Sometimes the SEO industry makes me so mad. I speak with prospects and clients every day who have had a terrible experience with a search engine optimization (SEO) agency or consultant. Learn how to recognize the red flags so you don’t get scammed by an SEO agency.
Watch for these nine signs before you agree to work with a new SEO professional. If the person you’re speaking to displays any of these signs, strongly consider choosing a different agency or consultant.
1. Performance Promises
No one can promise organic search performance. Not even the most experienced SEO professionals who have been in the business since the 1990s can promise performance improvements for every client all of the time. And if they give you a specific percentage increase or hard timeframe for improvement, that’s even scammier.
Performance improvements depend on a lot of intangibles and unknowns — especially unknown before you start working with the SEO agency. Not the least of which: Will you be willing or able to implement the recommendations required to see performance improvements, and will those implementations happen immediately or over the course of months?
2. Meaningless Metrics
What drives your bottom line? It’s not rankings. But scammy SEO companies love to dwell on rankings because they’re super easy to measure, easy to run canned reports on, and so numerous that it’s easy to downplay issues in important areas, to focus instead only where it benefits them the most.
But rankings don’t pay your bills — leads or revenue pay your bills, depending on your business model. If an agency doesn’t request access to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see the metrics that really matter before auditing your site, pass them by.
Before you sign on, ensure that you’ll be receiving regular organic search performance reports that contain the metrics that matter — impressions, clicks, sessions, and conversions or revenue.
3. Crummy Canned Audits
Speaking of canned audits, scammy agencies love to input a domain into an auditing tool and push a button to have an audit auto-generated. It’s easy, it looks impressive, and it takes no time at all. If the person on the receiving end isn’t especially SEO-savvy, the canned audit will seem overwhelming and potentially scary, prompting them to sign on quickly to fix all of these heinous issues. But look closely: Do you see things like meta description length, broken links, 404 errors, duplicate title tags, broken images, missing alt attributes, underscores in the URL, and more in that same vein? Fixing these will not improve your rankings. Period. It’s a scare tactic that projects the site maintenance issues that every site has as SEO calamities.
Real SEO audits are conducted manually by skilled and experienced SEO professionals. Real SEO audits contain strategic and tactical recommendations designed to improve organic search performance, not a list of quick fixes.
4. Gateway to Googlers
No one in SEO has a Googler in their pocket pulling levers to improve a specific site’s performance. It does not exist. Even having Google Premier Partner status on the paid search side does not deliver preferential treatment in Google organic search. If someone claims to have access to inside assistance, it’s just not true.
5. Leading with Links
Yes, authority is one of the central concepts Google was built on, the authority conveyed by a backlink from one site to another. In the nearly 30 years since Google was founded, the act of determining authority has changed quite a bit. But scammy SEO agencies hold on to their link-building business models because they’ve already done the legwork of setting up scammy link-building efforts like private blog networks and low-quality guest posting, and because people will still buy links.
Links that can be bought or traded for leave a pattern that’s detectable by the top search engines. Those links might work for a little while, but when they’re caught, they will either be devalued (which means that the performance they caused will also stop) or punished (which can tank your entire site’s performance).
6. Expert Evaluations, Training-Wheels Team
Even if you do happen to find a great salesperson or director of SEO who gives a high-quality sales pitch, that person is not likely who you’ll be doing business with going forward. Ask who your team will be, what their experience level is, what their specialties are, and whether they’ll be dedicated to your program or not.
A lot of agencies work on a turn-and-burn staffing model — bring a bunch of newbies in the door, train them a little, toss them into a workload that’s over their heads skills-wise and too heavy, burn them out, and repeat the cycle when they leave. That’s not who you want on your account because it results in low-quality work for your website. Discuss employee training, client load, and churn upfront.
7. Oops, Outsourced
Along the same lines, find out up front whether your potential SEO agency outsources or offshores SEO work. Will your team be a full-time employee of the agency or a revolving group of contractors? Will the person writing and optimizing your copy be a trained writer — not all SEOs are specifically trained as writers — who grew up speaking American English?
Some SEO companies white label the services of other hidden SEO partners or offshore companies, mark up the cost, and pass it on to you as their own efforts. Make sure to ask who will do the work upfront, and ask what their relationship is to the agency you’re talking to.
8. Absence of Accountability
Require a schedule of the work planned for the first three months. Any SEO agency worth its salt should have a sample roadmap planned out and should be able to describe how that roadmap might differ based on what they know about your business.
How are they going to develop their SEO strategy? Will they only plan for the first month or two, or will they produce optimizations or create content that can be placed on the site to help performance start to improve more quickly?
If they can’t hold themselves accountable before the work starts, when they’re trying their hardest to impress you, do you really think they’ll be accountable after they’ve started taking your money?
9. Regarding Reviews
You probably wouldn’t even buy a pair of shoes without checking the reviews. Why should hiring an SEO agency be any different? If their reviews on Google or third-party review sites like Clutch are poor, there’s a stronger likelihood that you won’t have a positive experience with them either. If they don’t have any reviews, that’s even worse — they’re so new or haven’t made enough of an impression on any client that no one has bothered to review them. Testimonials are great as well, but keep in mind that those are written by the marketing folks at the agency you’re talking to.
Why Do Agencies Scam?
These SEO scams bring lots of business through the door, often supporting a revolving door business model — lots of companies coming on board for SEO services with high hopes, and then lots of companies quitting quickly because they don’t see the results promised. But sometimes, the SEO agency might get lucky on some of those businesses — they might not be paying enough attention to their own metrics and might stay on longer than the average length of time.
Be on the lookout for these nine red flags when selecting your next SEO agency. If any of them ring a bell when you think about your current agency, consider looking for a new one right away.
