You may have come across a number of online businesses that blindly invest their trust in SEO companies, only to see their websites crumbling to the ground, most likely due to underhand SEO techniques.
There are many companies today, particularly startups, which fall prey to SEO companies promising them the moon, and asking upfront for several thousand dollars to boost their ranking to stratospheric levels. What ensues, unfortunately, is a scam but by the time you realize you’ve been had, it’s too late.
You shouldn’t have to go through this. Period. This article sheds light on what aspects to focus on when working with an outsourced SEO agency, and how specifically you can hold them accountable.
It’s all about asking the right questions, and if their responses are in the green, then you’re all set. After all, it’s important to determine early on if those external SEO guys are doing more harm than good.
Is it Really a Good Idea to Let Your SEO Company Do Whatever They Want?
So you’ve successfully managed to narrow down your shortlisted prospects and just signed the contract with a brand new SEO team. But what happens next? Even if they’re guaranteeing 100% satisfactory results, should you take their word for it, especially if they backup their claims with track records and past successes?
To put it rather bluntly, no. You need to have your eyes and ears open and they need to know this. The first few months are particularly critical – you need to be constantly on your toes and keep yourself in the know so as to exactly what they are up to. The sooner you do this, the better you can judge whether the SEO company is genuinely there to help you or just rack up their earnings and move on to the next business.
Here are signs that indicate the performance of your SEO agency may be seriously lacking, along with specific questions to ask at each stage, in order to identify potential problems sooner than later:
They Do Not Measure Performance
From day one, your SEO company should be able to show you what they’re working on and how they plan to reach certain goals. And this isn’t just limited to higher rankings, but rather the actual practices they are incorporating. However, during these initial stages, you shouldn’t expect drastic results, so there’s no need to lose patience even if you don’t see what you had hoped for.
That being said, you need to make sure that the agency is putting your money to good use. It’s only your basic right to ask early on for ‘deliverables’.
Even though the first few months might not be the right time to ask too many questions, at a glance, here’s what your SEO company should be able to provide:
- A full SEO site audit report on problem areas and how they will be addressed
- A thorough analysis of your website’s link profile (it’s very important that they share data with you on this right from the start)
- Content that needs optimizing on your site and how they plan to do it
- Articles linking to your site that have been previously published on affiliate or other authority sites
Now this is by no means an expansive list, but the points discussed enough should give you a good gist of things. In any case, see to it they are putting in the legwork to meet your desired goals and that they have something to show for it.
They’re Usually Mute
A good SEO company will always ask for your input from time to time because you’re the business owner and it’s your website. If they haven’t asked for the following already, you need to question them on the following:
- Admin access to Google Analytics and your CMS
- Access to Google Webmaster tools
- Access to all the target keywords
- Access to social accounts
- Past history of audits, penalties, SEO work done on site etc.
If they haven’t asked you for these already, or if they fail to reply with positive responses when you ask question them on the above, they’re most likely adding linkbacks only from their existing network of shoddy sites. And that explains why they didn’t ask for access to the above or failed to give you the right responses when you asked them the same.
Alert: Your SEO Company is probably performing actions that can cause a lot of harm in the long run.
They Fail to Recommend Improvements
If your SEO company is not keeping you in the know so as to what they’re doing to improve things or failing to respond to your questions in this regard, it can be an indicator of foul play.
A common practice among disreputable SEO companies is simply pointing a few quick linkbacks to your website and calling it a day. Remember that such low and cheap efforts never yield favourable results.
Great SEO companies realize the importance of their partnership with you and understand how critical it is to get your input at every stage. And this means they should be making a lot of recommendations. Ask for detailed analysis and reports to see what issues they have identified and how they plan to turn things around.
Not sure how to make heads or tails of these detailed reports? Get in touch with a digital marketing agency that has been fueling growth for online businesses for close to two decades. Call us now for a free consultation at 1.888.566.2577 to fully understand the ins and outs of good SEO reporting.
They Don’t Share Their Methods
The importance of asking your SEO agency this question simply can’t be stressed enough:
“What are you doing to turn things around and how do you plan to execute your game plan?”
If they give you dodgy answers, you need to get rid of them as soon as possible. This is a clear and legitimate question that any SEO company should be able to answer with full transparency.
In addition, if you get any “funny” responses like these, it’s time to make the switch to another agency:
- We share results with our clients only when our plan has been successfully executed, and until then it must be kept under wraps.
- Due to fierce competition between SEO firms, we are not at liberty to share our practices.
- We are good at performing a variety of SEO tasks, but we’ll be optimizing your website for Google, more or less.
- We’re doing lots to change your website ranking. You wouldn’t be interested in our techniques as they’re too technical.
- It’s difficult to say at the moment; we’ll get back to you once we’ve done more testing.
Good SEO is all about “white hat methods” that have proven effective time and time again. And if you’re agency is indeed incorporating these, they should be able to give you an instant answer along with reports to justify what they’re doing.
They Can’t Explain Plummeting Traffic and Rankings
It’s important to keep a check on your rankings. If your rankings continue to sink, you need to straight away ask your SEO team what actions they are performing. For all you know, they might have gotten your site penalized, by not taking Google’s algorithm changes and updates into account.
Ask them what they are doing to address this drop. Additionally, an unexpected drop in traffic, such as a rank loss, is a surefire sign of a penalty as your site may have breached certain algorithmic rules laid down by search engines. However, this might not necessarily be your SEO team’s fault. Still, you need to start asking questions the moment you discover sinking traffic and rankings.
Ask your SEO team if any algorithm changes might have caused this. The second most important question to ask in this case, are the changes that may have been made to your website right before the decline was experienced. And last but not least, ask your SEO guys about any offsite actions that were made, in order to get the complete picture.
They’re Ranking You for the Wrong Keywords
It’s important to be aware of your target keywords. If you’re already not using Google Analytics, you should in order to see how your longtail keywords are ranking on search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and driving traffic. Getting analytics on these two is easy: go to Acquisition > Keywords > Organic. If your organic keywords are changing drastically, there is a problem. Or, if you’re getting traffic from the wrong keywords, it’s not by coincidence. Additionally, you may have stopped ranking for previous high ranking keywords. Again, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest.
The main goal of getting quality traffic is to “earn” highly specific and targeted traffic. You might see that the majority of your traffic is coming from suspicious looking queries, which definitely indicates careless work on the SEO team’s part.
Ask them what keywords are being targeted and how they are getting traffic to those keywords.
They Are Unable to Explain Suspicious Linkbacks on Your Link Profile
Keeping a close watch on your link profile is a critical metric to focus on. Look at it this way: the link profile of your website acts as a banner that tells Google how to rank it. And if this link profile goes awry, so does your ranking.
So how exactly does this happen? Link profiles get messy when your site gets way too many questionable linkbacks coming from suspicious or generally spammy websites.
For example, let’s assume your backlinks (or linkbacks) are coming from a site that has practically nothing to do with your niche or industry – if this is indeed happening, your SEO team might be targeting your site with random backlinks just to temporarily add “link juice” and authority.
This technique is often referred to as randomly “spraying” a site with as many backlinks as possible; however, it just doesn’t work anymore and even though it might give you a temporary traffic or ranking spike, it will also lead to a Google penalty.
What you need to do is ask your SEO company about these suspicious linkbacks, and where they came from. Be prepared though as you might not get an honest answer. Now might be the right time to ask your SEO guys to pack their bags.
They Optimize Anchor Text through Backlinks
In today’s SEO practices, “optimized anchors” are not recommended at all. And with good reason: a 2012 update in Google’s algorithm saw 3.1% of all sites on the World Wide Web being penalized as a result of using anchor optimization.
What are optimized anchors exactly? Think of them as an anchor text derived from your keywords. For instance, if you site is www.xboxgamesforrent.com, you are trying to rank for “xbox games for rent”. What happens is you gain a linkback, while the main keyword remains “xbox games for rent”.
After looking into your site’s link profile, if find out that you are indeed gaining a lot of these optimized links, you can write it off as devious tactics undertaken by the SEO company.
If you’re currently facing a penalty as a result of having too many optimized anchors in your link profile, and these anchors happen to match the exact keyword list you gave the SEO team, you need to question them about this. However, don’t expect any positive responses, as this is a quick fix to boost rankings only for the time being, but a one-way route to a Google penalty.
Hire a Trusted Name to do Your SEO
In this day and age, you simply cannot afford to hire an SEO company that utilizes cheap black hat SEO tactics to get your website ranking higher.
AOK Marketing has been a pioneer in the digital marketing space for nearly two decades, helping online businesses genuinely rank higher. Contact us today to get the AOK edge and get your SEO on track from day one.
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