So, you hired an SEO marketing agency. Congrats!
But now you’re not sure if they’re really helping your company. After you trust an outsider, it’s normal to have some concerns, especially when you’re spending thousands of dollars hoping for new business and leads.
While it’s natural to have some doubts, there are surefire ways to know if your SEO marketing agency is helping or hampering your business. Let’s take a look!
Ask for Reports and Analysis
It’s easier than it should be for an SEO agency to run some keywords and sit back with their hands off. That’s why you want to see reports on what they’ve been doing. You may not see a change in SEO for the first few months, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be working.
Here are some things you can ask for if you feel it’s too early for results:
- A list of pages they’ve optimized
- Outreach for off-site optimization
- Your SEO site audit
- Your overall site analysis
- A report of what’s currently running and improvements they’ve made
There is always something your SEO company can be working on. So, don’t let them take advantage of you.
How is communication?
A great SEO company should be asking you for a lot of information, especially in the first few months.
These are some things they should have asked for by now:
- Access to your site
- Access to Google Analytics
- Social accounts
- Keywords you want to target
- Target audience
- Industry competitors
If they’ve sat back quietly without asking for anything, they clearly haven’t gotten started. That’s a pretty bad sign if you’re already a few months in.
They won’t share their progress
If you ask a company for something and they say that they are unable to share the information, that’s a major red flag. Your SEO company should be willing to share what they’re doing to up your rankings.
You should know what sites they’re reaching out to and which demographic they’re focusing on first. Don’t let “industry secrets” keep you from knowing what they’re doing with your account. Demand more information, or pull your business from the company.
You get alerted to a manual penalty
A manual penalty is the webs way of saying you’re spamming search results. It’s not a good thing. If you’ve been working with an SEO agency for a few months and this happens, it’s a bad sign.
You need to ask questions and get a better understanding of why you got the penalty. Pull your SEO agency in as well and make sure they’re helping you get to the bottom of it. A lot can go wrong with websites, but this is one of the worst. Especially when you’re trying to rank.
Ranking or Traffic Drops
As you make changes to your website, it is normal to experience a change in traffic and SEO. But if the change is significant, you might want to start asking questions. A sudden drop in traffic could mean you’ve been penalized by a search engine and are no longer showing up in their results.
SEO agencies handle a lot of back end magic. It’s important to stay on top of what you’re doing so you don’t get hit with a penalty or blacklisted on Google. Ask questions and stay involved throughout the business relationship.
