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. It’s also a good option for a la carte SEO services. For example, you can hire ghostwriters from The HOTH to write blog posts and generate backlinks. Or, you can have the company run a Google Ad campaign to generate new leads. Other SEO agencies can also use The HOTH for their own clients since the 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.
Plans and Pricing
Pricing at The HOTH varies widely depending on what services you need.
One of the main services The HOTH offers is link building, which means getting backlinks to your website posted on existing websites with good search engine rankings. The HOTH refers to these packages as ‘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 16 blog posts. Large costs $250 for 48 links across 32 posts.
Another example of a service The HOTH offers is a managed Google Ads campaign. 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. Keep in mind, 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, The HOTH will do keyword research, analyze your competition, and design a custom strategy for your business’s online presence. After that, the company will give 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 $500 increments).
Features
The HOTH offers a wide array of SEO services and tools for business owners and other agencies.
SEO Management
The HOTH’s main attraction is its SEO management services. The company puts SEO specialists, web designers, and ghostwriters at your disposal, allowing you to dramatically boost your online presence quickly. The HOTH will work with just about any budget, making it an attractive choice if you want to set a price tag on SEO for your business and then not think about it again.
One particularly effective use of The HOTH is to create a blog for your website and then put it on autopilot. You can offer a list of post titles or give The HOTH’s writers free rein to create content for your website. If your site is built with WordPress, The HOTH will even post your content on your schedule without you having to do anything.
The HOTH can also manage your website’s entire SEO or help run a pay-per-click ad campaign, and its SEO specialists will manage the keyword research and ad copy for you. A web designer will also create a custom landing page for your website that visitors will be directed towards and which can be used to generate new leads.
Some of the other managed services The HOTH offers include video production, website optimization, and reputation management. All of these can play an important role in helping your site rank higher in search engine results.
Link Placement
Link placement, as part of The HOTH’s Foundation packages, is one of the company’s most popular services. So, it’s worth a closer look.
When ordering backlinks, you’re essentially hiring a writer to write a guest post on an existing blog. You can choose to link to more than one page on your website with any order, and you get to choose the anchor text for every link.
One thing to note is that there are two pricing tiers for content writing depending on whether you want ‘Standard English’ or ‘Premium English.’ This is a little disconcerting, given that The HOTH promises high-quality, original writing for every project.
Many of the blogs that The HOTH contributes content to are well-established sites, but visitor counts can be ludicrously low for the amount of blog content on them. For example, one example site had roughly as many monthly visitors as blog posts. It seems a lot more likely that The HOTH owns these established sites itself or that they are primarily used for backlinking, so don’t expect much organic traffic on your posts.
Interface and In Use
The HOTH is incredibly simple to use, which is part of the attraction to this platform. For most services, you simply need to input your website’s URL to get started. If you want more control, it’s available as well—for example, you can specify the anchor text for backlinks or offer titles and content outlines for blog posts.
One of the best things about The HOTH, particularly for agencies reselling the company’s services or businesses with a large marketing budget, is the user dashboard. You can easily dig into any order in your history to see the ads that were run or the links that were placed and the results they got. This is a huge plus since even non-SEO experts can easily monitor whether the campaigns that The HOTH is deploying are working.
Support
Customer support at The HOTH is available during normal business hours by email or live chat. The website has an online knowledgebase, which is extremely helpful for navigating the user dashboard and API after you’ve already ordered a service. If you have questions about what services your company needs, you can also schedule a call with an SEO expert at the company.
The Competition
There aren’t too many companies offering the same range of services as The HOTH. But, if you’re primarily interested in link building, Love To Link is a strong alternative. Love to Link is more expensive than The HOTH, but posts tend to end up on blogs with a lot more organic traffic. At the end of the day, that means you get more SEO bang for your buck.
Final Verdict
The HOTH is a good choice for business owners who want to put the task of managing their online presence entirely in someone else’s hands. The fact that you can buy content creation, link building, and campaign management services piecemeal is an advantage since you can also use The HOTH with a limited budget. Overall, The HOTH does a good job, but beware that many of the third-party sites where your links appear don’t see very much organic traffic.