You may be surprised to hear this : your SEO agency can actually be hurting your website. We have been contacted by many businesses who have invested lot of time and money, and then realize that something is going wrong. They notice that their website rankings have dropped steadily or are fluctuating wildly, or their organic traffic has been on a decline, or even worse, they do not know what their organic traffic is. SEO can be quite technical and many business owners get short changed by an SEO agency which initially had promised the moon.
What are the signs that your SEO agency is not doing its job?
1. You do not get any monthly SEO reports
Sad, but it happens. Many clients do not get any detailed SEO reports which tells them what SEO activities were done. As a client, you should at the least get monthly SEO reports.
The agency should explain what exactly they are doing. If they refuse stating that its confidential or too technical for you, fire them fast! They well could be doing black hat (illegitimate) SEO.
You paid money and should get clear deliverables. During the contract you should be getting:
* An SEO audit of website
* Analysis of your site's link profile
* Keywords that both parties agree to
* Link building - what are the links to your site that have been published on other sites
* Organic traffic comparison
* Website optimization : titles, heading tags, etc
* SEO optimized content
2. They do not ask you for anything or involve you
They should ask you for the following :
* Access to your website host server and CMS
* Access to Google Analytics or set it up, if not done already
* Access to Google Webmaster Tools or set it up
* Access to social accounts or set it up
* Both you and agency should research and agree to a list of target keywords
If they have not done this, they may be building only spammy links, which will hurt you over time.
3. You notice drop in rankings or organic traffic
If you see a sudden drop in ranking it could be due to change in Google ranking algorithm penalizing your site or a manual penalty. The SEO activities of your agency may have led to this - ask them and investigate.
4. You see unnatural links to your site
If you see unnatural links to your site which were not there before then it's a sure shot sign that black hat SEO is being done. What are unnatural links? These are :
* High percentage of links with keywords as anchor text
* Links from unrelated or spammy sites