Nothing is more frustrating than your SEO not working and shelling out money every month to a company that never gives you a straight answer on why your Google optimisation is failing. We list the most common reasons and questions you can ask your marketing company.
Wrong company, budget to low
Pay too little, pay the wrong people
Every client we have ever spoken to is quick to blame their previous SEOs, but it is not always that simple. Sometimes SEO does not work as the client has unrealistic Expectations or simply gives up too soon.
If you are paying a monthly retainer, what exactly have you bought?
Did your present company provide you with a list of deliverables per month? This would include a minimum number of pages or blogs or a number of optimisation hours etc.
If you don’t have a document that spells this out, the reason your SEO is not working might be because:
- Your present company are not actually doing anything worthwhile.
- You are paying too little for any effective work to be done. Your budget is too low.
- The company you have employed are web designers or sell PPC and don’t know anything about SEO and/or are employing techniques that are out of date.
What to ask your current supplier
“I would like a report on exactly what has been achieved this month. I want this to include all optimisation tweaks, pages of content or blogs written and the complete number of hours spent on my business’s website.”
Your SEO company is doing the work but...
Wrong research, poor planing
Your SEOs are regularly updating your website, adding new content and making all of the right technical SEO noise but still no results.
Perhaps there is no plan
At Vanilla Circus, the first step in working with a new client is to outline a three-month plan. This includes keywords we are going to target, pages and blogs we are going to create, technical issues we are going to address and key competitors we are going to beat.
All plans are different. However, the right SEO strategy is likely to have the following steps and actions.
- Ongoing Keyword and key questions research.
- A plan to target less competitive keywords or Local SEO first.
- Professional Content planning and creation.
- Correct site structure optmisiation.
- Use of images that evoke emotion and complient the content.
- Daily Google position monitoring and reporting.
- Sourcing new backlinks and encouraging reviews.
- Editing and further optimising pages as they climb into the top 20 positions in Google.
- Identify which pages are converting and plan how to gain/exploit the traffic.
- Identifying where traffic is being lost and why.
- Analyse traffic and results data to adjust strategy.
- Competitor analysis, (any company ranking above us) what are doing, offers, pages, content.
- Identify new avenues of organic search traffic. How else can we sell more.
- Creative thinking to develop offers and new ways of saying the same thing a different way.
Your SEO is incomplete
Half the job
“Almost done” is not done.
Successful SEO is a little like fine dining. Miss a course, and the meal is ruined.
SEO is similar.
It is not sufficient to optimise the code or meta tags of a website and expect the website to rank #1 in Google.
SEO is a fine balance of:
- Correct code, ensuring site speed and adequate Core Web Vitals
- Quality non-AI content
- Web Design and UX optimisation (user journey)
- Off-page SEO. (backlinks, social media signals, reviews etc.
Without one of these elements, your SEO will not perform, and other companies who tick all these boxes will appear above you.
