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.
SEO is too often treated like a dark magic, where the magician won’t ever reveal his secrets. All that means is that the client is kept in the dark about how the agency will actually get results. Clients are just expected to be comfortable with not really knowing what is going on. You wouldn’t expect clients to accept that with their other marketing channels, so why should they accept it with their SEO?
Here are some of the things search agencies commonly get wrong.
They pitch poorly
When a client meets an agency for the first time, the agency’s pitch says a lot about them. It shows how thorough they were with their research, and how devoted they are to helping the potential client grow their business. If that pitch is generic, undetailed and not results-focussed it’s a fail.
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, they developed a 12 month roadmap – a mix of quick, mid-term, and long term wins – and a thorough breakdown of focus areas across AdWords and SEO to dominate growth.
It was intense. It was information overload. But it was good. They had poured a whole week into doing this – all for a tiny client starting off at a couple grand a month. This “care factor” was exactly what I was looking for. That pitch got them the job. And the continued quality of their results guaranteed they kept it.
They grab the cash and run
Too many agencies will become complacent as soon as they have the client on their books. If the agency’s primary motive is money, they’re not likely to put lots of effort into helping a client’s business. They’ll just go the quick and easy route before leaving the client high and dry.
They’ll use Black Hat tactics, such as creating spammy content and generating poor backlinks, to give a client’s website a quick boost. Then the search engines catch on and the website plummets down the rankings. It may even get a manual penalty.
They’ll use shortcuts to cut down on their time, which also cuts down on quality. They’ll use software that spins existing content on the web into ‘original’ posts. The structure and grammar of these articles are often questionable, as they’re written by machines. This kind of poor-quality content doesn’t build authority. And no authority means no conversions.
The best search agencies genuinely care about the work they’re doing. They show that they’re not just in it it for the money. They’ll actively avoid Black Hat tactics to ensure a client’s site is protected. Then, they’ll use customised techniques that benefit the client’s site and comply with search engine guidelines. This is undoubtedly one of the most important criteria in choosing an agency.
If the growth of the client’s company is what drives the agency, the client is far more likely to achieve the desired results. The success of any SEO and PPC campaign depends on this, so clients should always go with the agency that cares about helping their business.
They don’t treat all clients equally
Obviously, every agency will go out of its way to land and keep big clients. But what about the little guys? Not every agency cares about a client that’s bringing them less money. But the best search agencies treat all of their clients equally.
It’s a cop out for search agencies to claim they don’t have the time to invest in their smaller clients. If the agency has quoted accurately upfront then they won’t massively over-service (although a little over-servicing upfront can reap huge benefits for the relationship down the track) or impact profitability. Remember, small clients become big clients with the right support.
If a client feels like a single drop in a sea of clients, they won’t feel confident about the agency’s work. But if the agency focuses on a small client in the same way they focus on a large client, they can rest assured that this kind of devotion will yield results.
They’re terrible at reporting
Clients need reports that are both useful and easy to understand. Not too generic and not too complex. It’s critical to be able to splice, dice, and view data in minutes so the client can immediately understand if the campaign is actually making an impact.
It’s simple really. A good report should tell the client:
- How much their campaigns are costing them
- Which campaigns are working well vs not working well
- The positions in the rankings
- Conversions achieved from traffic
- The return on investment
Oddly enough, too many agency reports won’t tell a client these things. Instead they will be overly complex or overly simple – often deliberately obscuring the actual results and not addressing whether the campaigns are actually worth the investment.
Now that I’ve joined a search agency, I feel like it’s my responsibility – and indeed everyone’s in the industry – to raise the bar. It’s time we all do better.
Wasif Kasim is Online Marketing Gurus’ chief marketing officer
Seriously? Is this an opinion piece or an advertorial?
All search agencies are shit….except the one I work for now.
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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.”
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I’m with you “Gone Native”… only MY search agency is great, until it isn’t, depending on where I work next ….
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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!
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How (not) to win friends and alienate your industry peers…
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Should of gone to spec savers – Paul Wallbank
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Great work OMG Team . Best in the space
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A valid observation of SEO agencies (even if the opinion piece reads like a self-advertisement).
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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.
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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.
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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
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Absolutely my experience earlier this year!
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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!
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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 😉
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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?
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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.).
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It’s a funny industry indeed – fake reviews are the next frontier of crappy online marketing.
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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).
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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!)
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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.
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VPNs are not just for checking ranking, their also good for masking your IP when commenting 🙂
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