Choosing the wrong marketing partner can be costly and damaging to your business.
We want to help you avoid making that mistake. Take five minutes to read this.
Trust me, it’s worth it.
As an SEO Company based in Singapore, we’ve audited hundreds of prospects and clients and their competitors and found countless flaws done by other SEO agencies or freelancers, or the companies themselves. These flaws range from harmless but poorly done optimization to dangerous black-hat SEO methods that are potentially fatal. We’re on a mission to improve the digital marketing landscape in Singapore and help SME businesses in around the world avoid pitfalls and traps.
#1 – No Proper Keyword and Market Research.
Before anything else, any SEO professional will consider the needs and goals of the client’s business first. To do so, we must know your business intimately and ask appropriate questions.
Once we do, we will establish the marketing potential of selected keywords through keyword research and market analysis.
Questions like “are customers looking for this particular service using our chosen keywords”.
We determine that by researching the estimating monthly search volume.
If no one is searching for a particular keyword that we have selected (which might happen without proper research), then we’ll be embarking on a futile effort and wasting resources in the duration of the campaign. Even if your SEO agency manages to rank for the keyword, there is no monetary benefit or ROI involved.
Search Intent of the Query (Keywords)
This is OFTEN overlooked.
As a business owner, you might think of certain keywords as your target keywords, since it fits what your service or product is about. Users searching that particular keyword however, might disagree.
We see this often when clients want to target high-volume, short tail keywords. Without going into specifics, you may or may not have encountered this before.
What happens is that most of the results could be “informational”, think students doing research for their thesis (NO $$$). This isn’t a bad thing in itself but that’s a post for another time.
Another example.
A client wanted “service name” specialist. Sounds good right? Maybe.
6 out of 10 of the results were for job-related openings for that specialist. People are looking for jobs, like work. Not jobs as in business project sense. Would we still want to rank for it? Maybe, but the client ought to be informed of their decision so that they can make appropriate changes or managed expectations.
This makes it even more important for marketers and businesses to access thoroughly when it comes to selecting a professional SEO provider. A misstep can be extremely costly – and not just in terms of a substandard Google page ranking.
#2 – Didn’t Do Competitor Analysis.
Your search partner MUST be able to analyse your competitors for a given keyword.
Every keyword has an associated difficulty to rank. If the competitors for a given keyword is rather established (what we would call an authority site, or sites), then the resources and time taken to beat out the competition might both be extremely costly, and takes a long time to reach, if ever.
If your SEO consultant truly cares about your bottom-line and your ROI, then this is a very important part of the process.
#3 – Only thinks of SEO and doesn’t Compliment Other Marketing Channels.
SEO is not the only digital marketing channel that you might have.
A good SEO agency should understand the full spectrum of digital marketing and compliment the current marketing efforts. Search Engine Optimization should work in tandem with Social Media Marketing, Paid Advertising in Search and Display, as well as Direct Sales channels.
If your SEO company does not ask you these questions, they might not be adapt at digital marketing at all and are simply going for the hard-sell.
#4 – Too Cheap To Be True.
Effective SEO strategies can be costly, especially if you are in a competitive industry. Without sufficient resources, your business WILL NOT be able to compete against other companies who are spending more resources on their website’s SEO. If an SEO company promises you cheap AND guaranteed rankings, run far away.
Read more about reasonable SEO Prices here.
#5 – Not Implementing Goal Tracking
Without tracking calls or form submits or website purchases, we cannot determine if a digital marketing campaign is working, improving, or not at all.
This is one of the first things that we at Adscelerate Marketing do (we even have a very detailed guide to goal tracking here). We will routinely analyse the data that we get to measure our progress as well as find areas of potential growth.
If your agency doesn’t do this, well…
You might be wasting money and you don’t know it.
#6 – Doesn’t Monitor Your Backlinks for Attacks
It is rare, but it happens. Negative SEO occurs when other nefarious individuals or competitors spam you with thousands of irrelevant links. For example, your website gets targeted with thousands link with the word “porn” in it. Google then thinks your website is porn related, rather than whatever services you provide. This might result in a drop in website rankings. Good SEO companies constantly monitor for such links and cleans them up.
Negative SEO is alive and real today, even if some “experts” say otherwise.
I’ve seen numerous reports in the SEO community that have seen rankings (READ: business revenue) lost through this.
#7 – NON Holistic SEO Strategy
Any bias towards one type of SEO strategy exposes your business to SEO penalties (dangerous) or ineffective resource allocation.
Relying on PBNs-only is highly risky – even though we may attain fast rankings. If a network is penalized, the website’s rankings can be obliterated overnight.
Relying on a content-only SEO strategy without a backlinking strategy might likely take the website ages to rank, if ever. A holistic SEO strategy should also be integrated with other channel marketing strategies.
Bear in mind: Quality content IS expensive.
However, poor quality content is equally damaging. We no longer stuff a page full of keywords and expect the page to rank.
Google is increasingly rewarding GOOD quality content that satisfies a search users’ query.
Ultimately, we don’t just to rank on page 1 and get visitors, but we want those visitors to convert, or, become customers.
Selecting a digital marketing agency for search marketing may seem daunting. Do the research and find people you want to work with who have a proven track record.
Do that and you will be on your way to harnessing the power of SEO – and remaining competitive.
