There’s no dearth of digital marketing agencies in Goa and Mumbai claiming to offer the best SEO services. But not many people know that no SEO is better than bad SEO. An SEO agency that doesn’t know what it is doing can do serious and lasting damage to your website’s presence on search engines. Not everyone is an expert in the technicalities of SEO so it is easy to get fooled into thinking that what your SEO agency is doing is working for you. Digitally Scrambled reveals a few red flags that you need to watch out for:
1) Sending a Proposal that’s Not Tailored to Your Business
A good SEO Agency will always do its homework and tell you where you stand, what you’re doing right and wrong, and how it can help you improve your ranks on Google. They will also provide you with case studies and samples of how they helped other companies with their SEO in the past. An untailored proposal before the start of the project speaks volumes about the effort it will take once the project begins.
2) Promises of Unrealistic, Permanent, or Long-term Ranks
If your SEO agency in Goa promises that they can obtain the number one position for certain keywords permanently, that right there is a red flag! Your website ranks for various keywords and ranks constantly shift from the sheer volume of changes that websites and Google makes every second. The moment your competitors update their pages or make improvements to their websites, search engines like Google will update their result pages too.
3) Too Much Metadata
Metadata pertains to a page’s meta description and the meta keywords. Though Metadata was a huge part of SEO in the past, search engines have become more sophisticated and don’t rely on it too heavily for ranking anymore. That’s not to say that Metadata is useless it is a basic hygiene factor that every site should have. Meta descriptions do show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) so people can get an idea about what’s on a page before clicking the link. But, they won’t play a huge part in helping you rank above your competition.
4) Link Building being done the Old-fashioned Way
The best way to get links is by earning them, not buying into link schemes, however many SEO agencies in India practice cheap, dirty tactics to temporarily boost ranks and present impressive SEO reports. Making too many low-quality backlinks too fast is the quickest way to get penalized by Google. Bad SEO agencies blow up on one or two easy-to-rank keywords with a large amount of web spamming, instead of focusing on a larger number of achievable, profitable keywords, since clients don’t understand how SEO works. Google constantly looks out for such violators and if caught, the search engine may remove you from their index and may even your will lose your ad rank altogether, with no hope of ever recovering.
5) Promising a Set Number of Backlinks Every Month
A good SEO agency will never promise you a set number of backlinks. If they do, they probably use automated link-building software which is a bad technique. Good backlinks are hard to get and are very valuable as they are relevant to your business, drive traffic to your site, and significantly boost your ranks. Getting these takes a lot of work and no agency can guarantee an exact number without using dicey or black-hat techniques.
6) They are not High on Maintenance
Optimizing a website isn’t a one-time task, it’s a continuous process. One day you may be at the top and the next day you would have to fight with your competitors to get it back. Maintaining your SEO efforts consistently is of crucial importance or else your rankings will suffer. If your agency isn’t high on maintenance, you will find your ranks dropping, even with regular reports coming in every month.
These are just a few tips to help you find the best SEO agency to help you achieve your goals without getting you in trouble and wasting your marketing spend. Meanwhile, you can also read about Social Media Content Ideas. Make sure you know the agency you are considering and understand the plan they have to help you rank your business online.
