SEO cannot be ignored. If you are not willing to invest resources into improving your SEO, you will lose out on a prime marketing opportunity. If you don’t think you can personally manage your website’s SEO, it is a good idea to hire an SEO agency, but your job doesn’t end there. It is imperative to keep tabs on their work to ensure that they are offering optimal results.
You may hire an SEO agency only to find that you are not getting much bang for your buck. You may not have the time or expertise to handle the search engine optimization of your business, but there is no guarantee that outsourcing the job to an SEO company will bring the results you desire.
You can know that an SEO agency is hindering your business if:
- Traffic decreases – The first is the most obvious. It’s one thing for your rankings to stay steady or improve by baby steps at first, but if they actually descend, your SEO agency may be asleep at the wheel.
- They don’t ask for your insights – Be wary of an SEO company that doesn’t ask you for input, help, access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc. These are red flags that agency is not doing their job.
- “Proprietary processes” – When your SEO company does not want to share their strategy, they may be doing nothing at all. Switch to an SEO company that communicates openly and frequently.
- They write content for search engines and not for people – Your site’s content must be addressed to the reader. If the company is merely stuffing content with keywords willy-nilly to catch the attention of web crawlers, you could soon see a Google penalty.
Your SEO company might promise you the moon, but you need to be vigilant in overseeing their efforts.