Key Practices Inc Stephanie Piche SEO Nightmare! Do Not Give Them a Dime of Your Money Marina Del Rey, California

It appears as though this woman is treating this as though it were a Democracy. I stand by my story which is "My Experience" with this company and nothing but the truth. I am sorry she is unhappy with the tarnish on their record when in fact, this could have easily been avoided. Below I have copied and pasted a sentence from an email from Key Practices Inc which I received on January 3, 2013;

"You have also not paid for the hosting of the new website which is $80 plus the domain registration. We have not gotten paid to provide you with services for the past 60 days."

"If you would like to have access to the website we would ask you remit the amount due for the site's annual fee and domain registration which we have paid for. Once we get that payment, we will turn over access to the website to you." UNQUOTE

My wife and I had thought about this for several seeks and had decided that the only option we had was to pay the extra money or loose the site all together, so I messaged them and was told that I was to pay an additional $500. "I was like, "Are you kidding me? First of all, we were never notified that there would be any additional charges above the initial $2000 unless we chose to have them continue (which we certainly did not) with their services. When my wife and I finally agree, they hit us up for another 500.

We were paid for ninety days of service and as we stated both in writing and on the phone numerous times, it takes 90 days for the SEO work to reap the benefits for the business - especially for a new business online. There were name and location change requests and at the half way point into the 90 Day program we again explained the ramifications of the constant changes we were asked to make. At the 90 day point, we showed screen shots of several "searches" for cities we optimized for this business and they were getting Page 1 results in Google. The new changes slowed down results from the originally contracted agreement and again we explained it would take time, which anyone who does SEO for startups will tell you. For that matter for any new business that you start with from scratch including a new name and URL, you need to also verify with Google Business to make any type of headway in SEO. This is something we could not get done for this person during the first 90 days of our working relationship as it was up to them to provide the address and phone number for the Google Business Verification to be take place to benefit them as a legitimate business.

That is when payment stopped, including the payment for the hosting and website development services which we had not yet been paid for and completed in good faith via email requests for work services.

The fact is, this client had six months to pay for the work he requested and we completed. Now he is saying he was ripped off and we held his "website hostage." Last week, we found that he scraped all of the HTML content from the website and logo we developed for him and pasted it into a new website on new URL. It was at this point and after six months of non-payment of services that we removed the site we created for his business. Two days later he posted this report. 

To refer back to our initial post and response above - one just has to review his posts about us, and wonder why he keeps changing his location, and interestingly, to a different city entirely than the cities we knew him to do business or live in which were Culver City, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air to name a few. On the Ripoff Report, he went from being Mike in Las Vegas yesterday to Mike in Sherman Oaks, CA, today. But if you read his rebuttal today, he admits and claims to live in Las Vegas. 

It is unfortunate that we will have this post about our company which has never had ONE complaint posted against us since we founded the business in 2001 here on the Ripoff Report. That is twelve years of exemplary service for business to business dealings. We appreciate the intent of this website is to expose companies that "rip you off" but the actions of this individual speaks volumes about his character, ethics and lack of professionalism. There are many false claims against companies made every day. This is yet one more.

I am by no means a malicious person and know how difficult it is to run a business who's top priority is customer service as is with my company. I cannot say the same for Key Practices Inc. To start with, the entire first paragraph in the rebuttal from Key Practices Inc is a complete Lie and nothing less than Slander. As far as them having documents or reports for their services rendered with me, this is also a lie as I have requested them over and over again with no response. As far as "Multiple name and address changes", this occurred (One Time) and it was when my wife and I moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for personal reasons that had nothing to do with any business. In fact, we now operate our business in both states which was our goal. As far as Key Practices Terminating me, I only verbally contracted for their initial service plan which was for $2,000. which covered me for 3 months. Anything after this would have been an additional $500. per month to keep them on board maintaining my website so as far "6 months past due" this is also a lie! I never even for one second agreed to any additional services after the initial 3 month verbal contract. Why would I? And the website that cost me 2 Grand, they held it hostage while trying to extort more money from me when I requested it after the 3 months was up. Key Practices Inc has since canceled the website, "2 Grand down the drain". If they had just given me control of my site which I paid for, we would not be here in a Ripoff Report. I must say, I have learned a serious lesson here, "Do not ever do any business, handing over money unless you have EVERYTHING in writing and still be very cautious.

This complaint is made by a person who uses multiple business names AND first and last name aliases and had to move to Las Vegas because of "issues" they had in Los Angeles.

We went above and beyond for this person and unfortunately, because he is now six months past-due on invoices is using terrorist tactics to report our legitimate business, which has never had a complaint made against us since we opened in 2001.

All of our business dealings with this person are documented in full detail including the reports sent to them and the subsequent issues they were creating for the success of the program with their change of venue, name and lack of follow-though on providing a legitimate business for us to register online at their new out-of-state location half way through our project. We set proper expectations with them stating a 90-day period would be needed to see results with SEO and yet they made multiple name, location and business contact changes during that time period against our recommendations.

We stand by our decision to have terminated our business dealings due to non-payment and questionable business practices we observed during our time working with them.