Is Your SEO Company Hurting Your Business?

29 Jun Is Your SEO Company Hurting Your Business?

It’s easy to make a case for why search engine optimization is important to marketing a modern business. Google, which owns between 65% and 70% of the global search engine market, processes over 40,000 search queries everysecond. That’s 3.5 billion per day and 1.2 trillion per year. That’s an incredible consumer pool you’d probably like to be drawing from, and you need to be actively working on ranking well in order to get access to it; about 75% of users won’t click past the first screen of search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s why SEO is so critical when it comes to visibility on the web.

But here’s a warning you need to heed: Your current SEO company could be hurting your business. Many companies fall prey to disreputable companies using black-hat techniques to avoid putting in the hard work that real SEO takes. You need to be vigilant because not only will an SEO company like this waste your money, it will also leave lasting damage to your website and its rankings due to penalties for those black-hat strategies. Here are seven signs that you need to fire your SEO company:

1. They Can’t Show You Anything
   Your SEO firm won’t necessarily have results to show you within the first month — it can take months or even a year to get your rankings to move — but you should be seeing some deliverables. Those might include an audit of your site’s current ranking and link profile, optimized content on your own site (normally in the form of blogs; businesses that blog more than 15 times monthly get five times more traffic), or offsite articles with links leading back to your site.

 

2. They Don’t Make Any New Suggestions
   It’s unlikely you’ve been doing everything right up to this point. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have needed to hire an outside SEO firm! So if the agency isn’t telling you what to change on your website or social profiles, they’re not being thorough.

 

3. They Don’t Ask for Your Help
   In order to properly analyze and improve your website, your SEO agency will need your cooperation. That means they should be asking for admin access to your site and various logins for Google analytics and social accounts.

 

4. They Get You Some Strange Links
   Keep an eye on your link profile (it’s not hard to learn how). If you start seeing really odd links, your SEO agency may simply be buying backlinks — a very, very bad strategy.

 

5. They Won’t Share Their Techniques
   While each agency has its own take on how to improve search rankings, there’s no “SEO secret sauce” that will replace careful analysis and a good content marketing strategy. If you’ve hired a company that’s telling you their techniques are confidential, that’s a sign they’re doing something underhanded.

 

6. They’re Ranking You on the Wrong Keywords
   Only pay attention to keywords relevant to your business. If an agency is claiming success because it has ranked you on keywords other than the ones you agreed to target, it’s probably trying to scam you.

 

7. They Cause Your Site to Get a Penalty
   The ultimate, inarguable sign that you need a new SEO team ASAP is getting a manual penalty from Google.

Are you afraid you’ve hired a bad SEO company? Share what’s going on in the comments.