5 Indications of a Bad SEO or Digital Marketing Agency

Is your SEO Agency or digital marketing agency dishonest? Are they only interested in taking money from you? When it is about making vital decisions for your business, it is important to contact a reputed digital marketing agency that can work alongside you and your business goals. In this blog, we will discuss the five signs that you are with a bad agency.

Own your login or data 

One of the signs of a reputed SEO agency is that they will allow you to have the complete control of your data, reporting and logins. You may reach a certain point when you do not want to work with your agency but this can happen.

That many agencies do in this situation is to hold logins hostage and data to keep the agreement going.This mayexpand into legal disputes that can get stretched for several months, years and ends with the requirement to add new tracking codes and new logins to your websites.Any professional relationship should be built on trust though it has to be from both sides.

According to experts of a SEO agency in the UK, when hiring these individuals to “handle everything” from an SEO perspective, make sure you seek for references and check their background and if they cannot provide any references, then you should look somewhere else.

Guaranteed first page rankings on search results 

SEO professionals have the winning pitch that they guarantee first page rankings on search results. What these SEO experts won’t tell you is what they will get ranked on the first page, despite if it is driving quality traffic, generating higher revenue or more leads to your website.

Read on to know how it actually works:

• They talk to you over the phone and discuss your website. This can be done by enticing you with misleading advertisements such asa free audit that they send you or long email about something that had just occurred with Google.
• You give them a shot as you have to fix the issues explained by them and since you do not understand the ins and outs of organic search, you can easily fall into the trap.
• You will be able to find some keywords to Page 1 within a few weeks which fulfill the claim of guaranteedfirst page search results.
• Fast forward for a few months and Page 1 rankings will continue to come without any new business.
• SEO is a slow process and you will find new Page 1 results every week.
• You search for keywords after 6+ months you are “winning” on and realisethat they have next to no monthly search volume and are not at all appropriate for your business.

Thus, when it is about Google’s algorithm, even the SEO experts cannot guarantee anything.

Share their story and not yours 

According to a report on metrics, another sign of a reputed agency is if their reporting is always sharing their story and not yours.They always put greater emphasis on what was right, what they did awesome and why you need to pay more for the upcoming renewal.They do not discuss what was wrong, what did not work out and the lessons that were learned to make the present campaign successful.

If you know half of the story, then this should be detrimental for your business and education. By not being transparent, your agency has donea lot of damage by not letting you know the mistakes along the way.The agencies do not want to tell you exactly what they like to do because they do not want to give away their “secret formula” that makes everything work.

Professionals working in the best awarded SEO agency in the UK said, the truth is that the formula has various tests and missteps that let the campaign get to its present state, which is valuable for everyone who is involved.

Partnership has been positioned as transactional

People who are willing to help will tell you that they want to help you and people who don’t will tell you how much their service costs will be and how the monthly meetings will be structured. This is the great difference between hiring a vendor and a partner. A vendor will send you the bill.

If an agency comes in and spends hours talking about how great they are without telling you how they can personally help you, then you should stay away from them.

Though there is absolutely nothing wrong with bragging, you need to searchfor professionals who conduct research on your brand and give actionable things that they believe you will be able to attain together with the help of data. They care about your business and while they will send the bill every month, you will not mind paying it that much as work is being done.The lesson here is to look for a partner and not only another vendor.

Case studies are outdated

You need to ask the agency that you are hiring about their most recent successes as organic search changes all the time and whilst they may have been successful in the past, they may not be as good as they claim to be today.

These are some signs of a bad SEO or digital marketing agency that can help you to avoid falling into their trap.