How search agencies are failing clients
Online Marketing Gurus’ chief marketing officer and former King Content CMO, Wasif Kasim, looks at why so many search agencies are failing clients and how the industry needs to lift its game.
It was during my time working for King Content, when we were on the hunt for a great search agency, that I realised there was a major problem in the industry.
At the time, my internal team’s strengths lay completely in creating SEO friendly content, but we needed a lot of guidance with pretty much everything else SEO. We needed an agency that could handle the technical stuff and who truly understood the perfect marriage of SEO and content working together to skyrocket leads.
I sat down with boat loads of agencies, ranging from your massive agencies to tiny ones no one had heard of. I gave them all the same brief – put together a 12 month roadmap on how you’ll help us grow with SEO and Adwords. Leads per month was the main KPI for the plan.
The result? Every single agency, except one, came back with boilerplate responses – screengrabs from SEMrush or similar tools, lots of “fluff” about why they are amazing, and very little about the actual “plan” across SEO that would help us achieve this incredible growth. They focused on the generic techniques. But they didn’t give us a bulletproof roadmap for revenue domination.
Seriously? Is this an opinion piece or an advertorial?
All search agencies are shit….except the one I work for now.
Is this a paid for feature?
“During my time at King Content, there was only one agency that put together a fantastic pitch that did what I actually asked them to do – Online Marketing Gurus. This, plus the results I got as a client, were some of the key reasons I decided to join the crew at Online Marketing Gurus this year.”
I’m with you “Gone Native”… only MY search agency is great, until it isn’t, depending on where I work next ….
Sorry Dave and Gone Native, it is a submitted opinion piece but I missed that passage when editing the story. It’s now been amended.
Regards,
Paul Wallbank
News Editor
…a bit rich coming from one of the least-respected agencies out there!
How (not) to win friends and alienate your industry peers…
Should of gone to spec savers – Paul Wallbank
Great work OMG Team . Best in the space
A valid observation of SEO agencies (even if the opinion piece reads like a self-advertisement).
Their cookie cutter approach to SEO, spammy link building product and overloading consultants with sometimes in excess of 40 clients makes them the least relevant agency to be posting articles asking the industy to buck up it’s ideas.
Haters will hate ( and only talk) great work OMG team. I’ve been a client for 2 years and can’t rate these guys highly enough
Hi “Amused Industry Peer”,
I’m Mez, one of the Co Founders at OMG. Not sure where you get your facts from, but I always love meeting new people in the space (and won’t hold this against you!) Feel free to email me or call (mez@onlinemarketinggurus.com.au) and you can pop on in to our office and meet us. I’ll happily introduce you to our team, case studies and show you through the tech we’ve built, in excess of $1 mil + spent in research in last 3 years (of our own money of the Directors) with one of Australia’s only dedicated R&D Search teams ( which i’m sure you too have done to validate your opinion as well as trained over 100 people 😉
Awesome article Wasif.
Ignore the trolls in this comment section. I think your article does speak some hard truths about agencies that not a lot of articles have talked about. So keep up the good work.
There’re a lot of truths in this article, especially the one about smaller customers not being treated equally.
You’re right, in my experience, small clients become BIG clients when the marketing works. It is important for an agency to really help the client (grow) bring in lots of revenue via marketing. If the client grows, the mutual relationship also gets better.
Absolutely my experience earlier this year!
LOL, these guys are the best in the Biz. Who else has 200+ Positive reviews..
Ah it’s a funny industry the online marketing one!
It’s a funny industry indeed – fake reviews are the next frontier of crappy online marketing.
VPNs are not just for checking ranking, their also good for masking your IP when commenting 🙂
Basically: “I asked a boat load of agencies to give me the answer for free and I’m upset they didn’t.”
If it was King Content we can assume there wasn’t much revenue attached – and you couldn’t even shortlist first?
Think the questions that need to be asked of an agency would be how do customers fit in and how to leverage customer input for digital channels, SEO and content; sustained into the long term without introducing another barrier (sub-optimal agency)?
No matter how small a company is, they should be endeavouring to do digital in house (with external guidance) to develop essential expertise, ensure relevance and validity via their own customers (informing content, language used, SEO, preferred channels, behaviour etc.).
The sockpuppetting incident above (Mez, really?) speaks volumes about the ethics of OMG and their approach to SEO.
Sign up for thousands of dollars a month and watch your money evaporate into low quality copywriting, spammy Fiverr links and OMG team building exercises. Just don’t do it.
(And 200+ positive reviews? Just where are these reviews? It’s curious to see that OMG has disabled reviews from their online and social media presences).
Hi There,
I have a 50+ team members and Contractors in our office and can confirm I have only posted under my own name with my comments on this article on the record 🙂 , (so not sure why they are linking my name to someone else’s comment, we have over 50 on one ip address) All of our reviews are on Google? I’m not sure what you have got against OMG and doubt your credibility posting under an alias, but everything you’ve said above is frankly silly and incorrect. We are one of the only agencies with an R&D team and have spent over 1mil in research ( I would love you to come around and I can show you some of the cool stuff we’re working on, or the 2 research pieces we’ve helped 2 fantastic Aussie Universities on and more!)
I would suggest that you had trouble at King Content because you excluded some of the best agencies who create content AND are awesome technically. In my exp with KC they saw agencies who were also doing content as a threat to their model. A great SEO agency is likely to be more multi-disciplined than what you were looking for. Content & SEO are not a great “marriage” . Content is SEO.