How Is Your SEO Company Doing?
If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you are a business owner paying an SEO company to optimize your website. And you may fear or even know that the results are falling short of what was promised. Unfortunately, this is a common truth for many small businesses.
Because SEO is not an exact science, it’s hard to know what to expect. There are plenty of SEO companies that will promise you the world, get you to sign a contract, and never deliver results even close to the their promises.
Your SEO Company May Not Be in Alignment with Your Goals
You expect your SEO company to be the expert on how to move your online location from a bad neighborhood to a better one. Unfortunately, though, that isn’t always what happens.
One nightmare scenario is when a business website has been penalized by Google. If your website has been targeted by Google and a penalty is issued, you will very likely drop completely out of the rankings. And when that happens, it’s a very hard recovery process. Some SEO companies aren’t even equipped to help you find a positive solution.
You could also be working with an SEO company that, while a representative is based here in the US, is really using offshore talent. Overall, this isn’t a bad thing, but it could cause issues. Too often, offshore SEOs point bad links to your website. This might work for a few months, but the end result could be getting penalized and losing your rankings.
How to Double-check Your SEO Company’s Efforts
Luckily, there are several online resources you can use to monitor both your search engine rankings and the strategies used by your SEO company to build links to your website.
SEMrush is probably the best all-in-one tool to monitor just about everything possible in terms of search engines. It displays all of the keywords your website can be found for in Google, along with their positions. You’ll see if your ranking positions are increasing or decreasing. The site accurately estimates traffic to your website. It can also monitor your PPC and social media campaigns. Plus, you can even track your competitors!
MOZ is an extremely powerful tool, especially for local businesses. Through MOZ’s dashboard, you can do several things such as manage, track, and optimize your online listings and distribute business listing information in real time to key directories. MOZ syncs with your Google My Business account and allows you to track and update all of your citations in one place.
Ahrefs is our preferred tool for SEO monitoring. It explores your site, content, and keywords; offers alerts; and checks backlinks as well as content gaps and how your site compares with others. In addition, it has a toolbar that provides insights into all of your digital-marketing efforts.
Work Directly with Your SEO Company
Checking up on your SEO company doesn’t have to be all spies and dark-alley stuff. You can actually work within parameters to help them to be more transparent in their efforts.
Ask for reporting. Any good SEO company will track the performance of their SEO and PPC campaigns. As their client, you should be receiving regular reports on rankings and results. If they are doing good work, there will be nothing to hide.
Search for your keywords. Open an incognito browser and search for the keywords you and your SEO company are targeting. Also, be sure to check where you are ranking in your local maps as well.
Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO company questions. Ask them what they are doing, what they have already done, and what their plan is going forward. And request results, whether positive or negative.
Do you worry that you’re being taken to the cleaners by your SEO company? At Rising Phoenix SEO, we can help. We’ll provide a second opinion on their efforts to ensure you’re getting what’s expected. And if you’re not where you want to be, we can certainly help get you there. Start by completing our free discovery form; we’ll do the rest.
