SEO Agency Chicago

Category: Working With An SEO Agency

  • Different Ways SEO Agencies Work

    SEO companies or agencies work in different ways. Finding the right SEO for your organization requires more than just looking at their proposals. A cultural fit and understanding priorities are a good start. In addition, being clear on how the SEO operates, their methods, and communication are important.

    SEO Recommendations and Implementation

    When engaging an SEO company, understand how they communicate recommendations. There are different ways to manage an SEO program. How it is done depends on what your company needs. The challenge is aligning your needs with the way the SEO Company operates.

    Independent SEO Activity

    Some SEOs will operate autonomously, making changes as needed. This can help with the speed of implementation. It also reduces the burden on company marketing teams. To work in this environment, several areas of trust must be established.

    Technical understanding of your website. Different CRMs and hosting environments have specific requirements. You must be confident those implementing changes have a full understanding of the web site.

    Your business. When implementing changes, Your SEO must ensure they align with your brand and can write authoritatively and properly about your products and industry. Trusting the agency to implement changes can only happen when this happens.

    Recommendations and approved SEO changes

    On the other end of the spectrum is a pre-approval process. In this process, the agency provides you with a “current state” and “prosed state.” This can be for content, technical change, or the user experience. There are several advantages to this process.

    The first obvious advantage is ensuring the changes fully align with your brand and correct product information. There are times when what is good for SEO implementation may need to be adjusted to keep in step with the brand or product information.

    The second advantage is having a way to audit changes. Occasionally, things may need to be reversed, or other organization members will have questions. A proper recommendation process will provide parties with documentation of changes and why those changes were made.

    When SEO Engagements Start

    When the SEO engagement starts, there will be a series of communication and quite a bit of activity. This establishes confidence in the agency and implementation. After the initial activity, the level of communication will decrease.

    Creating a regular communication schedule and updates will help ensure your SEO agency can keep on track. It will also help ensure you can have confidence in your agency’s work.

    Requesting monthly reports is one way to keep track of what the SEO agency is doing. Having a regular call in addition to the reporting can also be helpful. As your agency gains your trust, you can allow them greater latitude. A good SEO relationship ultimately develops into a partnership that allows the agency to operate more independently and frees up your time to manage other aspects of your responsibilities.

  • Is your SEO Agency Asleep On The Job

    Is your SEO Agency Asleep On The Job

    Veterans of the SEO industry have seen a lot. When we take over an account, we always see things that we would do that the prior SEO agency didn’t do. In all likelihood, when we lose an account, the new agency will say the same about our work.

    It is normal for agencies to take different approaches to SEO. Thus, it’s not really fair to say that someone wasn’t doing their job just because they do it differently. And sometimes it takes a new perspective to help give a site a boost, tackling the problem from a different angle. Again, this is normal in SEO work.

    But, what if it is simply a case of the SEO agency (or employee) not doing their job? This is much different than just having a different approach. It is just not doing it.

    The challenge for clients is that they may not know enough about search engine optimization to know that basic things, housekeeping items, are not getting done.

    Are there some things you can check to see? Yes.

    Get written content change recommendations

    When you trust an SEO partner, it can be easy to say “just go ahead and do it.” And that’s fine. We have many clients that trust our knowledge of their industry and allow us free reign on content edits. But, your agency should provide a document that shows the before and after of content changes.  When you browse your website, you should be able to see those changes.

    It is possible that the content is well optimized and does not require changes. That’s fine also. Don’t make changes just to see changes. But, there should be some dynamic components to your content. If not changes, then new content.

    Check the H tags

    This may be a bit hard for some to do, but once you get the hang of it, it isn’t too difficult. The H tags are html code that helps search engines understand the content structure of your page. There should only be one H1 tag, and a page can have multiple H2 tags, as well as possibly some H3, H4 tags (and so on). 

    Where we see an issue is when there are no H tags, or there is only an H1 tag. This single H1 tag is usually derived from the site template and is not really added with much consideration.

    To see the H tags, go to a page on your site using chrome (it’s easiest since it’s the most used browser). Then hover on the page and right-click on your mouse. You should see “Page Source” as an option. Click this to open a new tab that has the code. Don’t sweat it, you don’t need to read or understand this.

    On the upper right of the browser, click on the three vertical dots, then select “Find.”  Then, enter “<h1” (I left out the closing bracket intentionally. The actual tag should look like <h1>, but some may put in a space). There should be only one. Click the down arrow to go to the instance of the “<h1”. Does the content next to the tag make sense? Does it describe the main theme/topic of the page? If not, you may need to ask your agency about it.

    Now search for “<h2.” Are there any instances? If so, click the down arrow in the search to go to the first instance, and then the next, and so on. Do these make sense, are they relevant to the content on the page? If so, great. If not, again, ask your agency about them.

    Google Search Console

    Google Search Console (GSC) is a great tool. Among other things, it will tell you the pages that have issues. Ask your agency to download the issues report for you if you don’t have access. 

    When you get it, you will likely see issues. Some of Google’s ‘issues’ can’t always be resolved. But, your agency should be able to explain to you what they have done and why the pages still on the list can’t be fixed.

    These three things will help you understand if your SEO agency is paying attention to your program. No agency is perfect and you may very well find some issues. But, no explanation for the various items above should raise some flags.