Why Most SEO Companies Fail to Deliver

I’m a firm believer in managing my client’s expectations because in my experience this is where most SEO companies go wrong.

More often than not when a client finds me it’s because they’ve had a previous bad experience with one and sometimes two or more SEO companies.

Let me tell you a story about a recent client of mine who competes in the buy to let property market.  He had been spending £500 a month with an SEO company for almost a year before he came to me.  During this time he had seen absolutely no return on his investment. In this case it was zero.

My client was frustrated and really disappointed that they had parted with a lot of money and gained nothing from it.

Why? It could be that the previous SEO company he was using were like a dodgy garage that relied on most people’s naivity and fleeced every innocent customer for work they hadn’t actually done.  Sadly this happens in the world of search engine optimisation.

What’s more likely in this case, is that the SEO company had no idea how big a mountain they had to climb to get my client ranked for his keywords.  In all likelihood they probably just asked him what his budget was or what he could afford and went off trying to improve his rankings for keywords that they had done zero research on.

And guess what? They failed.

Here’s the thing, if you don’t know how competitive your keywords are how can you possibly set a realistic budget for your SEO?

There are two ways to set a more realistic budget.  One is to do a rough guesstimate at what it’s going to take to start competing on the first page of Google for your keywords.  You can do this by analysing the number of backlinks the competing sites on the first page have compared to how many your site currently has.

Whatever the difference is tells you the minimum number of links you need to go out and get to compete.  If the site currently occupying the number 10 spot on Google has 3000 links and you only have 200, you know you need at least another 2801 backlinks to be in with a shot.

There are lots of other factors to consider like your domain age, page rank and ‘on page’ factors like meta tags but as a rough rule of thumb it ‘s better than going in completely blind.

But there is something else that you need to look at.  If you analyse the anchor text of your competitor’s backlinks you’ll get a much better picture of what you need to do to compete.

Going back to my earlier example of the competitor with 3000 links, if 420 of those links contain the anchor text ‘buy to let property’ this tells you how many specific links you need to compete for the keyword ‘buy to let property’.

Once you know this you’ll have a pretty good idea of how much work needs to be done.

On the other hand if you want the most accurate way of setting our SEO budget, you could invest in a Competitor Intelligence Report or Rankings Roadmap as I like to call it.  Most SEO Companies don’t even know what this is or if they do, don’t offer one with anywhere near enough detail and research to give you an accurate budget for your SEO.

A rankings roadmap will give you a highly accurate budget of exactly what needs to be done to get you onto the first page of Google, then into the top three positions and eventually number one.

The roadmap analyses up to 40 SEO factors of each of your competitors in the top 10 to reverse engineer precisely what needs to be done to get your business where it needs to be.

Now let me tell you the whole story.  Sometimes doing this homework in advance tells you whether you can afford to compete for those particular keywords or sometimes in that market at all.  If the mountain is just too big to climb don’t leave basecamp.