HOW TO SPOT A BAD SEO AGENCY
Digital marketing is here to stay, but not all online marketing agencies are friendly. Unfortunately, there are bad ones out there – the hapless, the outdated, the unscrupulous. Sign a contract with any of these and you could end up throwing money into a black hole. Scam-artists have given the field a bad name at times, but if you know what not to look for they aren’t difficult to avoid. Here’s how. “We’ll get you straight to #1 on all search engines, for ever, 100{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} guarantee!” Repeat after me: there are no guarantees in SEO. Not ever. Rankings fluctuate constantly, and change depending on your location. It’s also not a quick fix. No one can make you number one overnight – at least, not for an even slightly competitive keyword. Your digital marketing agency are also not mates with Google executives. They can’t call in special favours for you. If it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. Horrible Reviews In digital marketing, the power of reviews is inescapable. Good, organic reviews draw new blood to your business like nothing else, while bad ones scare customers away. When you have a five-star rating you want to splash it right across the internet. Any digital marketing agency worth their salt knows this – so why would you trust a company with poor or no reviews? You should also be wary if an agency only has anonymous reviews, especially if they do nothing but praise. The chances of them being written by legitimate customers hover somewhere close to nothing. “It’s all about the ranking…” All good agencies know that this is rubbish. You can be ranked as high as you like, but if your click-though and customer conversion rates remain low your business won’t improve much. If search ranking is all an agency spouts about, it’s probably better to go elsewhere. Dodgy Link Building Not all links are born equal. A respectable, relevant website linking to yours is a real endorsement – far more useful to Google than links from irrelevant, poorly-built websites or spam comments. Once upon a time you could get away with this, but no longer – Google penalises this now. It’s outdated and makes businesses look bad – would you want to be associated with irritating spam? Google also takes into account your location. A locally-relevant site linking to yours is also preferred. An agency with a record of generating shoddy, low-quality links, outsourcing link-building to foreign countries or buying links will bury your website. In addition, buying links is now banned by Google. Poor Performance Reporting The internet is always changing – algorithms are getting updated, rules are being modified. Your competitors are fine-tuning on their own digital marketing campaigns, trying to overtake you. As said before, it’s never a quick fix – marketing is an ongoing process, and needs constant adjustment in order to work. This means regular, in-depth performance reporting that shows what’s working and what isn’t is paramount. Without it, you might never know that that keyword you’re focusing your efforts on isn’t actually increasing traffic, and that you really needed to choose different ones. Look for companies that put effort into keeping in touch with their clients and letting them know what’s going on – check their reviews for other people’s experiences. Billing Structure? What Billing Structure? Maybe you’ve been convinced by an agency’s inflated promises and dodgy reviews. But if the agency gets cagey about what exactly it is you’re getting for your money, or if they can’t tell you what they’re spending it on… Well, that black hole from earlier might actually be more efficient. A good agency will be able to give you a transparent breakdown and justification for all your costs, so you can decide if it’s worth it. Thanks for reading our ‘How To Spot A Bad SEO Agency’ article. Be sure to visit our Digital Marketing Blog for all the latest happenings in Digital Marketing. We’re Digital Clicks, SEO specialists working in Cambridge with clients across the whole country. We specialise in SEO campaigns, especially when one wants to optimise for an SEO campaign in Cambridge. For more information, any help or advice for your SEO campaign or to know more about how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the team. Error: Contact form not found.