Note the use of yin and yang is purely illustrative, I do not endorse the belief in any shape or form.
Why Your SEO Agency Is Only Telling You HALF The Story?
It is simple, by the time you find out what SEO truly is, they have cashed out and moved on to the next victim. SEO is not about fast results or even about rankings, SEO is about optimising your site and content to bring the most possible qualified visitors for the least amount of effort.
Most importantly, not only for the first few months or even the first year or two your site is live. I’ve written (or ranted arguably) about this at length before on my other site. How Quickly Can I Expect SEO Results? See also a nice (if I say so myself) summarising quote:
If you read nothing else read the below.
Quick tip 4 – The ROI of your SEO like the ROI of your site is calculated by the total investment divided by the lifetime of your site or business.
How long do you want to stay around?
The longer you stay around the more you get with the least amount of time and money, but there are no shortcuts, in the beginning, cripples cannot run marathons, reputations aren’t built overnight.
The half of the story they have not told you is called SPAM, Webspam to be precise, or a set of practices that violate the search engines guidelines and may return fast results, but will compromise the reputation of your site and business over time.
A good analogy is doping in competitive sports, you may come first but sooner or later, you will be caught and the sky will fall on your head.
Top things to watch out when hiring an SEO agency
- Make sure they can tell you what they do to your site (for your life)
- If they guarantee fast rankings or any rankings run for the hills
- The average lifespan of spam results is 6 to 12 months, if you are lucky
- Ask about link building and make sure any self built links are recorded and you get updated on these
- In 2016/17 any SEO contract that is longer than 30 days rollover, better have an outlined strategy that guides the direction of work and clearly set what can and cannot be done
- All good SEOs have a process of some sort they can explain
- Will they report and how, make sure you get meaningful metrics
- Realistic timeframes – SEO works in months and requires a solid strategy and most of all perseverance
- Transparency – Will they share with you all changes they make to your site
- What types of SEO work will they do? Local, national, international, technical, off page, on page
- Who owns the data, site assets and accounts, you or them, it should always be you
That’s it short and sweet for a change!
You may also like: 5 Signs You’re Dealing With A Deceptive SEO Company Or Consultant
From Google itself: Search Console Help – Webmaster Guidelines
