Some years ago, I worked for a software company that had hired an SEO and marketing agency. When I spoke with the SEO contact there, he said our company’s website would never rank in the top 10 on Google organically for the two most important keywords. I didn’t believe the SEO representative. Eventually, it was decided to stop working with the agency. My employer was paying the agency $2,000 a month for accomplishing very little.
About seven months later, I achieved top 10 organic rankings on Google for the company’s two most important keywords. These improved results doubled the number of monthly Web visitors.
Some SEO agencies don’t know what they are talking about or doing. Of course, they will still charge you. Some of them don’t deliver much value, if any — at least in my experience.
The companies or non-profits that choose to employ them often don’t know how to do SEO competently or even how to get help. Not knowing much or anything about SEO puts them at risk of being ripped off by unscrupulous agencies. If you aren’t careful an unethical SEO agency or SEO consultant will figure out pretty quickly how little you know and then give you some spiel using techno-jargon which might sound like valid knowledge, but you have no way of knowing if you are being lied to or not.
Here are things to look for so you can choose an agency or consultant who might actually deliver value to you.
- Ask them to show you good organic rankings they achieved in Google right now. Ask them for the keywords or keyword phrases and their client’s websites or pages and check to see if they can prove their results. If they don’t have any Web pages presently ranking well on Google — at least in the top 30 results organically — then that is probably a red flag.
- If they can’t prove their success by showing you live quality rankings on Google, ask them why not. In SEO, and online marketing in general, anyone can claim anything, but always make sure they present you with clear, valid proof.
- Ask for contact info for other current clients so you can ask them how their experience was working with the agency or consultant.
- Ask to see data demonstrating their success.
- Don’t believe everything an SEO consultant or agency says at face value.
These tips might sound like they are too stringent. They are not. Most SEO folks are not so devious or dishonest, but it only takes getting ripped off once to cause damage to your business.
My former employer paid its’ SEO agency $2,000 a month for five months spending over $10,000 and there were almost zero results.
Another former employer had a webmaster who almost exclusively used black hat SEO techniques on his website for this small business. Black hat techniques can result in getting a website pushed down the rankings, not moved up. They can also cause an entire site to be removed from a search engine index.
Once your site is removed, good luck getting any decent rankings. It might take many months to do that and you would have virtually no visitors to your site during that period. Can you afford to lose that many potential customers from organic search?
To make up for all the last traffic, would you resort to increased PPC spending? How much would that cost?