I started Missive Digital (an organic marketing and especially content-driven SEO agency) with the objective that today, businesses need an honest conversation on what’s wrong with their website and how we can ensure they see SEO maximize ROI for them.
Even during discussions with SaaS, IT, and eCommerce founders across networks like eChai, I tell them that I’m looking to change the fate and face of the SEO industry where no business stays with an SEO agency for more than 6 months.
I thought companies do this because they either don’t get the proper guidance from the hired SEO agency or don’t see the needle moving in the right direction in the organic channel.
But, after starting my SEO agency, I have realized that it’s not always us. It’s THEY too.
And because we are here to help them grow their sales or revenue, I thought, let me create a blog for all businesses looking to invest in the organic channel.
Here are why you should never say NO to your SEO agency. I’ve got reasons and explanations for it on behalf of all the SEO agencies who invest a lot in learning, experimenting, buying tools, and hiring the right teams.
1. No Dev team is available.
This scenario reminds me of a meme by Izzi Smith:
Honestly, this is one of the worst reasons you say NO to an SEO agency. Why? Because most SEO agencies tell you before onboarding that they would have tech implementation on your website.
If that’s the case, you should know that you would need an in-house developer, outsourced to IT agencies, hired on a contract, etc., before you’ve onboarded them.
But instead, you tell your SEO agency after 2 months that you could not get a developer, so you would like to discontinue their SEO services.
In such a case, let me explain how this will cost you more:
- You hired the SEO agency – X Amount for 2 Months.
- You fired the SEO agency for no developer available – Delayed dev implementation.
- You try and interview various SEO agencies – for 2 Months.
- You again hire another agency with less cost – Y Amount.
- They recommend the tech implementation for 2 Months.
- You hire a developer – Z Amount.
- Tech implementation is taking – 3 months of time and money.
Now you’re losing patience and getting irritated because after investing X + Y + Z amount of money, SEO progress is nowhere in 6 months. Now you again fire that new SEO agency.
In such a case, if you would have done the tech implementation in the initial 3 months, you would have only spent 2X + Z in the first 4 months.
You already know SEO takes time, so why do you want to add more time to it by changing agencies for a silly reason?
Being a business owner, the smart decision is to save time and not just money because time is also money.
If you cannot hire a developer, let your SEO agency know about it in advance so they can help you with the suggestions. They might know a freelance developer or IT agency who would do the job for you if they don’t have one in-house.
So now don’t say a NO just for a developer need.
2. No budget for content creation.
Oh, come on! SEO is not just about changing meta tags and improving page speed.
If that had been the case, every site technically apt would be on page 1, with no content on the website.
Think of your customers; how will they trust you when they can’t see you for the non-commercial queries they search for?
For example, we got an inquiry for a business with all the commercial queries ranking on page 1 within the top 3 spots on the SERPs. But, their challenges were higher bounce rates and conversions.
Because we have a detailed inquiry form (screenshot attached below), we get to know all of these things before hopping on the first discovery call.
So I was going through the website and trying to understand what the business is all about, and I realized that it was not easy for a newbie to understand their business.
It was their communication that was stopping their audience from converting. The audience cannot understand whether there’s anything beneficial for them, so they leave the website early with a higher bounce rate and lesser conversions.
I told them this, but they said we recently got the entire website written so we cannot invest again in website copywriting as that comes expensive.
Then what’s the point of standing on Page 1 on SERPs and not driving the real ROI out of SEO?
And with content creation, I don’t just mean blogs or website copywriting. It can be videos, eBooks, guest blogs, infographics, and any other type of content that exists.
Maybe you can work with different freelancers for different types of content creation and slowly build the team in-house after SEO has started driving ROI for you. Or there are agencies like us that have their content team that can help you with your content writing needs.
But, you must know that the way you don’t buy anything from a random seller, your customers won’t.
That’s the reason you need a significant budget for content creation if you’re thinking about SEO. Otherwise, please don’t waste your and the agency’s time.
Because I’m not too sure about other agencies, but we say NO to businesses who say they don’t have the budget for content creation.
3. Too much to implement for you
Before explaining this to you, let me tell you what we believe in:
Two of our clients said this to us in the last 2 months, and that’s the reason why this is here. They haven’t said NO to us yet, but I thought I should bring this to your attention.
Let me also explain to you why they feel it’s too much for them to implement:
- We ask them to work on the tech side, which they want their team to implement.
- We ask them to create and share the buyers’ persona or ideal customer profiles with us.
- We request their tech team to publish the content because they don’t want us to work on their CMS.
- We ask the tech team to publish all the content optimization that we do every week (of course, they don’t want us to have access to CMS).
- During content optimization, we find certain sections that need to be added or edited so we ask their content team to work on them because we are not the subject matter experts and we are also not hired as their content writing agency (though we started writing such sections for them now but again, certain key product things they know better than us).
- We follow up with them every two days on the progress because they don’t acknowledge and update us with the status, so they feel pressurized.
I’ll keep updating this list because currently, I’m able to think about only these.
So, the point is when you want to keep control of tech and content at your end, you would have to implement a lot on your side; we cannot help it.
We don’t mind your concern about not wanting SEO agencies to mess things up, but we also want you to understand why there’s so much on your plate to implement.
So, never think of saying NO to an SEO agency because it has increased your work. You, your team, and the agency’s SEO team must collaborate for a common goal – boosting organic growth.
4. Your SEO agency does less execution
Now, the above challenge gives birth to this one as well.
When business owners or marketing heads feel they are implementing a lot, they think SEO agencies have less to work on, considering the fees they charge.
Let me give you an inside story on what’s happening at the agency (especially at Missive Digital) before they send things to you:
- The entire SEO team brainstormed on a project, their current status of conversions, traffic, positions, backlinks, and more.
- They prepare sheets, documents, etc.
- The strategists decide on specific tasks along with their key performance indicators (KPIs)
- They discuss those tasks with the senior strategists (in our case, it’s me)
- They together finalize those tasks and assign them to different team members
- All team members work on their tasks (research, analysis, optimization, outreach, creating, content calendars, content writing, etc.)
- The strategists review all those tasks and give feedback based on their understanding
- After the team resolves the strategists’ comments, they are sent to senior strategists (me here again) for review and final approval
- Once those tasks are approved, they come to you for implementation.
These steps look very simple, but all of these steps go in the loop to make sure that the execution that you receive is in the direction to drive the expected output.
So it’s a lot of work that 4 to 5 team members are working on before things are sent to you, and let me remind you that strategizing is a huge thing in every marketing, even if it’s SEO.
Suppose the SEO agency has strategized something and asked you for implementation or some level of execution. In that case, you can ask the SEO team to explain what they did and how and help you figure out a way to set the priorities for implementation. So that you don’t feel it’s only you who is working.
I guess this process would be better than saying a NO to them because good things are not always measured in the number of documents sent or tasks done.
5. Not implementing as they recommend.
I would like to highlight two incidents around this.
The first is with our client, who comes every week and asks us to showcase some insights from Google Search Console (GSC). One day, I took the courage to counter-question them whether they had done any implementation before we could see the progress in GSC. Below is the conversation from our Slack Connect.
When I asked them about the implementation of the homepage, it was a work-in-progress (WIP). Then I asked them about a blog; they said no, not that one. Then what’s the point of looking at GSC when all implementations are pending?
Let me tell you about the second incident with a very new client; they asked to showcase the performance report for September month to which I asked them that we would provide them once the implementation is done.
So, finally, I had to email them the list of items yet to be implemented; without that, we cannot see the progress (screenshot attached below).
And when I was invited by the iVipanan Digital Marketing team at Surat last week, I learned they were also experiencing similar issues with the clients.
So, if you have hired an SEO agency, they are the subject matter expert and understand what needs to be done to help you achieve your goals. If you don’t implement, you are not performing and not the SEO team.
So, if this is the reason you want to fire an SEO agency, let me tell you, you’ll never find an SEO agency that would not tell you anything to implement and would double your waste of time and money.
6. You want conversions before traffic.
That’s the story of most B2B startups!
Even before strategizing how much traffic they need to have a 2-3% standard conversion rate, they would just think of how many conversions we can expect in the next quarter.
And they are not just the business owners with no marketing background with whom we have such conversations; even the marketing directors and heads at SaaS and IT companies talk the same.
How can marketers don’t know that you cannot speak sales before people land on the website?
But yeah, this happens to us and most of the SEO agencies out there.
After discussing and agreeing to our proposed SEO plan, the in-house marketing head or business owner tells us after a few days that they internally discussed and decided to target queries with commercial intent only and want to create bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content.
Most commercial queries are competitive. Take a look at a few ones below.
Commercial queries take a lot of time to rank on page 1, and until that happens, you won’t see traffic and hence, no conversions.
And when it comes to targeting only BoFu content, the examples could be:
- How does Semrush help in keyword research?
- How does Wix eCommerce platform support SEO?
- Why is LeadSquared a better CRM?
- How have we built Dyte?
- The inside story of Growfin
- Why should you hire tech talent from CodeMonk?
- And the list would not be too endless.
Your potential customers would hardly search these topics on the search engines until and unless you become a brand.
Understand the below customer journey map that explains what your customers search for at different stages of their buying journey.
So you need to target queries accordingly, and for that, you need to have a content strategy for brand awareness and nurturing.
If you disagree with focusing on such content strategy, it’s time you rethink your strategy, as targeting non-existent search queries won’t be a wise decision to spend resources on.
Firing an SEO agency, for this reason, would cost you 5x more because you would keep on changing the agencies with the non-changing fact on how consumers search and consume content before they convert organically.
7. You think the SEO agency is slow.
Here, the definition of being slow is that the SEO agency is not starting the execution immediately after onboarding.
In the first month itself, they should be done with the following things:
- Thorough technical SEO audit
- Complete keyword research, clustering, and categorization of all the commercial pages
- Detailed backlink analysis
- Competitor analysis of content, keywords, and UX
- Thorough 2-months’ content calendar including all the keywords, FAQs, and content briefs for the writers
- A few backlink generation
- Optimization of a few contents
- Resolving the technical issues
- And more…
Ah! Just writing them at one go was so tiring.
Imagine an agency that is not getting paid for working full-time, dedicatedly just for you, and will focus on everything in the first month itself.
Imagine the time it takes to build an SEO team in-house and focus on the tasks:
| Team members | Time Investment |
|---|---|
| Hiring an entire SEO team (tech SEO, strategists, senior and junior team members, outreach specialist, etc.) | 2 months |
| Training them (Time + tools + certifications + team members’ efforts + inviting experts) | 2 weeks |
| Adding infrastructure | 2 weeks to 2 months |
| Explaining the business, audience, competition, expectations, etc. | 2 weeks |
| Creating the buyers’ journey map (internal brainstorming) | 5 days |
| Technical audit | 3 weeks |
| Keyword research, categorization, clustering | On-going for 10 days |
| Identifying the content topics based on customer journey stages (internal brainstorming is involved) | 1 week |
But when it comes to hiring an SEO agency, you expect lesser time:
| SEO Agency | Time Investment Expectations |
|---|---|
| Explaining the business, audience, competition, expectations, etc. | 2 days |
| Creating the buyers’ journey map | 2 days |
| Technical audit | 2 days |
| Keyword research, categorization, clustering | 5 days |
| Identifying the content topics based on customer journey stages | 3 days |
The agency is an outsider to your company when they onboard you as a client. They need time to adjust and grasp all the information.
You need business – the SEO agency understands that.
But, you need business right away – this is indigestible for them.
When you onboard an SEO agency, they have their set of discussions, data analysis, going through each page of your website, and more before they come up with an actual plan or implementation.
By this, I don’t mean you should give 4 – 6 months for such research and analysis. But I guess 4-6 weeks should be more than enough.
If you don’t have that much time and patience, you would say NO to a company that takes data-driven strategic steps.
Then you would hire an SEO agency that would be super excited to change the SEO tags on your website in the first month without understanding your business, audience, and industry.
As a result, your website might have more mess than good, which might take more time and resources to clean up, without any significant growth in the organic channel.
Do you mean I should never fire an SEO agency?
No, I don’t mean that. Of course, you must fire SEO agencies for the following reasons but not the above ones:
- Even after 6 months, you are at the same numbers as you were in terms of traffic, conversions, and positions.
- They are unable to track which queries should have a landing page, blog, or video.
- They hardly have a content distribution plan and never recommend a holistic approach.
- You think they’re targeting completely irrelevant queries for your website
- They build irrelevant backlinks.
- They hardly know how to reverse engineer what competitors are doing.
- They have no clue what the developer should be doing when it comes to tech implementation.
- The blogs written by your writers are never reviewed and given feedback to make them better for your potential customers.
- None of your content ranks on page 1 even after optimizing it for 6 to 8 months.
- They only talk about keywords and their positions and never talk about traffic, sales, returning visitors, customer journey, etc.
- Their reports never say what worked, what didn’t, and what are the next steps to take the growth to the next level.
- They never say that they made some mistakes because mistakes help marketers become better at what they do.
- And the list is endless.
So yes, you can fire them if things are not in your favor, but you should not stop working with them for the above reasons because other agencies would also want you to do the same things, and you end up wasting time and money with no ROI on hand.
When you’re carefully choosing an SEO agency, carefully think before you say NO to them. After all, SEO is expensive.
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