How to Spot the Real Deal With a Professional SEO Company
If you’re looking to hire an SEO company to handle your online marketing, you’ll want to be sure that you’re dealing with the right firm. There are a few warning signs you can look out for to help ensure that you’re not wasting your money.
Black hat SEO tactics can result in penalties from Google
Black hat SEO tactics are not legal and can lead to penalties from Google and other search engines. If you implement them, you may experience a drop in rankings, as well as a loss in traffic and sales.
Some common black hat SEO practices include content scraping, which is the creation of low-quality webpages. Others include cloaking, which hides a piece of content from users and shows another one to search engines.
A Google penalty can lead to your website being removed from the SERPs, or a permanent ban. The amount of traffic and conversions your site gets will be greatly reduced, which could cost you a lot of money in the long run.
Many search engines have become more effective at detecting black hat techniques and are continually changing the way they operate. The Google Penguin algorithm, which was updated to version 4.0 in 2016, has been the cause of a general decline in Black Hat SEO.
Inability to provide monthly reporting and Google Analytics data indicates no true results are achieved with their SEO tactics
The ability to provide effective client reporting is a great way to demonstrate your worth as an agency and increase the chances of securing new business. In addition to highlighting the best of your efforts, monthly reports provide the opportunity to discuss results as they are happening. This helps prevent small issues from escalating into big ones.
For starters, the Google Analytics data center has a few free tools that can help you see just how your efforts are paying off. For example, you can create new segments to speed up workflow, and add a user type to the all pages report to get an accurate picture of how your visitors interacted with your site.
You can also look to other platforms for insights. For example, Google Webmaster Central is a good source of industry news and blogs. You can also use Google Search Console for keyword performance monitoring. It’s also a good idea to subscribe to newsletters from industry thought leaders.
Warning signs that your SEO agency is a problem
If your SEO agency is causing false positives or failing to deliver results, you may be a victim of an untrustworthy SEO service. It’s important to keep an eye out for these warning signs.
If an SEO company is not willing to provide you with regular reports or explanations of their work, then you should be wary. They may not be doing a lot, or they could be hiding something.
Another red flag is that they don’t have access to key tools, which is critical for SEO. SEO experts must be able to check on your site, monitor analytics, and make necessary adjustments to your site. Without these tools, they are unable to do a good job.
If you notice that your site has been de-indexed by Google, you should be suspicious. This can happen quickly. Your site can lose hundreds of positions overnight. It’s vital to contact the SEO firm and ask for an explanation.
Some agencies will send you articles filled with irrelevant links that will hurt your search engine rankings. This is one of the biggest no-no’s in SEO today.
