Are you feeling in the dark about what your Sacramento SEO company is doing for you? Do they not communicate very well? Are your profits from digital marketing stagnant? All SEO marketing can be tied to an exact ROI or dollar amount. Every keyword can be tied to revenue generated, and your rankings reports should have a before and after snapshot to track progress.

These things are incredibly simple to put together. But too often SEO agencies are not interested in showing you their work or showing easy-to-understand results.

When I first started marketing, I worked for an agency, and in subsequent years I spent time contracting for other marketing agencies. There are times when hiring them is absolutely necessary – they have a big team with a set of diverse skills and experience.

However, the quality of SEO work generally is poor. It is a function of multiple variables, one being that they haven’t caught up with the newest tactics for ranking well, the other that they’re so busy trying to streamline and automate, they don’t take the time to give you a non cookie-cutter SEO plan.

There’s a lot that a customer should look out for when they hire for SEO services. As a Sacramento SEO expert, I’m offering to review all SEO work and contracts you have for free. Contact me today for a review, and read below to see the 9 reasons you should fire your Sacramento SEO agency.

*For more info on SEO companies, specifically in the S.F. / Bay Area and their downsides click here.

They’re Not Tracking Conversions, ROI, or Revenue Generation

When your website ranks on Google for any keyword and receives a click, the data shows up in your “landing pages” section in Google Analytics. Various web pages and blogs will capture traffic for different phrases, but you can see exactly which keywords lead traffic to which pages.

From there you can see how visitors of certain landing pages perform. Do they convert into a lead or customer? Do they subscribe to your email list? Do they download an ebook?

As long as you have Google Analytics goal and event tracking set up, you will know the metrics for these questions.

The real issue is what your SEO provider is reporting to you. Are you getting this information? Do you get at least 2 reports each month telling you how many new customers, leads or other KPI has accumulated due to SEO marketing? If not, fire this Sacramento SEO agency.

Your Sacramento SEO Company Isn’t Being Transparent / Barely Communicates

If your emails go unresponded to, that’s a red flag. Either you’re one of many clients in which they view your business as unimportant, or they simply don’t have answers to your questions.

In either case, you’re working with someone who isn’t effective or dedicated enough to improving your search traffic.

Your Agency Isn’t Creating Any Content

You simply cannot do SEO without crafting great content, i.e. web pages or blogs. And this content should be in the 1000-2000 word range.

New content allows you to target new keywords and link back to other articles, incorporating a key SEO success tactic call anchor text. Google reads the keywords that are linked, so new content means you can cross link with multiple phrases in each article.

What SEO companies that create content often publish is measly, 500-600 word articles that sound too keyword heavy. A user can probably tell the article was made for search engines and not readers. Remember, the average length of content on page 1 now is 2000 words, so these articles won’t work.

What’s worse, this content is usually farmed out to people overseas or cheap writers who hardly understand your customer needs, business product or service.

Your Sacramento SEO Agency Locked You Into an Unnecessary Contract

Companies that require you to sign long-term contracts with cancellation penalties have created an incentive to fail. Once they know you have to pay them, they’re less likely to work hard.

My philosophy with clients is that I want all work to be a home run so that the client will refer me new business, write a great testimonial that attracts new business, or want to re-up with me on the next project.

SEO agencies don’t have that mentality. They are only thinking about the next client.

If they were confident in their marketing ability they wouldn’t behave like AT&T.

You’re Paying for Stuff That Can be Automated Like Reports

Google Analytics can be setup to send you weekly or monthly reports about your goal tracking and conversions. In fact most marketing reports can be exported as PDFs or automated with just a few clicks.

So if you see line items in your contract that say reports, understand that is not real work. A report by itself adds no value. It’s not on the client to analyze a report, find insights and then come up with recommended actions.

That’s what you’re paying your SEO agency for.

They’re Not Telling You Your Rankings

Not only should you have rankings sent to you regularly, you should have access to your own Google Search Console account. See the screenshot below. You can find and filter keywords to see exact rankings and landing pages. If you don’t know your rankings, you’re working with amateurs.

You’re Paying for Website Updates to Text That Isn’t Actually SEO Work

I once saw a proposal that said, “We’ll make five website updates per month.” There are many things wrong with this.

• What if something happens to your service or product that absolutely requires an update but five have already been made?

• What if you can improve your rankings right away with a title tag change, but this would be the 6th update?

• How does a simple website update improve SEO? If the update doesn’t affect a SEO variable it’s useless in terms of improving rankings

If you see this in your contract, you’re working with people who don’t know SEO.

You’re Paying Your Sacramento SEO Company to Index URLs

Google does this automatically. There are almost never any cases where Google doesn’t crawl a URL, and if that happens, you can log in to your Search Console, go to the crawl section, select Fetch as Google, and voila, you can input the URL you want indexed.

This is not something that should cost you money and isn’t real SEO work. The crawlers do this without any instruction. My guess is your SEO agency put it in there to better justify the bill they’re charging you.

They’ve Sold You on Buying Links from Spammy Websites and You Didn’t Even Know It

One way a Sacramento SEO company might get around having to do real SEO work is by buying links.

Google ranks sites highly if they have a lot of other websites linking to them. These links increase metrics called PageRank and domain authority. In the beginning of Google search, their algorithm was almost all about PageRank (named after Larry Pag). Knowing this, SEO marketers would manipulate rankings by paying other web masters to link to their clients website.

Eventually Google caught on and incorporated multiple algorithm updates to weed out these unnatural links and to wipe these websites involved off the face of Google search. I.E., their rankings and search traffic fell like a rock.

If you see in your SEO services plan a bunch of stuff about adding 50 or 100 links per month to your website, you’re working with a company that will actually get you penalized and cost you huge amounts of cash. When you get penalized, you will rank for 0 keywords – only your brand name.

Getting out of the penalty box takes time, and you’ll have to start from scratch to improve your rankings, since no real SEO work was done to begin with.

Contact Me to Review Your Sacramento SEO Company’s Work & Contract

Trust me, I do this for fun. I’d love to see what crappy SEO proposal you received or what retainer package you’re on. Use the form below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.