Have you had an email land unsolicited in your inbox, telling you that your website isn’t ranking in Google and that they can help? If you’ve hired one of these SEO firms or are thinking about it, take ten minutes to assess their approach. Hiring an SEO cowboy may end up with you in the bullshit.
The algorithms and practices Google use to determine who ranks in search results is constantly changing. What used to be ‘normal’ and accepted might now be considered ‘black hat’ practices and get you in trouble with the Google police. This quick guide gives you some easy ways to assess if an SEO provider is bona fide, or bogus.
Warning sign one: Promising you’ll be on the first page of Google results
No-one can promise you this. Your ranking relies on a whole bunch of stuff, but it’s really dependent on what your competitors are doing as much as it needs your business to be doing the right things. Any agency that promises page one of Google results are either delusional or lying. There is a strategy they will use though, to ‘prove’ to you that they’ve achieved their goal.
Warning sign two: Ranking for useless keywords
Choosing keywords is as much an art as it is a science. While there are several logical paths to choosing your keywords, there are some useless rabbit holes too. A bad SEO agency will give you bad keywords to rank for. They adopt this strategy because it’s easy to rank highly for a phrase literally no-one will ever search. You’ll be first because no-one else is trying to rank for ‘pink panda stilettos for sale’. This is how they prove their effectiveness to you—after all, you’re on the first page of Google search results now!
The problem with this is that when your website does come up, it’s not going to be for anything logical or relevant. Even if you’re a business selling panda costumes, then ranking for pink panda stilettos for sale isn’t going to help.
Also, by ranking for useless phrases, you’re missing opportunities to rank for good, useful phrases that your customers will actually be searching for.
Warning sign three: Promising you results in a short timeframe
SEO is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s not something that happens overnight. If someone is promising results within weeks, they are telling porkies. Whether you start with an entirely new site or are re-writing an old site, then it takes a few days for crawlers to rediscover your site. And then you need to build a presence and keep on scoring SEO ‘points’ for relevant content. It’s building a wall of good SEO practices, slowly, to get the best long-term outcomes. It won’t happen overnight. If they give you exact dates and short timeframes… get out of there.
Warning sign three: They are creating dodgy backlinks
Part of SEO is creating backlinks. That’s external websites that have links to your website. As far as Google is concerned, backlinks are a sign that you’ve got relevant content that people trust. But if your SEO company is linking you from terribly dodgy sites, then you are going to be losing rankings, and fast. You want to be backlinked from sites with good domain authority, more than 30. (Note: Domain authority is a metric created by a company called Moz. For purposes of this article, we will use this phrase to express how trustworthy a site is).
If you are backlinked from porn sites, pharmaceutical sales sites, and a bunch of Russian dating sites, they are all going to have low domain authority, and it’s going to make your rankings look bad. Getting genuine backlinks is an absolute art—if someone is buying them or getting backlinks from sites with incredibly low domain authority, it’s a bad sign.
Most SEO software can tell you who is linking to your site, I like ahrefs.
Warning sign four: Their content is terrible
If they write content for you and it’s awful, then you need to reassess if they are the right firm for you. Well-written content is king; it should provide value for your customers and be easy to read. If blogs are full of errors or jammed full of uncomfortable key-words (for example, ‘In the wild, pandas wear pink panda stilettos for sale in trees’), Google can tell and they don’t like it.
Also be wary if they have a high-volume strategy. While regular blogs help (1-2 a week is great), it should be about quality. Re-purposing existing blogs to create ‘evergreen’ content is another fantastic strategy, Google loves updated, long-lasting relevant content. It’s not just about pumping out a heap of blogs.
Warning sign five: Any ‘black hat’ SEO
There are a range of practices referred to as ‘black hat’ practices. They are strict no-nos:
- Keyword stuffing- just shoving those keywords in at every opportunity
- Blog spam, where comments made on blogs link back to your site
- Cloaking, where there’s basically a fake webpage hidden from viewers
- Duplicate content where you directly copy someone else’s website writing (unsure about this? www.copyscape.com allows you to put copy in and see if it’s stolen from another site)
- Link farming, where a bunch of bad websites all link to and from each other
- Hidden text, where things like keywords are written in white font on a white background.
When to get on your horse and ride out of town
If your SEO provider is doing any of these things, your site will be suffering because of it. You could be getting penalised from Google, you might be ranking for entirely the wrong things, or you might simply be missing opportunities and spending money on something that’s useless.
If any of these strategies sound familiar, we recommend you find a better provider. While we’d love it to be us, it doesn’t have to be. Just make sure the company you use does things a legitimate way and are dedicated to a long, slow marathon towards great organic search results.