As a web developer, you may not know how to make your website gets the first place on Google rank. Therefore, hiring SEO agency is such a good idea in order to leverage your website page rank. However, you need to know that not every SEO agency will produce you with better result. In fact, in some cases, hiring SEO agencies will somehow make your traffic drops. This is because; some of SEO firm is hurting your web rather than helping them. Below are some signs that telling if your SEO firm is hurting you
- They have nothing to show
A good SEO agency will come with something to show you. It is not all about the sudden results or a rise in rankings. Instead, the agency should be able to show you the actual SEO practices they are doing which can be seen after four or five months from a contract. Furthermore, you need to know that you can’t expect a significant SEO result in its early progress.
If you have no idea about what a SEO agency might provide in the first few weeks or months of a contract:
- An SEO audit of your site
- An analysis of your site’s link profile
- Optimized content on your site
- Articles with links to your site that are being or have been published on other sites.
The above points are some of the examples that prove your SEO agency are doing something.
- They Never Ask You for Anything
Another sign that your SEO agency is doing nothing are that they never ask you for the listed stuff below:
- Editor or admin access to your CMS
- View or admin access to Google Analytics
- Access to Google Webmaster Tools
- Access to social accounts
- A list of target keywords
- Past audits/penalties/work
If they never ask for any of these, it could be because they are only adding link backs from their vast network of spam sites. Since, they don’t need access, and there’s a chance that they are potentially performing harmful actions.
- You Start Ranking for the Wrong Keywords
When you start having a SEO agency to help with your rank, you should already know what your target keywords are. Moreover, you can also figure out from your Google Analytics how your longtail keywords are driving traffic and/or ranking in the SERPs. To determine analytics on this, navigate to Acquisition → Keywords → Organic.
See if there is any change happens significantly to your organic keywords, there must be a reason if you begin gaining traffic from the wrong keywords. Or, the most problematic one is if you stop ranking for previously high ranking keywords. Moreover, a good goal in growing your traffic is to earn targeted traffic, if the traffic comes from wrong queries, then your SEO agency is doing indiscriminate work.