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.

SEO minimum requirements

Search engine optimization (SEO) services are not for every business. Paying a website optimization company a retainer to talk to search engines may not be the best next move.

If your business website is a billboard of what the business does, who does it with a light sprinkling of how it’s done you’re probably not too into the web anyway.  That website? It’s a virtual business card and chances are you’ve discovered there are better leads in more traditional channels.

In this case spending money on SEO services to investigate, recommend, build and manage a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is a waste of time and money. You simply won’t get a clear ROI for the effort. But that doesn’t mean SEO should be ignored. Your customers and your prospects should still be able to find you when they put your name or your trade into Google.

You should still seek to index well on your business name and the main few  search terms that most apply to your business. Your website and content should be applicable enough to generate voluntary linking and natural relevance to your industry. So you just need the basics. The basics let search engine robots crawl and understand your pages.

Here are 5 SEO techniques that meet the basics of SEO, those minimum requirements to optimizing your website. You can achieve this in a couple of hours and it should help you shoot past 99% of your competitors.

Actually, let’s face it. This is everything that many SEO services offer anyway. They just dress it up with documentation and jargon.

1. SEO Words

The first thing you need to know is what people are searching in relation to your business. You can find this out with the Google Keyword tool.

If my business is an SEO service I’d pick the most popular term, in this case “SEO” and then the next 6-9 most popular terms that are synonyms. The next most popular terms in this case are “seo optimization”, “search engines”, “search engine optimisation”, “search optimization”, “seo search”, “website optimization”.

2. The Title

See that thing on the blue bar of the browser that says “SEO minimum requirements”. That is the Title.

The Title is a meta tag in your page code that the browser reads when it hits the page. Between 6 and 10 pages on your website (if you’ve got 10 or more) should have a Title that clearly reflects the subject and content of that page, followed by your business name.

The code that makes it show up in the blue bar looks like this <title>SEO minimum requirements &laquo; Emissive</title>. The &laquo; is the reverse chevrons, you don’t need it, so leave it out.

Write some code like this in word or notepad for between 6 and 10 of your pages. If you can, try and cover most of those popular keywords identified in your keyword search. But only use them if they are relevant to your content.

IMPORTANT: don’t change your content too much to meet the keywords. Humans buy your goods, not search engine robots.

3. Page Title

As in the actual title of your page. This should be exactly the same as the subject described in the Title. In this case “SEO minimum requirements”.

Again, make sure it lines up with your page subject and content.

4. Meta Keywords

Keywords are like Titles. They exist in the pages code but in this case you don’t see them. Only the search engine robot.

Those search terms we looked up at the start and didn’t use? This is where you put them. Take the top terms, ensure they’re synonyms and chuck them in the code.

The keyword code looks like this <meta content=“Emissive, seo, seo optimization, search engines, search engine optimisation, search optimization, seo search, website optimization ” name=“Keywords”> which again you do for the pages you have chosen to optimize.

Do this for each page you are optimizing.

5. Meta Description

I’ve never met a description on a web page because again, it exists in the code but not on the page. The prerequisite for this highly technical code is being able to write a sentence and enclose it within some code.

It will look something like this <meta content=“The minimum requirements for search engine optimisation from Emissive.” name=“Description”> ensuring it actually meant something.

Do this for each page.

What’s next

Give your SEO work to your web developer and ask for it to be loaded into the chosen pages at the next release of the website. Or buy your web develop lunch and get it done that day. It should take them 30 minutes to do 6 pages at the most including testing.

After that SEO happens by itself

Let it happen. What most SEO services don’t tell you is that the search engines take over from here. If the robot crawls the page and the calculation of the search engine agrees, then you will rank well on the search engine.

If the page isn’t crawled and or the search engine does not agree then it won’t. This has more to do with the subject and content of the page than anything most SEO services can provide you. A reason for it not to crawl is that you have not told the search engine you exist. Submit your website here.

Some of your pages will optimize really well. Some won’t. However, what will happen is that you will rank very well on your business name. And your digital business card will be miles ahead of where you were at no cost, for little time.