When Should You Consider Dropping Your SEO Agency
Achieving your marketing goals takes a toll on your budget as well as hard work from the team. With digital marketing facing out traditional methods, SEO marketing tools offer an efficient yet affordable way to increase traffic and improve conversion rate. Nevertheless, SEO marketing remains a conundrum to small and medium enterprises making hard for them to realize significant benefits. Some fall for the common perception that SEO is a one-time activity.
With numerous variables in the traditional SEO campaigns, you cannot wish away the need for an SEO agency to run your campaigns. If you do not know the intricacies of SEO, the chances are that you cannot tell when things go wrong, or even know When Should You Consider Dropping Your SEO Agency. If you know the basics, you may have the guts but little faith, which might get you mediocre results in your campaigns. You need to drop your SEO agency if you encounter the following with your existing company:
Substandard content
High-quality content and SEO marketing are inseparable. It is hard to run successful SEO campaigns without high-quality content, and almost impossible to produce top-notch content without SEO benefit. While your agency might do everything to get your site quality content, the bar remains high, and shifts every day. There are no shortcuts; you site must offer the best of the content in your target niche.
As the search engines change their algorithms, there is need to adopt powerful SEO tactics that keep your content relevant to the trends. You need content that coincides with the visitors needs and on a regular basis. Often, search use engine crawlers that tend to recognize new content to improve the ranking. Failure to make new posts leads to a drop in the ranking, which influences on the overall conversion.
There are no updates
While you might not understand the complex strategies and the terms involved, your agency ought to explain this in simple terms. Understanding the campaigns in a strategic level helps you gauge the direction and evaluate the progress in lieu with the business goals. Inadequate experience and lack of background training are not sufficient to keep you out of the campaigns. If they cannot inform you, the chances are that they might be headed in the wrong direction, or they do not care about backing their performance. If they fail to communicate, there is no reason why you should hold onto them.
Bad inbound links
There is no doubt; link building is one of the most important yet the most difficult aspect of SEO campaigns. The quality of the relationships determines the effectiveness of the Campaign, with the link integrity indicating the agency’s commitment to high quality. Bad links are not only cheap but also easy to build, while quality links demand some level of engagement and investment from the company. Useful links occur in well-sourced, top-notch content as well as on robust and pertinent domains. On the other hand, bad links are contextually irrelevant, wantonly posted and present on shady, unreliable yet irrelevant domains. You need to drop your service provider of you note a recurrent trend of bad links, or else wait to pay the price.
No more progress
Like other marketing tools, progress in SEO remains a continuing debate. There is no guarantee that a company will see immediate results during the start of the campaigns. It takes time to create a solid foundation and consistent effort to realize tangible results. Over time, you need to see incremental progress in your rankings, organic search traffic as well as the domain authority. Occasional declines are not worth business attention, but if the stall lasts for several months, you could be headed for a fall.
Sudden increase in the result
You may not believe it, achieving super results too quickly is a warning sign that things might not be right. You need to improve your search engine ranking, and your service provider knows it too. You might be happy to receive a sea of links to your site in a given period, which might signal the use of Black Hat SEO strategies to beat the systems and attract shady links. Such tactics draw severe debilitating punishments from Google, which affects the overall ranking in the search engines. It calls for the business executive to verify the results as well as the tactics used to reach the goals, to ensure compliance with the set regulations.
No consultations
An expert service provider needs to customize the campaigns to suits specific needs of the firm as well as the industry. It is almost impossible to develop relevant campaigns without involving the business owners. The consultant needs to access to your CMS, Google Analytics account and hence need to ask for such information during the period. If they do not ask for any assistance, the chances are that they are using mischievous ways such as link building through spammy sites or stuffing the content with irrelevant keywords.
Ranking for the wrong keywords
Keywords form the basis for optimizing your site. Before you set off for the compound process, you need to know the target keywords and see how well they rank in organic searches. When there is a change in the organic keywords or attract traffic from irrelevant keywords, there must be a trigger. The ultimate goal for SEO is earned targeted traffic. Any traffic originating from arbitrary queries signifies indiscriminate targeting and hence mediocre work from the agency.
Lack of measurable results
Other than the monthly reports, SEO firms ought to send you analytics reports on a monthly basis. SEO companies are tasked with increasing traffic and the leads. They ought to have a list of targeted keywords, which forms the basis for tracking, hence the only way to gauge progress and the performance of the consultant. Failure to show calculable progress shows a lack of commitment towards incremental gains.
In some instances, the reasons go beyond the tangible results that you can track. For example, changes in operations, target markets, and expansions are likely to prompt some changes in SEO marketing strategies. In the case of a mismatch, you may have to move the next phase and explore the options.
