Have you got an SEO company working for you right now?
Why do I ask?
If you do, then you need to be aware of what’s happening every step of the way.
We’ve just recently spoken with someone who is a leader in their field, and their previous SEO was taking a few grand per month from them for the last two years and hadn’t moved their web site up in the ranks for their selected keywords at all.
No increases in traffic, no extra business, and no value whatsoever from the search engine optimisation campaign.
When it all came crashing down, the web site owner engaged another seo company in Melbourne to take over, and essentially got more of the same.
They charged him handsomely, and in our web site assessment, which is done manually, without automated software- we detected seven instances of the same content- so it wasn’t duplicate content, it was “times seven” content!
Has a word even been invented to describe a situation that is so bad?
It gets worse.
The website had these faults, among others:
- Duplicate home page content
- Some pages blocked by robots.txt
- H1 level headings missing on most pages
- Duplicate page titles
- Excessive, non-productive code in the head area of the page, before any useful content appeared
- Inline styles which should have been declared in the stylesheets
- Critical heading text displayed as images, which should have been h1 text instead
and so the list goes on.
We were forwarded an email from his current seo, who said the lack of performance and recent loss of rank might be due to “too many links having been made too soon”.
This brings us to the point of this article.
You need to know what your SEO is doing- and where it is being done.
Our first job for this client, will be to track down where the links were posted, and complete a “disavow” request through Google web masters.
The problem now, is that the seo person cannot recall where the links were placed.
We should remind you that all links are not equal, and our guess is that there would be a lot of links brokered through link farms or link programs, which should be avoided at all costs.
It’s unimaginable that two separate seo people, charging good money for their services, did not detect the compounding on-site problems.
That’s why you- as a website owner and business owner- need to know what your SEO is doing. You need to know where your web site is being linked from, where your money has gone every month.
Your online success- the very essence of your seo campaign depends on it.