Rashid Lalloo

Mountain Valley Center is a brick and mortal store in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. We sell gifts and services for Well Being. These include fountains, candles, meditative singing bowls, prayer flags, aromatherapy, and a variety of unique gifts that bring peace of mind to their buyers. We had used 2 different SEO companies prior to going with eBrandz. Because we live in a rural area, we hoped that an SEO company would increase our website traffic and therefore our revenues outside of store sales. I did a search on the internet and contacted about a dozen companies, including eBrandz. eBrandz website “just appeared” during my search. The first SEO company we hired promised to optimize our home page and get one keyword (their choice) ranked as # 1 on 1 search engine. They chose the keyword “feng shui bells” and did get it ranked as # 1. The problem was, “feng shui bells” is a small keyword and the sale of these bells is less than 1% of our inventory. So, even though they did what they promised, we left them and looked around. The second SEO company we hired required a large up-front fee and a yearly contract – to be automatically deducted from our credit card. They promised a thorough site optimization and to get #1 ranking on 10 keywords. Once we hired them, they optimized our home page and had to be talked into optimizing several sublobby pages. After 6 months, we were ranked # 1 in, you guessed it, “feng shui bells” in 10 search engines. When we spoke with them, they said that the contract said 10 # 1 rankings, but not 10 different keywords, and told us to “quit bothering them” because they were very busy with other clients. It took us another 4 months to get them to stop billing our credit card and refund a portion of our money. With these first 2 companies, there was no significant increase in our web revenues or page rankings. We remained at a Google PR 2 with both companies. That’s when we went on a search for another SEO company and found eBrandz. During the search, I spoke on the phone with about a dozen SEO companies, all who wanted up-front fees and yearly contracts, all who promised a lot but, after the first 2 experiences, I just did not trust them. I found eBrandz, and signed up for several reasons: 1. At that time, eBrandz did not require a substantial start-up fee or yearly contract. The statement on the eBrandz website was basically “We will work for you and if you do not like our work, just stop paying us. If you stop before a year, we retain copyright on what we have done”. That seem very fair to me. 2. eBrandz offered reasonable entry and monthly fees, with options for expansion as we went along. 3. The first email from Milind asked me relevant questions, as if I were being evaluated by eBrandz to see if they could help us. I was very impressed and glad to answer the questions. An immediate rapport was established and I felt that eBrandz was selecting clients they could help and not just after the money. After the unfortunately very poor service we received from American companies, I was ready to switch countries. It did not concern me at all that we were outsourcing to. At the time we signed up with eBrandz our website had hit bottom. We had dropped off Google and our pages were not even being cached. Milind helped us problem solve through the situation, discovering that the Googlebot was not being given access to our website. We changed web hosting services to correct the problem. Then Milind and his team got to work. I remember each day saying things like “Wow”, “This is great”, “I can’t believe this” as they looked at our entire site, suggested keywords, optimized pages, and began the link program. Not once did they mention keywords like “feng shui bells”, instead they went for the big ones, like “Unique Gifts” and “Feng Shui”. In my professional experience of 25 years in educational and business consulting, this was the first time I could honestly and constantly say “eBrandz exceeded my expectations once again.” For the first time, a SEO company was looking at the scope of my entire site, and committed to raising the whole site up to the top. Any questions I had, or still have, are answered promptly and graciously. I feel like I now have an entire company working for my success. We saw immediate improvement. Google found us again, cached our pages, and our PR began to move up. DMOZ found us again too! We see a continuing increase in web sales each year. Our Google Home page PR is 5, pushing to go to 6, our sublobby pages are 4”s and 5”s and our product pages are mostly 4’s. Customers looking for our products and services are finding us easily. We have now customized our products to our rankings, selling more fountains, salt lamps, tuning forks, and other products that we did not expect to be found by searchers on the web. Within 5 months after signing on, our Christmas web sales doubled from the previous year. By June of the first year with eBrandz, (10 months after signing on) our web sales had exceeded web sales for the entire previous year. Our web sales now account for 60-75% of our revenue, depending on the time of year and have enabled us to maintain our store through the non-tourist winter months. I am grateful every day for finding eBrandz. They have made the difference between our success or failure as an independent retailer. They have taken us from “small pond” to the “big ocean” and have us playing with the “big boys”. For example, on a Google search for Unique gifts, Hammacher Schlemmer is ranked # 3 and we are on the same page at # 8. That’s quite impressive. Another example: Last year Martha Stewart Living was looking for products to do a photo shoot on Sound Healing. They found us on the web! We shipped our products to New York for the photo shoot and were listed in the magazine afterward as the source for the products. People still are calling to order from the magazine after 1 year. So, yes, I would and do recommend eBrandz to other companies. Thank you all for who you are and what you do! www.mountainvalleycenter.com Phone Toll Free: 1-888-773-2491 Local: 1-828-369-5698 Fax: 1-828-524-6086 10248 Georgia Road (441 South) in Otto, North Carolina 28763

I found eBrandz to be very responsive and to date we have seen a dramatic increase in our ranking only after 3 months. The team has worked very well with us and we look forward to better relations in the future.

Refunds Now Tax Service is the leading privately owned income tax preparation service in the Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts area. When we are competing in our marketplace we are fighting with the biggest players in the work, H & R Block and Jackson Hewitt. However, we have come to realize that what might work for those guys is not necessarily the right one to market and marketing is what we live for. When researching PPC companies we were looking for experienced, results oriented companies. We found eBrandz via a Elance. We had many proposals but chose eBrandz over everyone else for the value of their services. Before eBrandz we were a little overwhelmed. We soon discovered that to run a successful PPC you cannot sit back and watch. The campaigns have to be monitored and updated daily. This is where eBrandz excels at. They keep a careful eye on all our campaigns, always working to increase our return on investment. eBrandz is well organized and disciplined company. We are now running campaigns with several of the major search engines. Each account is professionally managed with a dedicated account person. When we initially managed our own campaigns, we realized you can go through a lot of money with little to show for it. eBrandz has streamlined our key word campaigns and have found keywords that are bringing in real sales. Before we had keywords that were costing us money. Sure we were receiving plenty of clicks, but we discovered these clicks were not converting into sales. eBrandz has helped us eliminate junk traffic and find real, loyal customers. eBrandz keeps us well informed every step of the way with a detailed weakly report for each campaign. We get weekly and monthly reports from eBrandz.Now we know what’s working. Conversions are the key to any campaign and not just click through-s. eBrandz has really cut down our wasted clicks and found some bargain keywords that have increased our customer acquisition. They are excellent at focusing on terms that find buyers not browsers. We saw immediate results. And it keeps getting better. eBrandz has done a great job in researching keywords that generate business. In other words, they have concentrated on conversions, not clicks. This has really allowed us to stay on budget. What’s more, like any good advertisement you have to have good copy. That’s copy that sells. eBrandz makes sure that the overall language is correct and appropriate for our audience. eBrandz has the experience to get the most performance and ROI out of a campaign. eBrandz specializes in managing all aspects of our PPC campaigns, from keyword selection to bid management, ad creation and ad testing. They take care of all the work for us, so you can focus on our business. This includes setting up, monitoring the words that are performing and those that are not, and making the logical adjustments to the campaign. eBrandz shows us the reporting and campaign statistics so we know how our money is being spent. By outsourcing our PPC Management we have optimized our click price, increased our conversion rates and generated new sales. We highly recommend eBrandz. In the sea of hype and quick rich marketing companies, we are very pleased. Thank You Again. Tel: 401.521.4111 Fax: 401.521.5844 Address: 381 Wickenden Street, Providence, RI 02903 email: taxrefund@cox.net