5 tips on how to choose an honest SEO agency
Choosing a reliable SEO agency can be a serious conundrum if one is not familiar with the specifics of this service. Website positioningis a special kind of work, so we have prepared a handful of tips on what issues to pay attention to in order to avoid unfair treatment by the other party.
In the subject of SEO activities, it is very easy to have a lot of misunderstandings, so the stage of quotation and contract details is appropriate to clear up doubts on the following issues.
#1 Clearing Model
A fairly common type of pricing used by SEO agencies is to propose a monthly rate for a specific keyword. However, the client is not always scrupulously explained when such a payment is made, service providers sometimes do not realize that , “positioning” is not an effect given once and for all, because the position of the page can change not only on a monthly basis, but even a single day. In the case of a monthly fee, it is necessary to break it down into the number of days that the site has actually been in paid positions. Nevertheless, the most reasonable variant of cooperation at the moment is payment for both results plus and permanent service, i.e. monthly basis or subscription is a condition that allows the agency to reliably watch over the situation and optimization of the site, such as eliminating errors that appear on it.
Therefore, billing in the success fee model does not have to be the only fairness to the Client – a subscription fee in the case of particularly demanding phrases or billing based on acquired traffic from the search engine is often necessary so that the activities can be undertaken with full commitment. This is primarily a matter of a comprehensive explanation of the mechanics of search engine operation and positioning, so that the Client understands what he is paying the invoice for and knows that he is being treated fairly, e.g. receiving a quote covering phrases that can have a real impact on his business and not those that, from the agency’s perspective, should be able to be quickly positioned. In any case, payment terms should be clearly spelled out and explained between the two parties.
#2 Empty promises
If you expect a guarantee from an agency to get a specific result within a certain timeframe, and the agency eagerly nods, know that something wrong is going on. With any project, it’s important to realize that influencing the organic results reported by Google is interfering with an external system over which no agency has control. Not only that, but in recent years there has been an increase in the number of Google algorithm updates that are crucial to the course of the SEO process, which can completely reverse its effects. Under these conditions, a reliable agency should explain the current state of affairs rather than pay lip service to promises. The remedy for this should be billing based on a success fee model, but it too is not always the optimal solution, because with SEO it’s a bit like visiting a doctor – it’s hard to expect to get paid only on the condition that we recover, right?
#3 Stretch promotions
A classic of dishonestly presented promotion is the information about the first 1-3 months of activities for free. When starting SEO, it is inevitably difficult to expect such quick results, since even an exemplary site optimization and link building process sometimes require many weeks to dramatically increase the visibility of a given website. In other words, regardless of the information about the promotion, most likely the agency would not be qualified for payment during this period anyway (unless the contract provides for a subscription payment).
In the past, I have also encountered cases of surprising offers for positioning, such as in group purchases. This consisted in the fact that the client sent the agency a proposal for several keywords for positioning, and another 3 phrases were completed by the agency. The offer was distinguished by a guarantee of the result in the form of positioning up to TOP10 – 3 keywords (in the case of an annual contract), but the proposal (in the variant of an annual contract) was structured in such a way that it was enough for the agency to focus in the task on the phrases recommended by itself, and these were certainly already dictated by the ease of positioning and not attractiveness from the perspective of the client. I think that in the current reality, such an offer would not hold water.
#4 Keyword Selection
It’s natural for an SEO agency to provide an offer with a quote for specific keywords, but does it always provide information about the popularity of particular phrases? Sometimes the main criterion for choosing phrases is the potential speed of their positioning and not the real interest of the client. The client has the right to inquire about the principles that guided the agency in the selection of phrases and whether it used appropriate tools, such as Google Trends, “Keyword Planner” or special software.
The offers sometimes include passwords deliberately chosen to show that the site is virtually absent from the web, meanwhile meticulously finding, for example, 8 phrases on which the site is outside the TOP50, but this does not necessarily mean that the site is not high on other passwords – it is worth informing about this, even if these phrases will not be positioned for this reason. Asking about the course of keyword selection often also shows the attitude of the agency to the client, which can be a signal of the quality of cooperation in the long run.
#5 Data manipulation
The submission of an offer for positioning is sometimes preceded by a superficial audit of the website, as part of which the potential client is inundated with various numbers, such as page load speed, site weight, number of backlinks or the number of subpages indexed in Google. While some of them actually reflect the situation of the site, some only introduce unnecessary confusion, such as the position in Alexa Rank. Besides, it is worth independently verifying the reliability of these numbers, let’s say, the number of Backlinks, which is not at all easy to determine in an automatic way (it may require checking and comparing in different tools). At the same time, it should be noted that positioning is not about outperforming the number of BL’s, ba, in the current conditions it may even bring negative results, so from this point of view it is a form of misleading the recipient.
