you to the first page." However, this is meaningless if the phrase you rank highly for has never once been googled.

Stay away from this company.

Boostability is not a business worthy of your attention except to run! We cancelled not even waiting the 90 days and they have been charging our card every month since. My accountant did not know I had cancelled the service and did not question the charge until I told her we cancelled that service 11 months ago! then she gave me a printout of all the months I had been charged. They say they will not give me my money back since I did not cancel. There is no way I'm going to let that slide 85 dollars a month for 11 months! I don't think so! I'll update later.

We had signed up for a 3 month contract with Boostability paying $300 per month. At the end of the contract period, they made no contact with us and happily continued charging our card. We saw the charge initiated on a Friday evening and contacted them early Monday morning asking to cancel our account and refund the payment. Remember this was payment in advance for work to be done in the following month. Yet the account manager Colton Miller gave a flimsy excuse that work scheduling had already been done and after much insistence from our end, he agreed to a partial refund of $200. The same information was also sent back and forth and through the hoops via email. We were told that the refund would be credited in a week.

Three weeks passed by and we didn't see any refund. So essentially we were back to square one! Called them again and this time we were told they would be NO refund! That's right, we have it on record that they would be giving us $200 and based on their current position, it was all a BIG LIE.

Do yourself and your wallet a favor and DO NOT sign up with Boostability. They are crooks running a mediocre business and trying to swindle people by any means possible. DISGUSTING.

Very dissappointed with this service. They did not contact me after the first week of the sale. And then blamed me for not following directions of an email that they never sent to me. Tried to cancel the service at the beginning of the month, but this service would not refund me the $350 for the month. The links they built for me were not relevent. Most were never picked up by any of the search engines. This company does not do quality SEO and has terrible customer service. Do not use them.

I was paying a minimal amount to try and get some traffic to my website, I don't know if I would have had better results if I paid more, but I had no increased traffic--- I wrote an email and asked for cancellation, they claimed they never got it and so they could not back date my cancellation, because I could have "doctored" the old email that I sent to them--- why would I bother? and I hate being called a liar. As a business owner I wish I had a business model where I charge people small amounts and just keep on charging--- month after month--- no matter how lousy the service or that there are exceptions to the rule. Its just the business climate--- steal from customers as long as you can--- quantity --- not quality.