You Hired The Wrong SEO Company Now What?
If you are reading this article it is likely that you have hired the wrong SEO marketing agency or you are getting that feeling that something is a little off with your marketing agency.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, because the odds of picking the right agency is about 1 in 10. The odds are not in your favor. Here is a simple Webinar where we discuss what to watch out for.
A Robot Translated this so ignore any errors.
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You Hired The Wrong SEO Company. Now What Do You Do?
Jace: Hey guys. This is Jace over here at Yinc marketing, bringing another podcast video, so what we’re calling them. So, today we’re going to be talking about how to protect yourself from hiring the wrong online marketing company. And I wrote this article, you’ll see on August 12th.
Also Neil Patel, for those of you guys who don’t know him, he came out with a great article we’re going to go over a little bit of that today. Right here, Don’t get fooled: 17 questions to ask before hiring an SEO Company. So, how this came about was a couple of weeks ago I had a friend give me a ring. He runs a pretty big company and he wanted me to look into his business and see what was going on. I get these types of calls all the time and 50% of the time the SEO company is ripping off their customer.
The other 50% of the time the SEO company or online marketing company is really trying hard to make things work. They just need a little help or a couple of ideas to help.
I asked him a few questions.
He had a feeling they were getting ripped off, they weren’t getting their value for what they were paying. So, I went up there to discuss what this company was doing for them. Well, They didn’t have an e-mail campaign, they didn’t have a good SEO, they didn’t have a content strategy, just zero.
And this happens more often than not. So I came back and kind a created an article talking about that. Then Neil came out with this one. So we’re going to run through it, and hope this helps you guys hire the right company. So first of I got Wes here. Say hi, Wes.
Wes: What’s up guys?
Jace: So Wes here. Wes, can I, say that again. Say what’s up.
Wes: What’s up guys?
Jace: Okay, I can hear. It wasn’t on my ears. Okay, so I’m going to hit the odds. Wes is going to hit the evens. If you have any questions you will have to send us an e-mail. Okay, so first of how would you improve your online search rankings. So what Neil is saying is here ‘Ask these questions.’
So the very first question is ‘How are you going to improve my rankings?’
You should always ask that. They better have a plan. So number one if any company comes to you make sure they have a plan in place of how they plan to improve your rankings. It’s not just hey it’s going to happen.
Wes: Okay 2.How you make me informed of changes you make to our website? This is just a key of any communication too. There is obviously a technical site of SEO so they are going to go in, maybe change some sitemaps, adjust some coding to make sure you’re getting basically read by Google easier, and just make sure you’re informed on that, so you don’t run on any other issues with other functions on your site.
Jace: Okay, that’s a problem I see everywhere too. A lot of companies do not have good on-page SEO. So, a lot of times when we go into a company to help them out with their online marketing, very first thing we’re going to do is fix their website, fix all the problems they have get him indexed.
Okay, so 3. Past clients
Obviously whenever you’re going to hire somebody ask about their past clients, maybe call one or two of their past clients. So make sure they were doing what they told. Now, Neil, General Motors into it. With Ydraw we work with your fourth Oracle Procter & Gamble, all those big companies. But we don’t hand them out as references due to the fact they are busy, but we’re more than opened to give people any numbers and say ‘Hey, here is a client call him, talk to him, see what we’ll do. So, don’t be afraid to ask that question.
Wes: 4. Do you always follow Google’s best practises?
Now this is an interesting one, because we’ve had site in the past where we’ve had competition, basically buy bad backlinks for our site to hurt our ranking and Google. And so it took us a lot of time to go in and disavow those bad links. Basically I bring that up because there is a way to hurt your site if someone is buying bad links for it. And this is not, it isn’t unusual for us to see SEO companies going and do that. This is obviously your cheaper guys, or your little bit shady guys that will just go in and try and buy backlinks to get your rank up, rather than doing it the right way.
Jace: And it’s very common even on big companies, it’s just the pressure to perform an SEO is pretty big. So they’ll fall into that problem.
- Which tools do you use?
I like to use what Google provides. Some companies have customized tools. I don’t think that’s necessary. If you’re like, whenever you hire an SEO Company they should give you access to your analytics, webmaster tools. If it’s a Word Press there’s analytics there. So you should be logging in and you should be able to see exactly what’s happening, as far as traffic do well. And I kind a recommend you to do that often.
Wes: 6.What types of SEO work will you do?
Now, Neil Patel adds least three of the technical off-page and on-page. The technical I mentioned earlier, that’s going in changing some coding, making sure Google can crawl your content. Off-page- that is your inbound links. And what we’re seeing recently is Google is a lot more concerned about social links and social shares. So something to be aware of and then to unpage it your content. Your SEO Companies should be creating content if you want to have success.
Jace: Okay, 7.This is a big one. If any company guarantees you #1 rank, go the other way. They can’t. They cannot guarantee that they are going to rank you on page one. Okay, it’s not hard to do on certain keywords. Yeah, they might get you on a crappy keyword, but the reality is SEO takes a lot of time. So, if they say they guarantee anything, you know you’re dealing with the shady internet marketing company. You’re up Wes.
Wes: Alright. 9. Payment structure, or did I skipped one?
Jace: 8, you’re 8. How often will you report…?
Wes: 8.So, how often will you report on your work, and what will it look like?
This should be happening at least once a month. If you’re a company that needs a more often, make sure that you’ll find an SEO Company that will work with you and report weekly.
Jace: Yeah, weekly’s not a problem. Now, if you want them to report more, you’re wasting their time.
- Good payment structure.
Okay, this is actually pretty important. If a company comes to you and they say ‘Hey, we have a great service that offers $250 a month’, you know you’re getting scammed. Okay, nobody is going to work for $250 a month. So, that’s one of the things, I see that often. There are so many companies out there, and you guys have probably got phone calls from a lot of them that say ‘Hey we’re willing to do your SEO for $250.’ It doesn’t work that way. You are not going to get the result and the opportunity cost is going to be huge. Like I mentioned at the beginning, that company we went and visited, yeah, they were spending a huge amount of money, but what was the worst was opportunity cost, of not getting it done correctly. Same thing, if you’re going to pay $200 a month, you might as well keep the money, because you are not going to get a good job. So, what should you expect to pay $100- $200 an hour, or what we have. We have a lot of companies that sign up. They get a full time employee that works solely on their business 40 hours a week. We charge anywhere from $5500, not for that. We also have packages like $1500, but anything lower we don’t mess with.
Wes: 10. How will we contact you?
So, this one just come to expectations. How do you want to be contacted? Do you want a phone call every month, a week? Are you an e-mail guy? What’s the best way to contact you? The only issue we’ve seen with this in the past is we’ll take on a client and then they’re impossible to get a hold of, and it just slows down having success. So if you’re going to hire company, commit to it, make sure you’re available, and then see the revenue boost.
Jace: 11. How will you work tie to other marketing efforts?
Obviously, if they are doing your in online SEO, they need to be tightened everything else, they need to know what’s going on. So, self explanatory on that one. And they need to be aware of your branding. So, just make sure they understand kind of the message you want to put out there.
Wes: 12. What happen if we terminate the contract?
Just know this upfront, make sure you have a conversation about that. The key thing here though is when you do sign up for an SEO service, understand this is a long-term play. This is something that takes time to have success with. You’re not going to see results probably the first couple of months. But, as Google crawls your site, says you’re creating more content and getting more links, that’s when you start to boost. Plan on this six months on a year. That’s a good time for him to look at.
Jace: 13.If you worked with penalized sites…
Okay, this came into play a couple of years ago when Google came out with an add algorithm, deindex a lot of pages, because of bad backlinking. So you may want to ask them have they worked with penalized sites. If they worked with a lot of penalized sites, it’s probably because they’re doing some bad stuff. So, this, I don’t know if this is relevant question. Who cares? If they haven’t worked with penalized sites doesn’t really matter. Do they need to know? Well the only thing you can do is go in and disavow them. So, and then get better backlinks.
Wes: 14. Are you up to date with the latest algorithm changes?
This is important. Obviously, Google’s changing things pretty consistently, but you never really know what the exact algorithm changes are. So, people can guess and say what they’re seeing, but the only two clear ones we’ve seen lately is make sure your site’s mobile friendly and get more social shares.
Jace: 15.How your team adapt to your strategy to my industry?
Obviously, they need to know about your industry. Common- sense. Next. Sorry that’s my phone.
Wes: 16. How do you determine if you’re successful?
Now, there is a couple of ways to look at this. Some companies care about links and what kind of traffic you’re seeing. With Yinc we’re more concerned with revenue. So, if you’re revenue isn’t boosting every month, we’re not doing something right. And so, it’s just the different mentality of what, basically what numbers were basing our success off.
Jace: And you can rank like, a lot of people are ‘Hey I want page one.’ Well that might not add to your bottom line. So we’re really revenue ROI conscious. We don’t care really about rankings. If your ROI is going up and if there is, if you’re buying, if you’re spending money as long as you are making money. Then whether you are on page one or not doesn’t matter. But our goal is page one, it’s just more importantly is ROI.
- Why should you hire you over other SEO companies?
Obviously, there is a lot of good SEO companies, but most are bad case. I always call the 80-20 rule, the Pareto Principle. 80% of SEO companies are junk. 20% are going to be good. See which one fits you best. Okay, there are a lot of good ones out there. Some of them are better in certain industries than others. So, do your homework.
Wes: And just to wrap things up for the conclusion, just a reminder, if you are outsourcing internet marketing it’s a long-term play if you’re working with the good company. To have success, marketing company has to basically infiltrate every part of your site, do upsells, you know, e-mail marketing. It takes the whole process. And so, like Jace said six months to an year to really see a lot of results happen.
Jace: Okay, in case if you guys have questions obviously we always give a free consultation out there. So if you have questions about your business, if you have questions about our service, we focus on video, Facebook, e-mail, and PPC campaigns. Okay, so if you have questions let us know. My e-mail is jace@marketinghy.com . Wes, you can e-mail him at wesws@marketinghy.com, and we will talk to you later. See ya.
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