As the owner of a business, one of the biggest ways to achieve success is to invest in SEO services. Long gone are the days of paying too much for commercials on TV or the radio…
Businesses are now able to spread their brand over multiple channels through SEO. The only thing about SEO is that if you’re a business owner and have no working knowledge about SEO, it can be very scary and bad for business when trying to hire for SEO services.
Why can it be so hard? Well, because you won’t even know what to look for in an SEO agency to know whether or not they’ll actually provide quality services to your business. Whether you’re looking for an SEO agency or are currently working with one, there are signs to look for that will let you know that you’re dealing with a bad agency. The sooner you can recognize the signs, the sooner you can cut ties or find a more qualified agency.
Take a look at some of the biggest signs that let you know you’re working with a bad SEO agency.
Sign 1: They Won’t Keep You Informed
When investing in any type of service, you should expect to be informed about what they’re doing. If that isn’t happening, you need to immediately fire them and start looking at other firms. You have to realize that you are putting your business in the hands of strangers and if they’re not telling you what they’re doing with YOUR business, they can’t be trusted… plain and simple.
Sign 2: You Don’t Have a Clear Understanding of What They’re Doing
This particular sign goes hand in hand with the first sign. Your SEO agency should be keeping you informed about what they’re doing for your business but if there’s a part that you don’t understand, your SEO agency should be able to clearly explain what’s going on.
One of the biggest factors in choosing the right SEO agency is their ability to let you know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. If they can’t help you understand the “what” and the “why” of their services to you, “how” can you feel comfortable hiring them?
Sign 3: They Have Lots of Clients
You would think that an SEO agency having lots of clients would be a good thing, and it is but where the tricky part lies is in how many clients they work with at once. It’s one thing for an SEO agency to have lots of satisfied clients but it takes on a different meaning if they’re working with lots of clients at once.
Working with too many clients at once means that they’re not going to be focusing too much time on a single client because they have so many other clients to work on. What that should tell you is that your business isn’t going to the attention it needs.
Sign 4: What They’re Offering Sounds Too Good to Be True
You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true… they usually are. As a business owner, the only thing you want is to be ranked in the number one spot on Google, right? Because that’s the goal… well, you find an SEO agency that offers you that guarantee plus some, and it can all be done in your price range! Sounds too good to be true, right?
That’s because it is. Any SEO agency offering you a number one ranking is lying and you should run far away from them! In fact, the Search Engine Journal states that first-page rankings are one of the biggest SEO scams to date. Because Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, there’s no way for an agency to guarantee a business the number one ranking. So if you’re being guaranteed that, they’re bad news.
Sign 5: They don’t ask about your business goals
If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, then you wouldn’t even know or recognize that the whole purpose of an SEO campaign is to get you closer and closer to your business goals. Maybe you want to implement some of the biggest SEO trends for your business but the SEO agency hasn’t even bothered to ask what your business goals are.
By them not asking, it just shows what their true intentions are. Furthermore, if you’re not reaching any business goals with your SEO services, what exactly are you paying for?
Do You Recognize the Signs?
After seeing some of the biggest signs of a bad SEO agency, did you check off any of them on the list? If you did, you have to find another agency or else it could end up costing your business a lot more than you bargained for.
Depending on how quickly you can find out if your SEO agency is bad, you might be able to save your business from the harmful SEO tactics that have been performed. That reason alone is why it’s so important to get your business insured with professional liability insurance to run damage control before it’s too late, depending on the damage they’ve caused for your business.
Nonetheless, whether you know about SEO or not, it can be hard to tell if a particular agency has your business’s best interests at the forefront. Before you make a final decision, do your research, check references, and ask specific questions. If you’re already currently working with an SEO agency, hopefully, you’ll be able to re-evaluate their services and move on to a different agency while your business can still benefit from the services.
