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Marketing Director at Conosco
09 July 2009 13:29pm
Monitoring progress on SEO is undoubtedly a challenge and it has been on my mind recently. An obvious, but key, strategy is to align your interests.
We have an arrangement with our SEO advisers, High Position, that half of their monthly fee is based upon a bonus of them achieving a top 5 position in Google for 6 keyphrases that are particularly important to us.
They are doing well so far by taking us from nowhere into the top top 20 for some of the keyphrases, but we are only at the end of month two of the arrangement and they said it would take six months so the real results are yet to be seen.
Outside of this I am trying to get HP to come up with a plan for the six months that indicates how our position should improve over this time with goals for each two month period.
That's my two pennies' worth!
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
15 July 2009 10:08am
Apart from reporting back on the the success of their work in terms of improved ranking, conversion rate, etc... I would ask them to report on what they are actually doing to achieve results.
If link building is part of their strategy why nhot ask them to list all the pages they have linked from.
A clear understanding of what they do (and how they do it) will give you a better idea of how good or bad they are.
Sales & Marketng Director at Interleado
15 July 2009 17:31pm
Can I make a practical suggestion? You can carry out an independent audit of the site. This can be done at no charge by signing up for a free trial of Interleado's SEO Workbench. This is a rules based intelligent software suite designed to audit web sites for search engine optimisation projects.
You enter the site URL plus up to 10 key phrases that you asked your service provider to optimise for your site.
The data will be used to crawl your site and assess how it rates with the major search engines for those key phrases. The main useful output for you will be a report that tells you the top 3 issues in order of priority. These should be the most important and easiest tasks for a seo consultant to implement to get faster and better seo results.
The give this list to your service provider and as few other companies and ask them to quote you specifically for fixing these identified issues. If the feedback you get back indicates that these issues can be fixed easily with results showing in a month or so you should definitely question whether your seo service provider is doing a good job.
You can find the trial sign-up at:
http://www.interleado.com/index.php
You can also read a blog post on the issues of measuring ROI for seo projects here:
http://www.interleado.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/03/whats-the-best-charging-model-for-professional-seo-services/
Web PR Consultant at Clickthrough Marketing
24 July 2009 16:14pm
Many agencies, such as ourselves, offer a free audit and review service with a follow-up meeting to discuss the findings.
As an Internet marketer with 14 years experience, I cannot imagine how any agency cannot achieve visible, tangible results within 6 months, even in a highly competitive niche, unless what they are doing is viewed by the search engines as spam or blackhat. Or they are truly incompetent!
30 July 2009 11:15am
I really think Ashley Friedlein as part of Econsultancy should stay objective on this point. Having a vested interest in another SEO agency really does not look good for Econsultancy’s independent outlook. Fair enough recommending an SEO agency but when you are linked so closely this really does look biased.
I love the website and I was just forced to register to make this comment. I am sure Econsultancy don’t want all of their SEO customers leaving the Blog? I have stopped short of going into details as I am a professional but come on!!!
Todd
CEO at Econsultancy
30 July 2009 13:28pm
Hi Todd
Perhaps, to make it super clear, I should have stated that Browser Media, our search agency, is run by my brother if that's what you mean?
I don't think that means I can't recommend them as I have no business interest in Browser Media and I think they're good at what they do and the SEO audit is good value and sensible. You can download the SEO Audit they did for John Lewis to see (though this is a few years old now).
We've never been shy to recommend people but only if we actually know them well, and usually that means they work for us. For example here's me saying good things about Kampyle, and here's me recommending Clicktools which we use etc.
On your point about registering: you can leave a comment on the *blog* (this is the Forum, not the blog) without registering. However, we took the decision to enforce registration to post to our forum as we just couldn't control the spam we were getting from... you guessed it... SEOs after free links. We still have this problem in the blog.
30 July 2009 17:59pm
A) I never said you couldn’t recommend your brothers agency
B) My comment about SEO advertisers moving away was not directed at the need to register. My point is that if an SEO agency was planning to advertise with econsultancy they may decide against it due to a perceived bias.
C) It is your company you are free to do what the hell you want
Thank you for the prompt reply
T
CEO at Econsultancy
30 July 2009 20:37pm
Fair enough Todd... For the record, then, I think all SEO agencies are great. In particular Latitude - please scroll up and click on their ad... ;)
31 July 2009 10:53am
Ashely, if all SEO Agencies were that great, then this post would never have originated! There are clealy some sharks out there it's just not always easy for a lay person to work out who they are and steer a course around them. Hence turning to econsultancy for the top tips, which have been great.
Head of Marketing at Colebrook Bosson Saunders
06 August 2009 13:33pm
With SEO it's really easy to be blagged about what can be delivered and what can't, especially if you have little understanding of what's involved. I suspect your agency have done the basic optimisation and haven't continued to do the required amount of follow up work to make it successful. In my experience of SEO it's a very organic process with lots of additional work, often involving full elements of the marketing mix just delivered over the web platform. My SEO agency have increased my SEO specific traffice by 25% over 7 months so it is possible if you brief them correctly and they're prepared to do the work.
If you need a new agency get these guys to pitch to you, they did my SEO when I was at the Guardian and do it at my current company: http://www.4psmarketing.com/