How to detect a bad SEO agency (2nd part: the commercial speech)? – Abundance SEO Video N°201

If you have a website, you may have (certainly?) been contacted by an SEO agency that proposes to monitor and improve the referencing of your source of information. Unfortunately, there are as many great companies in the SEO market as there are charlatans. How, then, to separate the wheat from the chaff? Here is a series of videos that aims to help you in this type of case. This week, I'm talking to you about the SEO agency's commercial speeches: which ones are eliminatory and which ones raise questions?

The world of SEO is an exciting environment, unfortunately sometimes tarnished by scornful people who create a lot of disappointment among shamelessly cheated customers. If some SEO agencies do a professional, remarkable job, and demonstrate real competence, the same cannot be said of some others. This is a phenomenon similar to what happens in many fields and professions, of course. However, it is never pleasant to pay (sometimes expensive!) to have a total lack of results afterwards.

SEO is of course an inexact science and the results cannot be guaranteed, but it is the duty of the SEO agency to respect its client and to put in place all the necessary skills to offer a maximum obligation of means. Which is sometimes far from the case...

Also, it seemed interesting and useful to me to propose a series of videos to give some "tips and tricks" in order to avoid you falling into this type of trap. Hoping that this can be of use to you... Last week, we studied the work to be put in place BEFORE contacting an SEO agency. Today, let's study the different types of commercial speech that you will have to decipher. Because some can be clearly eliminatory!

How to detect a bad SEO agency (2nd part)? Video N°201 proposed by Olivier Andrieu (Abondance). Source: Abundance

Transcript of video 201: "How to detect a bad SEO agency? Part 2: the sales pitch":

“Hello and welcome to this 201st Abundance video, which is the continuation of the 200th on some tips and tricks to detect and distinguish between a good SEO agency and a bad SEO agency. We saw in the previous video that you have to work, if you have to be in contact with an SEO agency, it's up to you to work first, make specifications, indicate your objectives, some competitors , make the list of services you want to request, a very detailed estimate, costed item by item and then ask for examples of positioning, written articles of links obtained, etc., etc. That's the work you have to do upstream. Then you will get in touch with an SEO agency. What are the points that can be looked at, which can give you indications on the quality of this agency? I try to indicate them in two families: first the eliminatory points. Frankly, if the SEO agency has this commercial speech and these points that we will deal with right after in their commercial speech, flee! It's the total scam because there really it's totally eliminatory.

I listed some of them: if the jargon is incomprehensible, it's a salesperson talking to you or a person talking to you and you don't understand what they are doing, you don't understand what they are going to do , you do not understand the services that are offered, it is opaque and abstruse, there is a lot of jargon, etc. They are rolling you in flour, it's not normal. The speech must be clear and you must absolutely understand everything that is said and clearly understand all the services that will be offered and implemented. This is very important: the SEO agency must put themselves at your level if you are a beginner in SEO, no problem there, they must speak to you clearly and you must understand everything. It is really very important.

Something unfortunately that we often see and a speech that we often see that is pure scam is: "we are Google partners for SEO". It's absolutely false, no agency in the world is a google partner for SEO! So there if we tell you that, it's clear it's a scam pure and simple. We can be a "Google partner", we can be a Google partner for advertising, for Analytics, for a certain number of things, ok no worries, but not for SEO! There are sometimes a lot of agencies that play on the ambiguity of this term: they are "Google partners" for SEA, for example, for advertising, and then we say that it also works for SEO. It's wrong ! Google does not have an SEO partner! No agency, anywhere in the world! It's also a way to sort things out fairly quickly: if you're told that, you can run away quietly...

And then also also if you are offered services that are from another time in terms of SEO, and I swear to you that I saw everything that is on this slide not so long ago and that it came to my ears, where you are going to be charged for submission on search engines! Submit your site to search engines! Something 15 years old! We are going to tell you about meta keywords tags - I swear it's true! - the meta keywords tag, it hasn't existed for twenty years. Or we'll tell you about working on old engines like Lycos Excite, Altavista - it sounds so amazing! - and yet these are things that we read on the sites of service providers, agencies, etc. Or the agency will register your site on directories to have links. But all this is 10 years old, it's obsolete, it's really low quality SEO! We don't do SEO like that anymore! So we're going to move on... You know at least with these few points that it's not the agency you need who is talking to you, it's clear and clear.

And then therefore second family: the points then it is not prohibitive, it is not eliminatory, but I find that it raises a little question, it is perhaps necessary to dig these points there, it is perhaps not be not negligible. If you have been solicited by e-mailing for example. You can be canvassed by e-mailing, it is not necessarily illegal, but I will not go further on this point, since I wrote an article on Abondance some time ago and I will put the link under the video on the Abondance site to this article which explains what is legal and what is not when you are canvassed by e-mailing. But check at least that if you have been solicited by e-mailing, that this e-mailing is legal, that there is for example a link to unsubscribe in the e-mail, that there is a contact, the name of the company, of course, etc. But frankly, everything I've seen in the past in the context of canvassing by e-mailing was still quite often of fairly low quality, it must be said. But hey, you just have to check at least that it's legal!

Guarantees: we know very well and all serious SEOs know very well that nothing can be guaranteed in SEO! It's bogus and the guarantees that an SEO agency will be able to give are only commercial speech to satisfy the client who wants a guarantee but we can't guarantee anything, it's obvious so it's not because we guarantee you things that it is necessarily a scam, you just have to look at what is guaranteed and give the weight that it is worth to this guarantee, knowing that in SEO, we cannot guarantee absolutely anything and certainly not a result because it moves too much, it's not an exact science and unfortunately we can't guarantee anything. So be careful, you have to dig a little bit and really look at what is on offer.

When the SEO has a speech that says: "Be careful, SEO is very long and it takes a lot of time to get results", I don't completely agree. Of course, on certain very competitive requests, it takes a very long time, even longer if the site is recent, etc. but it depends on a very large number of criteria, it depends on the site, it depends on the request targeted, it depends on the notoriety of the site, the size of the site, its age, etc., etc. So we can have very fast results, but the site must be legitimate. This notion of legitimacy is also super important, so we can't just say that SEO is super slow, that you have to be super patient, it's not true, it's more nuanced than that. On some requests and in some cases, it can go very quickly and sometimes it can be very long. The speech that says that SEO is very slow, I find that it is a bit limited and not nuanced enough. So maybe we also need to dig into that aspect of things.

I also see a lot of talk that the page loading time is very important to be well ranked, which is absolutely false and all SEOs and all serious SEOs know it today that it hardly influences the page ranking. There are studies that have come out on this, and so on. It's clear when you do SEO, real SEO, we know it and unfortunately I see a lot of proposals, a lot of quotes where the page loading time is almost number one! But maybe also that there are slightly higher margins on this type of service? Maybe that's it too? But clearly, page loading time, I'm not saying it's not good, I've talked about it a thousand times, it's good for the Internet user, why not for the crawl budget, etc.? but that's not what we do SEO with today! So an SEO agency that puts this forward, I tend to be a little wary anyway because it's purely commercial talk, but you're going to be disappointed behind, clearly, because it won't improve your SEO! So be careful there too, you have to dig a little!

Here are some tips and tricks, some tips that will help you sort it out. We haven't finished because next week, I will offer you another video that will try to analyze the methods and services that are offered and that the agency quotes in its quote. So I say see you very soon for a new video, of course there are always the little videos to review and so I say see you next week for the continuation of the saga of detecting bad SEO agencies and good ones of course ! Thank you and see you soon ! Thank you and goodbye🙂”

Complementary items: