How to keep SEO agencies honest

The difficulty with engaging search engine optimisation agencies is clarity that they are doing something for their money.

Often SEO is seen as a dark art that ‘you have to know’ and claimed results are the result of the suppliers skill and knowledge.Fortunately this is true in many cases however, booms attract cowboys and these agencies are purely running administrative services and are often undeserving of the fees they receive. There are simple benchmarks to find this out.

If you already have in house web analytics you are half way there. Combined with freely available reports you can identify who is riding the market and who is not.

1. Back links

A reasonable part of the monthly fee for SEO services will be on link building. This involves strategies to get other websites to link to you. Trouble is how do you know they are being successful?

In google and in yahoo if you run a search on how many links are recognised by that search . If the SEO agency is doing a good job they are increasing the number of links to your site.  This is an easy thing to monitor and is an indisputable benchmark for the performance  of that fee.

2. Share of search (THE keyword)

Sometimes an increase in traffic is touted as a big win for the SEO. But sometimes it is simply supply and demand. Google Insight can help you out in scaling the volumes you receive for a keyword against the total number of searches. Be mindful it is scaled so it isn’t 100% accurate; but it definitely helps you verify performance claims.

Always pick the top 1-3 keywords searched for your category. If the SEO agency has done its job they will have told you what these are.  If you want to know yourself go here and play.

Next plug the keyword(s) into Google Insight and find out the relative performance.  Always do the longest time frame available. If the searches you are getting for these keywords are the same or decreasing while insight shows an increase then questions need to be ask. If your search increase is faster than insight give your agency a pat on the back.If it is riding along the same as insight, again, ask questions on the value they are adding. You want added value.

(On both the keyword tool and insight make sure you have the right region)

3. Reach (engines, keywords and phrases)

You are paying to increase your rankings across a broad range of keywords. This is the major claim of SEO agencies to use them rather than doing it in-house and if they are good, it’s true.  So if your SEO agency is successful your analytics should show an increase in the number of phrases and number of keywords that make up these phrases. It should also increase the number of search engines you show up on.

4. Volume

Are you getting more search related traffic? If not make sure that can be justified against a drop in demand.

5.  Importance

Install Google toolbar and turn on PageRank. An SEO agency should help you become more important to Google. If they can’t make you more important, maybe you don’t need them.

6. Your contract

Once you know your benchmarks, write these into the contract or have an out clause if the most important are not met.

Assessing demand on the internet

One of the most difficult things to understand when you are launching a website is the level of demand that exists for your ecommerce offering.

Many ecom websites dis-intermediate the supply process for products that have been established through real wold stores through traditional distribution. As a result there will be a wide number of distributors and retailers, and they aren’t going to willingly hand your their sales numbers to get a handle on demand.

You can purchase the information but it is often very expensive and may have little weight on the actual demand from internet shoppers. At start-up stage the business is also cash poor. Ballparks serve better than definitive figures in these instances. There is free information that can give you current demand on the internet, so you can use your money elsewhere.

Google keywords should be the first stop for assessing the interested and active market for your product. With some application of typical consumer behaviour, the way people use the internet and applying your own market position you can quickly assess the level of demand that can be tapped.

Take books as an example.  The UK saw 30 million searches for “books” in December with average search volumes of 15 million.  Many people will look at a number of suppliers if they have choice available, let’s say 4 suppliers, so there were at least 7.5 million people searching for a book, that did not already have a supplier in mind.

However, if I have a niche in children’s books, all of a sudden I’m looking at less than 2 million searches in December and less than 0.5 million potential uncommitted visitors.

But these only tell me half the story. There are also a lot of loyal, repeat customers of websites out there and they won’t use the search engines, they’ll go straight to the brand of choice.  I might believe I can take some of the business away with a better proposition so to complete a demand assessment I need to know what there traffic is. Getting these figures is more difficult without paying.

Go through press releases and visit industry websites like the IAB. According to a press (skite) release Amazon UK put through 15 million visitors leading up to Christmas. Books are a big part so we can start to make some ball park assumptions. People will often visit 2 or 3 times before purchase and Amazon has other products to sell. So lets be generous, add 2.5 million and there are probably at least 10 million people buying books online each month and about 0.6 million wanting children’s books.

You could also check alexa rankings or draw on free information published by Netratings, Hitwise (their retail data centre) or Deloitte’s to size up how much market share the internet has. All of these websites provide press releases and proportions of traffic that allow you to reverse engineer the actual numbers.

All up, current internet demand data describes a healthy demand for books in the UK and even niche opportunities like children’s books. These can be taken back and slotted in to any websites capacity planning, system scalability plans and market share targets and ultimately a business plan. And hopefully this blog post just saved some out there a few thousand dollars in research.