In todays post we will explore how can you know what your SEO agency is doing.
Or if they are doing anything at all. As a Contractor Marketing Agency (book a FREE Discovery Call if you haven't yet), we often talk to prospects who have mixed feelings about their past SEO agencies.
Imagine you’ve hired an SEO agency, and it’s been a few months already. How do you know if any work at all is being done?
Now I want to say up front that this is a surface level check to get an understanding if anything is being done at all. There is a lot of things an SEO agency can do that will help you get results and not all of them can be checked through these methods. Plus, every situation is different and the best way to check things is usually by talking to the professionals that you hired.
For example, them may be changing the URLs of your pages, or implementing redirects from the pages that you used to have to new pages (which is a structure of the website), or modifying other things on the background to distinguish between international versions of your website (if any), or improving page load speed etc.
But these are more advanced, technical actions that won’t apply to most contractor websites that we are going to cover in this video.
So when we talk about small or relatively small local websites – under 100 or 200 pages, these is normally a couple of things you will see your SEO experts do:
Agency Reporting - How Often Agencies Report?
While it depends on the agency it’s a common rule of thumb that you will receive some sort of report on a monthly basis. In some cases, clients may even get reports weekly. It’s a common sense – if you are a plumber and you replaced a pipe you’re gonna let your client know, right?
Same goes for SEO. A typical month of work for a relatively small client will include a certain mix of building pages, creating backlinks to your website, building directory listings, and some other technical work on your website, or Google Maps accounts, for example, posting, optimizations, etc. In other words, if it’s been a few months and you’ve never heard from your agency or never seen any work, this seams like a red flag, unless some other work is being done.
And in my view, there is nothing wrong with reaching out to your agency, asking what they are doing exactly.
Do Agencies Create Content?
Source: Aquarescue Plumbing
Most of the smaller sites don’t have enough content or only have some major pages with surface level content on them.
That’s why for many of the locally-oriented websites, building pages is a part of routine SEO work. You will normally see pages related to:
Locations
Services
Optimizations of existing pages and content
Etc.
Depending on the specifics of your engagement, you will normally see one to five-six pages built per month.
In most cases, pages should not be hard to find and should normally see them in the header or in the footer of the website.
Ask your agency what their approach is to content creation and why. Same as for other things in SEO, different websites, and industries may see a different approach.
How to Check Backlinks of a Website?
This is again something that is normally done as a part of SEO routine. The number of backlinks per month will vary depending on your contract, how many links you need to rank and other factors. But most likely you will see at least some links being built every months.
While we as an agency use paid, expensive tools to manage SEO work, you can use a free tool like UberSuggest, to check the number of links that you have.
Open UberSuggest
Go under backlinks,
Backlink overview - and you will see a list of linking websites to your site.
Filter - you can also filter it by first seen, to see the most recent links.
Keep in mind, this is a third party tool meaning this is not Google, or Microsoft, etc.
While all links are different, not all links count the same way, or the tool may not have found your links yet, but this should give you a rough idea if any work is being done at all.
How to Check Directory Backlinks & SEO Citations
Citations – which means directory listings built to your website. You can check this the same way as backlinks by using Ubersuggest or a similar tool.
How to Check Google my Business optimizations?
Source: WordStream
There is a variety of things that can be done here.
Not all of them are obvious, but if we imagine a listing that has never been optimized, when you go to your listing you should see it have services, products, photos, social media links, updated business descriptions, maybe there are updates posted on your account, etc.
In other words it is fairly easy to tell a non-optimized listing from a listing that is well optimized.
How to Check Google Ads Work & Changes?
Finally, number six – and this is not SEO, but if you are running Google Ads, an easy way to check if any optimizations are being done on the account is by going to your account and clicking on Change History.
This will show you modifications that are being done on your account. Now in here doing more doesn’t mean doing better. However, if it’s been a couple of month and there are no changes at all then you either don’t have enough spend in market for optimizations, or maybe everything is working well, or perhaps nothing is being done.
I hope this post was useful. If you are a contractor and looking to get top-quality Contractor Marketing Services, book a FREE Discovery call with one of our experts today!