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Hiring an SEO agency? Ask them these difficult questions first.
29 Plays1 year ago
We have been doing some research into some of the challenging questions SEO sceptics ask SEO agencies. Some of the questions were really surprising, some were reassuring and none are irrelevant!
In this episode Yeseo founder Andrew Laws runs through the questions and explains why getting a clear answer is so important.
Here's a recap of the questions:
How do you measure ROI?
What sort of return can you expect to see? How long will it take?
Ask for a case study
Ask about pricing models
Are there any hidden costs?
How can the agency ensure they are cost-effective?
How do you tailor your SEO strategies?
What are you doing to ensure sustainable results?
What makes your SEO strategies different to strategies of other agencies?
How experienced is your agency?
Asking for case studies
Ask to speak to clients of the agency
Ask for relevant examples of previosu work
Ask what niches the SEO agencies has worked in
What is the agency doing to stay up to date?
How often does the agency send SEO reports?
How much SEO knowledge are you expected to have as a client?
What strategy does the agency use to adapt to changes in SEO practice?
How does the SEO agency comnunicate?
How is client feedback incorporated into SEO strategies?
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Transcript
Introduction to SEO Objections
00:00:00
Speaker
We need to talk. It's not you, it's me. In fact, it's not me, it's SEO. My name's Andrew Laws and I am the founder of Yesseo. I've been doing some research into objections people might have to paying for SEO. If people know they need SEO and they want to see their site go up, what concerns might they have that might be blockers, might be obstacles, might make them think I'm not so sure. And I've got
Addressing Common SEO Questions
00:00:26
Speaker
a big old list.
00:00:27
Speaker
So here we go, I'm gonna try and give you this as mutually as I can, but because this is my video, because we're making it for you SEO, I'm gonna tell you how we counter these. Here we go, objection number one. Or questions actually, let's call it questions. What questions, what difficult questions could you ask someone who you're considering hiring to do SEO for you? Okay, question number one. How do you measure the ROI of your SEO?
00:00:56
Speaker
That's quite an easy one for us. Are you getting more leads? Are you making more sales? If you're giving an SEO agency money, is it helping you make more money? It's quite a baseline thing. It's quite a simple thing. Pretty SEO, just getting lots of rankings, but not increasing leads or sales is kind of pointless and irrelevant. I think most business owners would agree with that. So connected to that, what sort of return can you expect to see from your investment in SEO?
00:01:24
Speaker
And how long does it take? This is going to be the first one of the SEO questions that I'm going to have to respond. It depends.
00:01:34
Speaker
If you're selling widgets and making a few pennies on each, then you're probably going to have to sell a lot of widgets to see a good return. But it's not unusual for us to work with people who sell a lot of things for a small margin to many, many people. But it's also not unusual for us to work with clients who sell very big things with a very high price and high large margin.
00:01:57
Speaker
to a small number of people, so it matters more what your targets are. SEO can take you to some really great places, but we need your targets to be able to aim the rocket ship at.
00:02:15
Speaker
I'd say conservatively three to six months but again it depends. If you're an incredibly competitive market it can take longer. If your competitors have got a head start on you and have been doing SEO for many many years already then it's going to take longer to catch up with them.
00:02:32
Speaker
But of course, the opposite side of that is if you're in a market where no one has really made the most of SEO yet and I can think of several straight off the top of my head that that is relevant to, then it's your turn to get the head start and you might see quicker results. The best time to start SEO is a bit like the old cliche about when's the best time to start a tree. The best time to start SEO is 20 years ago. The second best time to start SEO is today, right now.
00:03:03
Speaker
It's because of all these potentially wide areas of scope of the job that might need to be carried out to help your rankings that agencies like mine carry out free feasibility study, free most of the time. Sometimes if it's a really big job, then it's a different thing. It becomes a whole project. But I think a lot of agencies do that. Don't be afraid to ask for it. Say, well, can you show us proof?
00:03:27
Speaker
An agency worth its salt might say something like, look, we can't prescribe until we've diagnosed. And that's absolutely fair comment. But I don't think any SEO agency wouldn't at least have a look. I mean, sometimes
SEO Pricing Models
00:03:40
Speaker
you can think, well, this is just not a job for SEO. That does happen. So ask that question. If you want that information backed up, ask for a case study.
00:03:52
Speaker
all SEO companies write case studies because we're proud of what we do if we really move the needle and when we have real success we want to tell everyone about it and quite often our clients are perfectly happy for us to tell everyone how smart they are in the way they've collaborated with us to get their SEO skyrocketing so ask for case studies and you can ask how long it will be to get a return on investment
00:04:18
Speaker
you might not get a response. If you get an honest response, I think that's probably the sign of a good agency. Next, we're on to cost and pricing. What are your... These are questions to ask an SEO agency. What are your pricing models? Again, it's a very tricky thing because everyone has different overheads. Everyone has different software and other outgoing costs.
00:04:40
Speaker
But I think at least getting an agency to break it down a little bit is really helpful. For example, we have a day rate. We have monthly clients. Most of our clients are monthly. We have project clients where we'll come in and we'll work for a month or two or sometimes a far shorter period than that. We have coaching clients who we speak to maybe once a month and we have the hourly one-offs. So there's kind of something for all levels there.
Customizing SEO Strategies
00:05:09
Speaker
I'm going to be honest with you, I'm transparent now. I've got some notes here because there's quite a lot of things that I want to cover in this email. Another question to ask is, are there any hidden costs to SEO? I think generally the answer to this is no. I'm yet to meet any peers who would throw in extra costs. I think once you start an SEO project,
00:05:30
Speaker
If it looks like it's going to require a lot more resource than you initially thought, then that's when we speak to the client and say, look, this job is bigger than we thought it was. How would you like to proceed? Quite often in SEO, you can get slightly faster results if you put a lot of resource into making changes, or you can spread those changes out over a longer time and potentially have to wait longer for bigger results. But again, it's not that straightforward. It all depends on the job in hand.
00:05:58
Speaker
For example, we worked on a project once where it looked like it was going to be a really big job. When we started, the developers had done something that meant that the website wouldn't be visible to Google. That was quite an easy and quick thing for us to fix. On the other hand, sometimes when we start a serious SEO project, our client's competitors can catch up with them.
00:06:20
Speaker
Sometimes it can take months, sometimes it can take years, in which case we need to step up the game now. We need to put more work into this. So I'm afraid, in summary, it depends. How can we ensure that services are cost effective?
00:06:38
Speaker
It's another big challenging one, really. We try and make sure we give the best value we can to every client. But I quite like this as a potential question to ask another agency. What are you doing to perform efficiency and value? I mean, I'll happily talk to any of our clients about all the work we do behind the scenes for our project management to get things really pushing to try and get every little bit of value I have, every bit of time and every task that we carry out for our clients. But it's a good question to ask anyone.
00:07:05
Speaker
I think it's a good question to ask anyone in any industry, not just SEO agencies. What are you doing to be efficient to make the most of our investment? Nice question. So next we're on to strategy and customization. How you can ask a potential SEO agency, how do you tailor your SEO strategies?
00:07:26
Speaker
I think this should be an easy one for any SEO agency to answer. There are certain key things that have to be done for every client that we work with here at ESEO. For example, we have this long checklist that we go through just to say, look, has this been done? Has search console been connected? It's just a long list. We call it our roadmap.
00:07:48
Speaker
because we like giving things silly names. But the bigger answer is no to SEO strategies are exactly the same. There's always core things at the same. Hey, we're always going to start with keyword research and then on-site auditing. And then there's always several broad stroke tactics, sorry, strategies that are the same.
00:08:11
Speaker
but no two clients are the same, no two sets of opportunities are the same, so no two strategies can be exactly the same. So everything is customised to every client, apart from that little first bit.
00:08:28
Speaker
A question which came
Staying Updated with SEO Trends
00:08:29
Speaker
up in my research which is a little trickier to answer because the key word in this might have two meanings and the question is what are you doing as an agency for sustainable results? Now the word sustainable has become very big in our world because it relates to things like community resilience, environmental and economic concerns but for this
00:08:52
Speaker
this video and for this article or podcast, depending on how you're consuming this, I'm going to answer it in a very specific way. Sustainable results, I'm going to use that phrase to mean consistent results. Now, consistently climbing is what we're going for, but things do dip in SEO, but we then work to get them back up, so sustainable growth
00:09:16
Speaker
How do we do that? Well, constant monitoring. I mentioned earlier that a lot of our clients have been with us many, many years. It's because the opportunities available to our clients change all the time. New things have got like AI at the moment. Everyone's talking about AI. I mean, in our industry, we've known about it for a while. In fact, a lot of tech industries have worked there for 25 years maybe.
00:09:37
Speaker
But it's a good example of new opportunities coming along. Okay, so when something new comes along, what can we do? How can we exploit that for our clients? So we ensure results are sustainable by evolving and by staying very connected to the market and constantly looking out for opportunities. We have several things in place to make that happen. Again, to give you more technical details, I would have to make a far longer video. And this video is already running at 10 minutes, so I don't want to be too much longer.
00:10:07
Speaker
Next one, what makes you ask this to any SEO agency? What makes your strategies different to the strategies of other SEO agencies? It's a lovely question. It does put you on the spot somewhat because the answer is really challenging. We are all working to the same algorithm. We're all working to the same set of guidelines from Google.
00:10:28
Speaker
So our approach might be similar to that of another SEO agency, but it's all the intangible extra benefits that we add in. And this keen eye for looking for opportunities that can make the difference between us and another SEO agency. But in the interest of fairness, another SEO agency might be stronger than we are on a certain aspect of SEO. It's all about finding the right fit, finding the SEO agency that you feel most comfortable with making an investment with.
00:10:58
Speaker
paying money to I like referring it to as an investment because It is and it's one that should pay back with a great ROI but enough about that So next one we're on to past performance track record. Don't be afraid to ask your agency You know, how long have you been around everyone? Everyone's really proud of how long they've been around but I've been guilty this myself I've been saying I've been an SEO for this long
00:11:24
Speaker
The reality is, if you're buying SEO, it doesn't really matter how long somebody's been doing something as long as they have experience. And as long as they can show you, show you they're working, show you some decent case studies. Something I like to do when I speak to prospective new clients is encourage them to ring my clients. Pick any of my clients. I'll list them for you. I'm not gonna list them on this video. But if you're thinking of working for us, I've actually put it in the proposals we send out. Please speak to any of our clients.
00:11:54
Speaker
Because they're the ones who are going to give you the answers from a non-tech perspective as to why they still want to work for us. And I would say it probably almost always comes down to being understood, which is a big part being listened to. It's the fact we're proactive and the biggest one, the most brutal one is do we get results? And if we do, that's why our clients stay with us when we do. Be more positive about that.
00:12:24
Speaker
So ask for examples that are relevant to you. I mean one of the other questions is what type of businesses, what type of industries, what niches do you work with regularly?
00:12:35
Speaker
This one, again, is a challenge in SEO because many SEO agencies won't work with two companies in the same industry who might be competitors. We think it's unethical. If we've got this much resource to rank you at the top of Google, how are we possibly going to rank another company who do the same thing as you both at the top? We just can't do it. So that's our answer to that question.
00:12:58
Speaker
Another question you can ask prospective agencies is what are they doing to stay up to date with the latest changes in SEO? This one, I would say almost all SEO agencies will give you the same answer as us. We read a lot, a lot.
00:13:14
Speaker
We stay connected to all the industry magazines. They're all webzines. Is that still a word we use? All the webzines in our industry. There is so much news and so much information constantly flying into the brains of anyone in SEO that it's just a natural part of the job, as it is for many other things. I can't imagine if you're a doctor that you still kind of
00:13:37
Speaker
that you ignore everything coming from the British Medical Journal or wherever. It's a similar kind of thing in SEO, although thankfully we're not responsible for people's actual health. Right, I'm
Transparency and Client Involvement
00:13:49
Speaker
going to have to refer to my list here. So transparency and reporting is what I have next. Ask your agency that you're going to work with how often do they report? What will the report contain? How understandable will the report be for anyone who isn't in tech?
00:14:05
Speaker
I can give you our ounces. We tend to report once a month, at the beginning of every month, and we say, this is what's gone up, this is what's gone down, here's what we're gonna do this month, here's what we did last month. We keep our reports really concise. At the moment, and this video may date because we're constantly evolving our reports, at the moment we send a fairly meaty report, which we generate using a bit of software called SEMrush, that goes into quite a lot of technical detail. That's just a PDF, and we say, here you go, here is this, and we will gladly
00:14:34
Speaker
talk you through what all of this actually means, but what we actually do as a report is we write a brief email with that executive summary that I just mentioned. These keywords have gone up, these ones have gone down, these ones we don't know what to do with yet, let's talk, here's the tasks we have done, here's the tasks we're going to do and why. So from our perspective we make it entirely non-technical and it's a challenge because with SEO a lot of it is very complicated.
00:15:02
Speaker
Right, what level of technical expertise is going to be required of you as the client to work with us? Some, but it's not necessarily SEO expertise you need to have in your head right now.
00:15:19
Speaker
a big part of the way we work with clients is to inform. We've got this thing, part of our vision is to democratize SEO information. It's such a powerful tool for business owners and people in marketing to have that we want you to use it. We want you to understand what we're doing. Because ultimately, you know what your strengths are better than we do. And we spend a lot, we have lots of really good methods to get to know your strengths. But yeah, if you understand a little bit of the technical side,
00:15:45
Speaker
you can couple that with the technical knowledge that you have of your own business and your own industry to see new opportunities. We love that. We'll get a real kick out of that. So that's that answer. But, say, ask away. Ask any agency. How much am I expected to know?
00:16:00
Speaker
We have some clients, especially the long term ones, they get really into it and they'll start spotting things in the news, changes in the world of SEO and want us to speak to them about it and we love that. It's great, it's geek club, it's fun. Another question, you can ask an agency what's their strategy for adapting to changes in the way SEO works.
00:16:26
Speaker
It's an interesting question because the answer can unveil the attitude to SEO and general optimization from any SEO agency or consultant.
00:16:42
Speaker
Our opinion on this is that SEO as a whole hasn't really changed for, I don't know, 25 years. It's still put good stuff in, good stuff comes out. Sure, the details of it and the little nuances of what Google expects to see, how you make your excellence clear to Google and how you go about spreading the good word about your excellence, the nuances of that do you change. But the core message of put good stuff in, good stuff comes out.
00:17:12
Speaker
It's never changed. This is why the domain name for the SEO's website is .io. It means input, output, put good stuff in, good stuff comes out. That being said, there are tweaks and changes, but again, it goes back to just having our finger on the pulse and staying aware of what the best authors, writers, journalists in SEO are talking about. We enjoy it. It's nice.
00:17:36
Speaker
Google doesn't really move
Importance of Client Feedback
00:17:37
Speaker
the goal posts. They just define what they think goal posts are. That's almost quotable, I think. Final little section here is collaboration and communication. The question you can ask an agency is, how do you communicate? How do you set out what it is you need from clients during an SEO campaign?
00:18:04
Speaker
I think any good SEO agency, and there are lots, I know locally, do this by just communicating very effectively and very regularly.
00:18:14
Speaker
Within the first period of an SEO campaign, the learning curve is so steep that any agency will want to speak to the client a lot and read a lot. For example, we do that and we want to spend big chunks of time with our clients to really get to know not only what the opportunities are, but also how the internal organization works. Who do we speak to about A, who can give us an answer on B?
00:18:39
Speaker
Who's the best person with the best knowledge about see all these things are really really important so as to how we communicate I think frequently again I can only speak for yesio but we open channels of communication through whatever works for you whatsapp email some clients are on slack
00:18:56
Speaker
But it's whatever works really. It's whatever brings clarity. SEO gets the best results when it's very clear. So whatever we as an agency and you guys as the collaborators and clients, whatever we can do to combine that to get the fastest results, we will do. Everyone has different communication styles. It's the way it is. So let's find the common ground. Let's make it work.
00:19:21
Speaker
We've got, what is our process for incorporating client feedback? I say I'm reading off my list. What's your process for incorporating client feedback into strategies? Listening, I think that is what it comes down to. If a client tells us that we've got the wrong end of the stick on something, we're not gonna carry on with that wrong end of the stick. We're gonna learn why. I think that answers that almost, doesn't it?
00:19:51
Speaker
listening is really important. That pretty much sums it up. As you can tell, this email, this video hasn't been tightly scripted. I wanted to have this list of questions and answer you off the top of my head to try and give you
00:20:09
Speaker
the answers that felt the most relatable. I think sometimes when you watch an SEO video and it is tightly scripted, you lose the opportunity to scratch below the surface. So I wanted to kind of answer these questions almost as if I was in a meeting with a prospective new client being asked them, because I think that's what kind of brings out the best content. So this is a new type of video. If this has been helpful to you, please let me know. If you've listened on the podcast, please like and subscribe.
00:20:39
Speaker
If you've read the article that one of my colleagues is going to write up from this video, then contact us about it. Let us know what you think. Feedback is really important. In fact, I could have almost scripted it so that that last question about feedback was the last thing, but I didn't. So anyway, thank you very much for engaging with this. I've been Andrew Laws. I will continue to be Andrew Laws, hopefully for many, many years. If you've got questions about SEO or you just want to say hello, contact us. We like to talk.
00:21:09
Speaker
KATHRYN