Is your SEO agency adding value? 5-Minute Check

The most successful marketing agencies are those that sell well. Not necessarily those who work well.

Ultimately, it’s evident that the agency without excellent execution can survive and even thrive. Without sales, it will die soon.

Some exceptions do both. Unfortunately, they are usually expensive and hard to find. Let me illustrate my view on this market:

Not just hiring, you need to manage an SEO agency as well

Fun fact. The keyword “how to choose an SEO agency” and its variants have hundreds of searches per month in the US and some decent content. 

At the same time, there is no visible search interest for “how to manage an SEO agency.” 

That’s not great. Based on my experience, many businesses will get much more value from SEO if they keep their agency in check. Little time invested will yield a high return.

Please understand me correctly. I’m a big fan of hiring agencies for businesses of any size. 

To grow well, you should scale well and focus better. Outsourcing helps a lot with this. At one point in my enterprise career, we had more than twenty (sic!) agencies working on marketing and PR for us, and the annual budget was above $2M.

At the same time, during the last few months, I’ve seen cases where SEO agencies were charging their monthly fee but not doing anything. Literally.

You may ask, “How did they report to their client then?” 

Abundant reporting is the answer. Tens of pages were generated automatically by marketing analytics tools with beautiful diagrams and tables, where they filtered all good changes and then deleted “red zone” and alerts.

Yes, as easy as it sounds. Positive Google rank fluctuations were presented as a result. This may sound weird, but I see this often, unfortunately. 

The client is overwhelmed with tons of data and decides it’s too complicated to dive in. They continue paying with the hope of getting results and fear losing the existing traffic.

Proper outsourcing management is time and energy-consuming. You’ve hired an agency to save you some time but not to spend this released time controlling the agency. 

That’s why I love frameworks when this type of supervision is performed by 3rd party. It can be another contractor or software. I’ll write about the “meta” strategy of using contractors to help manage your other contractors one day. For today’s article, let’s focus on a tactic that is fast and easy to implement.

Easiest tactic – Track search rankings

With SEO, the only thing that matters is how much new business you get from non-paid Google traffic. 

<<image on paid and non-paid search results>>

The problem is that linking the SEO agency’s activities with your website’s revenue is often tricky. Too many things influence the result – seasonality, other marketing channels, marketing attribution, analytics issues, etc.

Does it mean you should give up? No. There’s a way to separate the wheat from the chaff—search ranks.

All SEO efforts aim to improve your search engine ranks for keywords relevant to your business. Higher ranks will bring more traffic and more business over time.

At the same time, you may not see any increase in traffic and sales for weeks or months. It happens because customers usually visit only sites from the first page of a Google search. If your website is ranked 29th or 69th or doesn’t rank at all, it will bring the same amount of traffic – zero. According to Backlinko research, the first rank gets 27.6% of the search traffic for the given keyword.

However, the fact that your website appeared in the top 100 search results and moved higher week over week indicates that things are going in the right direction.

So here is the tactic. You want to constantly track search ranks for the limited selection of relevant keywords.

1. You only want to track a small number of keywords. Remember? I promised 5 minutes to get the result. Ten keywords are enough to start with.
2. They should be as relevant to your business as possible. You need the best of the best. I call it the “DNA keywords” list.
3. You want to keep your eye on them regularly. Weekly is the best cadence.

Now we have two questions. Where to get this list of keywords? And how to track them. You don’t want to check the top 100 Google results for every keyword, right?

Where to get this “DNA keywords” list?

1. If you are starting, don’t overcomplicate it. Open a new Google Spreadsheet document and make a column with ten search queries you want people to type into Google search to find your business. OR
2. Ask your SEO agency if you already have one. “What are the main ten keywords we are targeting?” They should know the answer if you work with them for over a week.

How to track the results?

Ironically, the SEO agency probably used the same software to do their job and build the reporting. Now you’ll use it to manage your cooperation better. 

You can Google “rank tracking tool” and use any of them. I’ll use Semrush because I’ve used it for all my online marketing needs for ten years, and they have a free version.

1. Register a new account. Feel free to ignore all UI that sells you the free trial. You need precisely a free account, so skip the trial. I’m not Semrush’s SVP of Marketing anymore. Now I can give you such advice 😂.

2. Feel free to skip all the questions about personalization and additional contact. You need to get to the starter screen. This is what it looks like. Click the “Position tracking” tool:

3. You must enter your website address, select the geography of a search for the tracking and hit “Continue to keywords.” If your business has a local presence, you can also enter your business name – it will help to monitor the ranks on Google Maps.

• 4. Now enter the list of keywords you want to track, press “Add to campaign” and then “Start Tracking”

It will take a minute to gather the data, and you’ll end up seeing approximately the following:

Two main elements here are the list of keywords (to the left), and their Google ranks in the selected geography. In the example above, I took a picture one week after the campaign was set up to show you what the progress report looks like.

Don’t pay attention to all the data and numbers in the report. For now, you only need to know your “DNA keywords” and understand your website’s current rank for those keywords. Every week you’ll see if your ranks are growing or not. You don’t have to remember to do anything – weekly updates will automatically arrive in your e-mail inbox.

If you are serious about organic traffic and your monthly SEO budget is anything above $3000, investing $120/month in a basic subscription can make sense. You’ll track more keywords and get much more advanced analytics independently from your agency.

Until then, using the tactics described in this article will be enough to keep your eye on this channel without spending more than two minutes weekly to check the progress during your routine e-mail check.

I know CMOs and even CEOs in enterprise businesses who use this tactic’s advanced version for goal-setting and monitoring their SEO strategies. I’ll write more about it one day. Stay tuned!

This is my first “tactical” article ever published and I’ll be more than happy to get your feedback and reaction. Feel free to drop a comment in a discussion on LinkedIn.