A significant number of potential SEO clients that we speak with have worked with an SEO company in some capacity in the past. They are getting in touch with us because that previous partnership didn’t work out as planned. When we ask what went wrong we are shocked to hear the number of prospects that we speak to that say something along the lines of, “We were never sure exactly what our old SEO firm was doing for us.” In a way this gets us angry, no wonder why the SEO industry has a bad reputation!
If you are in the market for an SEO firm, one of the first things that you should talk about is the level of transparency in regards to what items the SEO firm is completing on your behalf. If an SEO firm claims that they can’t or won’t tell you exactly what they are doing with your website or what types of links they are building, that’s a huge red flag and you need to walk away! As much as an SEO firm might not want to admit it, there really aren’t any secrets as to how an SEO campaign is carried out. There are plenty of free resources online that give you all of that information. If a website owner has enough time, they could essentially learn SEO and run the whole campaign themselves. What drives the need to hire an SEO firm to complete the work is simply lack of time to learn SEO and lack of time to execute the program. That’s why it gets outsourced.
The most successful SEO campaign occurs when both parties, the website owner and the SEO firm, work together throughout the duration of the campaign. Communication between the two parties should be ongoing and the SEO firm needs to get approval on many items before taking any sort of action. Keywords need to be approved by the website owner before they get implemented on the site and throughout link building content. Content that is written needs to be approved to make sure that it conveys the correct tone and overall brand messaging. Inbound link opportunities should be approved to ensure that that site is in fact in line with the target audience of the client. An SEO firm is an expert at SEO, but the website owner is the primary expert on the industry and the product or service, which is why approval is necessary. If approval isn’t given, it can result in content or inbound links that aren’t “on track” and can deliver the wrong kinds of visitors to the site.
At the end of each month or quarter an SEO client should receive an itemized list of every single activity that was conducted as part of the SEO program. This will prevent confusion on the end of the SEO client. They will know exactly what things are being done and can ensure that every item is white hat. If an SEO firm isn’t telling the website owner what they are up to, there’s a good chance that they could be up to no good- building links that could potentially result in a search engine penalty.
