SEO Salesman B.S - Learn It, Avoid It & Make Your Life Easier

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization, so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to the SEO show for episode nine. This week we're talking SEO salesman BS, learn it, avoid it and make your life easier. And I'm joined by Arthur. How are you going? Good. How are you?

ARTHUR: I always say that I need to find a better way to introduce myself each week.

MICHAEL: I am not bad. Thank you. How are you? No, we don't need to ask you. I've already asked you that, but no. Look, today we're talking about a pretty, I guess, a bit of a minefield, right? The world of SEO sales and SEO promises and the types of dodgy things that maybe unscrupulous agencies or salespeople will tell business owners to try and get them in the door. Then we'll also talk a bit about, I guess, what the good agencies do so you can compare and be informed and try and figure out, you know, if you are looking at engaging an agency, whether they're from the camp A, the dodgy operators or camp B, the decent operators. So we've got a whole bunch of points. We're just going to sort of talk back and forth on them and have a bit of a conversation about that. But I guess I wanted to start by saying that, you know, the world of SEO or running a digital marketing agency, that there's not very many barriers to entry. You know, anyone can just start an agency in theory, you know, throw up a website, get a name, get a logo and start hitting up business owners and trying to sell to them. There's actually a ton of YouTube videos out there about starting marketing agencies and people selling this dream about how easy it is to suddenly make all this money every month. And the reality is that running a service business is really hard. It's really difficult to build and maintain a team with the right skills. Unless you're ripping people off, which is what these guys do. Yeah. Well, you burn your agency that way. So you might've been in operation for a year, two years, get a bad reputation and move on. But to do it the right way, it's very hard to have the team, to get good client feedback, to maintain your margins and get that whole balancing act right is really tough.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That takes years. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So a lot of these reputation. Yeah. And a lot of these people will come along and find out, you know, a year into it that that's the case. But by that point, they've already burnt a lot of businesses and moved on those businesses, swear off SEO.

ARTHUR: And it's annoying for us because then we have to deal with them. Yeah. Then we have to re-earn their trust.

MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. So what we're going to do is just run through what we see very common out there in the industry. We talk to a lot of businesses, so we hear about the pain points they have and yeah, just sort of freestyle a bit of a chat about it. So the first thing I think is a really a sign of a dodgy SEO agency is that they will prescribe things without assessing you first. So a good analogy for that is like a, you know, if you were going to get a plastic surgery or something, you wouldn't just rock up to whoever gave you the cheapest price without them even looking at you first.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Or like going to a mechanic and then him just giving you a query without looking what was wrong with the car. Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. This is going to cost you two grand. You're on my basic package. Let's get started. That's not how it works in the SEO world, right? Absolutely not. Like you need to look at a site and figure out, where it is.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. Yeah. So you can have a ballpark figure, but no two sites are the same. So you need to have a custom court based on the needs of the client.

MICHAEL: Exactly. So this is a bespoke service, so you should be treated as such. You're not just a cog in a machine, another number. Exactly. The other thing that a lot of dodgy agencies will make promises a lot of the time that they can't even keep.

ARTHUR: like the 90 keywords in 30 days promise that we see all too often or a really popular one is first page guaranteed.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Guaranteed in 90 days.

ARTHUR: So I'll definitely avoid anyone that offers you any sort of guarantees. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Well,

MICHAEL: Actually, it depends on what the guarantee is. It's a guarantee of something they can control. Yes, for sure. Like, you know, we guarantee we will create 10 blog posts per month at a certain amount of words or get you this many links.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But if someone's guaranteeing you 90 keywords in 30 days, you can bet that it's going to be trash. It's going to be either branded keywords or something really long tail that you probably already rank for. Um, and again, like it's out of their control. There's just too many variables for them to be able to guarantee anything really when it comes to keyword rankings like that.

MICHAEL: So here's an example, right? Let's say a company engages one of these agencies that says, We'll rank you first page for 90 keywords in 90 days. Yeah. But then that agency does the keyword mapping and the onsite optimization work, gives it to the client, but the client doesn't even put it on their site for two and a half months. How can the agency guarantee that they're getting those rankings if those changes aren't even made on the site? Well, they can't. That's the thing.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So they're definitely, they're lying basically because they being deceptive, they don't control Google.

MICHAEL: I mean, I wish I controlled Google. It'd be, you'd be a billionaire by now. So anyone that's promising rankings, um, traffic, you know, sometimes I'll promise traffic, which, you know, do you want traffic for the sake of traffic or do you want leads and business outcomes, you know, revenue growth, more customers. If they're promising traffic, you've got to be a bit suspicious about where it's even coming from.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I've got a headline here. So guaranteed 500 new website visitors within two months or your money back. Yeah. So a, they didn't say where the visitors are coming from. So it could be bot traffic. Yep. And like you said, it could be most likely it will be junk. Yeah. It won't convert. It'll just be bot traffic. So definitely want to avoid that.

MICHAEL: So look, guarantee is a good from, you know, let's look at it from the agency's point of view as a sales tactic.

ARTHUR: Let's talk about some of the guarantees we give clients.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So well, first of all, guarantees help remove friction in the buying process. It can help a client feel confident that they're getting X, Y, and Z out of a scenario. So I understand why clients like them. I understand why agencies want to offer them, but it needs to be stuff that you can deliver on and that you have control over. Yeah, for sure. So we would guarantee, you know, our link building team, we know that if they have a certain amount of investment put into them each month, that buys a certain amount of hours. And for a certain amount of hours worth of work, it will lead to at least, uh, you know, X amount of links. So then we can say to clients, we guarantee at the end of a link building campaign, you'll have X amount of links.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Or you can guarantee the amount of time is spent on the account as well.

MICHAEL: Yep. Well, we can guarantee that, you know, if we do a technical audit and we find a list of 10 things that need to be done and that we space that work out over a three month campaign, we guarantee that that work will be done by the end of that campaign. We control that. Yeah. They're good guarantees.

ARTHUR: Definitely. Yeah. That's basically what we do with our clients. Yeah. But a bad guarantee is just a hundred keywords within two months or your money back. Exactly.

MICHAEL: Anything to do with Google. We as SEOs don't control Google.

ARTHUR: Google, Google's guidelines basically say if someone's guaranteed position one results, then avoid them like the plague. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So that's a pretty big point. Yeah. Avoid them, put your mask on and walk the other way from those clients. Not those clients, those agencies. Yep. Another thing, you know, you see in tandem with this sort of stuff is long-term locking contracts. So, you know, long-term locking contract to me is six months, 12 months, maybe even longer. I don't really see much benefit in that to the client, you know, from, from the agency point of view, it's great because they've locked in that revenue, that billings for that amount of time, they can make decisions around planning and all that. But for the client's perspective, unless you're getting a massive discount for locking in that long, or unless you're maybe getting that agency to work with you exclusively, what's the benefit of locking in long-term?

ARTHUR: None, not at all. And it gives them the opportunity to become complacent in a way because they feel they've got, you know, a whole year to deliver some sort of results. Yeah. Um, it's just not the right way to operate. Yeah. So I agree that there should be contracts in place. So minimum three months to kind of get some sort of, you know, get the ball rolling with the SEO side of things because it takes time for Google to kind of you know, value the site. Yeah. So I think anywhere, you know, three months is a fair kind of locking contract when it comes to SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And to give a bit of background, you know, with our agency, we used to just do no locking contracts, like no time whatsoever. People would leave after a month. Yeah. You sort of, we found that people would have unrealistic expectations, just think they can test the waters and a lot of the time and effort and expense You incur at the start of a campaign as an agency is significantly more than as the campaign rolls on. So we changed to three month minimums to try and weed out people that weren't serious. And we think that's the right balancing act. That's a fair amount of time to really test things on SEO. You're not really, you know, you shouldn't be expecting a huge amount of results in three months.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And going back to what you said, it's not just a waste of our time, but it's a waste of their money because if they, you know, they pull the plug two months into it, they've just spent thousands of dollars for nothing. So, you know, it benefits them as well to kind of, you know, hold out for three months just and kind of revisit it and see where they're at.

MICHAEL: And three months, you'll know whether you enjoy working with that agency, whether their reporting's good, whether the service is good, whether the relationship is good. So then you can make a decision about continuing on. So look, any longer than that, it starts to get a bit questionable. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, like everything in life, let's chat about price.

ARTHUR: You get what you pay for.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like there's a reason things are called, you know, don't worry about that. It's just cheap, you know, like, Oh, it's just a cheapie. If it breaks, it doesn't matter. Get a new one. You know, when you're talking about, things around your house and stuff like that. So when it comes to services, if they're cheap, there's something going on to make it cheap.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So if you're getting quotes from agencies for $2,000 for an SEO retainer and someone offers you, you know, a $500 retainer that should ring alarm bells, massive alarm bells.

MICHAEL: Like even, you know, if you're a business owner, think about what's going on there. $500 a month is six grand a year.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That would barely cover the cost of tools for most people.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You know, yeah. So subscriptions to tools can be many hundreds of us dollars a month and you need lots of them. So then that means that agency needs to have a ton of clients for every team member just to make their business viable. But what does that mean for your campaign? You know, it's going to get no attention. It's going to get no investment. So like everything in life, investing a bit more and doing it with the right people is always going to be better than going with the cheap and nasty option or even just the cheap option. Don't worry about nasty. So. It seems to be good to be true price wise.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it is. Avoid it and avoid anyone that offers you things like SEO booster packages or things like that, but you know, guarantee they'll get you to position one.

MICHAEL: You know, give an example of a SEO booster package. We've heard this stuff in the wild, right?

ARTHUR: So we had, I can't even remember when it was, a while ago, we had a client and we were doing Google ads for them. So we had our own tracking set up and we noticed that there was one number that kept calling them and it was just daily, it was relentless. So we went in there and had a look, we searched the number and we found out it was an agency, a competing agency. So we had to listen to one of the calls and we found out that they were basically calling them up, harassing them every day, offering them SEO booster packages to get them into position one for one of the most competitive keywords. Um, I think the CPC is around $30. So, you know, it was ridiculous. One or $300 fee to get them to position one is not going to happen. Yeah. And that's a $300 fee one time, one time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And as we know with SEO, you need to be investing in content and link acquisition and ongoing work for months. So that $300 is just going in their pocket. Exactly.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So definitely avoid that sort of stuff.

MICHAEL: Yep. What else? Another one that is a little bit sneaky and underhanded is when agencies claim that they have some sort of a link with Google. So whether like that can be as simple as saying, you know, we're Google partners, so you should trust us, but Google don't offer a partner program for SEO. They have it for their Google ads program. You can be a partner agency on the advertising platform, but that doesn't mean Google's endorsing you as a good SEO agency. Google don't endorse any SEO agency. Exactly. The other thing that they can do is maybe hint that they have some sort of a link to a Google insider or understanding of the way Google works or some sort of proprietary knowledge of the Google algorithms that other agencies don't have. That's all lies. All lies. Don't fall for it.

ARTHUR: To a degree. I mean, we kind of have our own internal tool that we use, which kind of plugs all users. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But the thing is that tool has been built because we've looked at what works with Google and reverse engineered it. We're not saying to anyone that Google told us, oh yeah, this is what

ARTHUR: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Cause there are sites that actually do have handy tools, audit tools that you can use for free, but anyone that claims to have inside info is lying or knows how to, you know, knows how the algorithm works. Exactly. We've had clients actually hit up one of our bigger clients with some sort of proprietary tool. Remember that? Yeah. We had to look at it and it was an absolute joke.

MICHAEL: They were throwing out terms like AI, machine learning, all that stuff. And like the client got very excited. And then the tool was just, you know, I don't know why they got excited.

ARTHUR: The presentation had spelling mistakes and they were using, you know, Gmail email addresses. It was ridiculous.

MICHAEL: Which is another sign, right? Gmail. Like if someone hits you up from a Gmail address. Why? Like, are they too cheap to buy a domain name for eight bucks and set up Google suite on it? Yeah. Probably a backyard operation. Yep. Or a churn and burn, you know, like they're just plowing through the email addresses and moving on and burning clients.

ARTHUR: But you know what? The client was super excited about it. So it does work. Yeah. It does work. So you have to be very careful. Yes.

MICHAEL: Yes, absolutely. And look, in a sec, after we finish trashing all the dodgy sales tactics, we will talk about what the good agencies do so that when you are getting excited, you can sort of tell if you're getting excited about the good stuff or, or the snake oil. But, um, look, another one I see a lot is we're the number one agency where Australia's leading the best, the biggest, where whatever, you know, and they'll say that in their ad copy or, It can only be one number one agency for, you know, whatever metric that they're saying, but they're all saying that stuff. So vague promises or claims like that, that have no, you know, grounding or, or sort of, I guess, backup as to why they're making that claim. Look, it's a little marketing tactic.

ARTHUR: It's just a marketing tactic, but no one's the best. No one's number one.

MICHAEL: Look, look through it. See through it. Like if they're saying that, like, what are they backing it up with? And then likewise on the same tangent, award winning is a big one. you know, not all awards are created equal. There are awards for, I guess, doing good work and there are awards for growing your business and growing your revenue as a business. You should look through whatever sort of claims they're making about awards and see, you know, are these awards the first category or the second category? Do you have any examples of the two? All right. So let's say Australian Marketing Institute awards or SEMrush awards or APAC search awards. So that's the stuff you should be looking out for.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Because that is like a industry body. They're judged by your peers. You know, so people with agency experience or marketing experience are looking at campaigns you've actually run. Yep. The results achieved the outcomes for the clients and then picking winners.

ARTHUR: So what about something like Telstra business awards? That's more focused on the business growth.

MICHAEL: No, no. That, that will look at a whole range of categories of a well-run business, but things like, you know, fast 50, fast starters, like, so things that just look purely at revenue growth. Sure. Okay. Why do you care about that as a client? You know, you don't. Yeah. If their business is growing so quickly. Sure. That's good. But is there operations and delivery and fulfillment and sort of client services growing at the same rate or are they just Making a ton of sales and pumping stuff out the door and getting heaps of clients for every team member and you know, burning their clients. Often really fast growth like that and a really good service don't go hand in hand unless they're really on their game. What else would be a common one that we see a lot with clients and dodgy SEO companies? I would say saying yes to everyone.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely. Um, and I guess when you're starting off, you do kind of want to say yes to a lot of people. If you're a small business, you want that revenue coming through, you want those clients to work on. Um, but when you, when you get to a stage, um, I don't want to say that we're at that stage, but you know, we, we've stopped saying yes to people because you know, we know that we might not be able to help them or the budgets are too small. So definitely want to, you know, pick and choose.

MICHAEL: I guess maybe that's not the right, right. Well, it is the right words. Like as an agency, you, if you say yes to everyone, you get a lot of headaches. So you want to just sort of find your lane. and say no to the opportunities outside it. So we say no to a lot, like sort of 60% of the leads we generate, we don't. Because we don't feel like we can help them.

ARTHUR: Yeah. For their budget or for the, to reach their goals basically. Yeah. So we're transparent and honest upfront, letting them know that they don't have enough money. to get to where they want to be.

MICHAEL: Yep. A lot of agencies don't do that. They will just sign them. If a hairdresser comes along and says, Oh, you know, I want SEO. I'll just say, yep, cool. Come on board. And like, as a hairdresser, you probably shouldn't be doing SEO really.

ARTHUR: Even worse, they'll lock them into a 12 month contract.

MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. And tell them that they guarantee they'll be on the first page and it all sounds good. And then that hairdresser ends up getting burnt and thinking SEO is trash and that the industry is trash. And it's just this repeating cycle. So. Look, really as a, as a client, when you're approaching an agency, you should expect to be asked a lot of questions about your business and how you operate and what you sell and your margins. And you know, the agency should be trying to understand the business case or the, you know, does it make sense for you to invest in an agency and the good agencies will walk away from it if, if that all doesn't make sense.

ARTHUR: Or is SEO the right channel for you? That's at that point in time. Sorry, I've got something in my throat.

MICHAEL: At that point in time. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Cause an SEO agency will sell SEO, but that's not always the right channel. The other, maybe I guess on that note is, you know, is their team really super sales heavy? You know, if you look at them on LinkedIn, do they have a massive sales team and then not many people delivering the actual work? That's a big red flag.

ARTHUR: Definitely. Always check out the site and have a look at the team if it's available.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Maybe we should just, you know, we've, we've done a fair bit of trashing of dodgy tactics here, but let's talk about, that side of things, like how do you figure out the good ones? And that one is a pretty good point, right? Checking out the website.

ARTHUR: A hundred percent. I mean, it's, it's a, it's their brochure. It's the, basically the face of the business. So you can, if you look at their site and it doesn't look great, then it's probably a red flag. If it's templated, if they're spelling mistakes, like if it doesn't look like a proper business, then you should probably avoid it.

MICHAEL: Um, and then on that note as well, there should be a face to a name. Yeah, for sure. Like you should see the team, like you click on the about page. It's a team there. Are there photos there? Can you see who owns it? Can you see who works in SEO, who works in paid search, that sort of stuff?

ARTHUR: Well, it depends how big, if it's a, if it's a kind of, what do you call it? Like a lone wolf working by himself.

MICHAEL: Well, he should be, he should be, he is a brand in that case or she, but what, what the, I guess coming back to the dodgy side of things, a lot of these agencies will be faceless. Like there'll be a name, a logo, like a brand, but you can't, there's no service office address. Service office address. Yeah. It was like fake off mobile number. No names for the team. No sort of LinkedIn, no social, like check their socials. Does it show an active?

ARTHUR: That's a big one. I think. Yeah. Any, any agency that has a team will probably be posting maybe not super frequently, but there'll be posting their events, you know, any sort of updates. So I like we post about once a week, once every fortnight. It's not, it's not super frequently, but we do post. Yeah.

MICHAEL: You're showing team life that we are a real business, that there's a bit of a culture there, that sort of stuff is all important. Are you dealing with a real business or a, you know, a shady behind the scenes type operation?

ARTHUR: So if they have three followers and one post, then they're probably new or not very dodgy. Yeah. Or dodgy.

MICHAEL: Or very dodgy. Yes. I get on this sort of topic as well. If you're able to check out who works at a place, you can check out their experience and see whether they're up to the task. So very easy to go on LinkedIn and look at the agency you're going to work with and look at their team, have a look at their experience.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Where have they worked? How long have they been doing SEO?

MICHAEL: what were they doing before they got into the world of SEO? Like, you know, where have they done it for five years, 10 years, one year they done it for one year.

ARTHUR: And before that they were something totally different, you know, real estate agent decided they wanted to work from home and did a course online on YouTube and now is exactly hustling people online.

MICHAEL: Exactly. So that's probably not going to be a very good experience. working with someone like that because they just haven't spent enough time to develop the skills, obviously, and, and, and gain the knowledge. They've probably read, seen, watched one of those YouTube videos about how to start an SEO agency and gone done it. The other thing of course is reviews. Yup. So reviews are, you know, agencies have funded their reviews and they will try and reach out to clients and get reviews, obviously, which is every business should do that, right? Like every client should be trying to get reviews from their customers as well. So that's not a bad thing, but don't just take, you know, reviews on their website that they've placed on there on face value or even Google, because anyone can write a Google review.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You should still look at it. You should still look at it. But I mean, if you, there's a, if you see a trend of people with only one review or a contributor of one review, that's leaving five star reviews and I'd probably avoid that because they're probably fake accounts that are just leaving.

MICHAEL: It's pretty, it's pretty easy to tell when businesses are putting fake, fake good reviews for themselves. Like they'll normally be written the same way, like the same sort of.

ARTHUR: Well, super specific, super specific. But the best way is to have a look at who's written the review. And if they've only contributed once and written one review for that agency, then it's probably that agency just creating Gmail accounts and leaving reviews.

MICHAEL: If, if that is a common theme, if there's a lot of one star reviews, like the odd one here and there is normal because some people might've just never left a review.

ARTHUR: Yeah, absolutely. But if it's all of them are like that, then you can bet that it's all bullshit.

MICHAEL: If they all say they've increased my visibility 74% while reducing my cost per lead by 27%. Yeah, too specific. That might happen sometimes, but if it's a common, you see it a lot, then that's a red flag. Similar, you know, name dropping team members, if that's in all of them, then again, oh yeah. We get name dropped in legitimate reviews.

ARTHUR: Yeah. There's different types of review platforms. I know you love Clutch because that's verified. So the reviews there are actually, you know, customers that you can trust that people, people that have worked with us. So yeah.

MICHAEL: So Clutch will look at, you have to log in with your LinkedIn and then submit it, or they actually talk to you on the phone and get that. So it's pretty good in that regard. Another little, I guess, hack is go a bit deeper than looking at those sort of big, you know, the Googles, the Facebooks, the obvious platforms. Like if you type a agency name and then reviews into Google. Have a look at Reddit. Yeah. Reddit.

ARTHUR: Whirlpool. Whirlpool. Yeah. Product review.

MICHAEL: There was a massive thread a couple of years back. Yeah. There's been some agencies on there where they, you know, their reviews on their website are sort of like, you know, five star and glowing, but then you go on Whirlpool and there's page after page after page after page of people just having the most horrific experience. So do a bit of digging.

ARTHUR: Just do research. I mean, you research when you're buying a game, when you're buying any sort of appliance or anything, you do research. So why not do your research when you're investing thousands of dollars into SEO?

MICHAEL: So research could be testimonials too. Yep. Do they have them? Are they real? Are they authentic? Like.

ARTHUR: Well, video, you love your video testimonials because. I absolutely love a video testimony. Yep. Because I mean, you can't forge them basically. You've got the client there talking about your business in front of a camera. Anyone can write a testimonial and say, you know, Joe Doe or whoever wrote it or gave you that testimonial, but it's hard to fake a video.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And for clients to be happy enough to go on camera and go through, you know, a couple of hours shoot and it's hard, it's hard to get video testimonials. Yeah. And like, it's, it's awkward to do them as a client. Like they might say yes. And then all of a sudden the bright lights around them, the cameras on them and it can be tricky.

ARTHUR: So the fact that it's tricky when you're even there with them, when you're asking them the questions, cause you start wigging out yourself sometimes and you're making eye contact with them. And yeah, it's a bit of a funny setup. It's fun, but it's not. Yeah. I can see why clients aren't thrilled to do them. Yeah. So if they do, it probably means they're happy. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And we appreciate every client that's given us a hundred percent. Um, what else did the good agencies out there do? I would say the way they sell is really important. So, you know, With sales, they can be the super sleazy, aggressive approach, the high volume game where they're just like coming back to that prescription without assessment. They're just pumping out templated proposals using package pricing and then hazard harassing people. That's one way of doing things. But then another way of doing things is taking the time to really look at your site, look at the opportunities, look at the competition, suggest a custom plan and then educate or even tell them, you know, SEO is not the channel for you.

ARTHUR: Maybe you should look at X, Y, Z. Yeah. Yeah. So a good salesperson from a reputable agency will let you know, you know, this isn't the right time for you to do SEO or maybe you should do SEO and do, you know, Google ads or Facebook.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We'll start with Google ads and then SEO is maybe for you in the future once you've got a bit of runs on the board. Exactly. But like good salespeople sort of have empathy. They listen more than they talk. They understand what the actual goals are for you. So if you say you want to do SEO, like is it because You're trying to generate more business and how much more business are you trying to generate? So what needs to be done to get there? And they frame it in that context and they educate when they sell, you know, they're open with what the plan would be and bring you along with that so that you, you're very confident in what's being done. So just look at the salespeople and assess them, you know.

ARTHUR: And it's in our best interest to do that as well, because we don't want to sign people have them have expectations of getting, you know, this much traffic, this many, you know, this many rankings, knowing that we can't deliver that because you know, in two months time they're going to be upset and leave. So yes, exactly.

MICHAEL: Expectations are massive. Yeah. Like having expectation alignment and being on the same page. Like we, when we were sort of kicking around ideas for this episode, right, you've, found that article on news.com.au that was talking about, you know, the SEO industry and how there needs to be crackdowns on these digital charlatans fleecing Australians. So we'll put the, actually the link to this article in the show notes. But in that article, they interviewed a business owner who engaged in SEO agency. And she said, in the six week period, I got no sales. And you know, that company had been engaged to improve her SEO and she'd been given some useless reports. So the red flag to me there is she only allowed the campaign to run for six weeks before she kicked them out for getting no sales. So that's just a bad engagement to begin with. The expectations were totally wrong. The salesperson from the SEO company should never have signed her up to SEO to try and generate sales for business in six weeks because SEO is a long-term channel. Yep. So good salespeople will say, Hey, look, you know, six weeks, your timeframe, maybe we should be looking at Google ads. And now the agency will probably make a bit less money because you don't need to invest as much potentially there, but that's the right thing to do by the client.

ARTHUR: So I liked that the, at the end of it, they asked for a five star review. It's amazing.

MICHAEL: Six weeks, five, leave us a five star review. So yeah. Do your research on the reviews because that sort of stuff does happen. Um, what else do the good guys do? I would say thought leadership, or at least trying to share knowledge and expertise is a big part of it. You know, are they writing useful blog posts to show their knowledge? Are they hosting excellent podcasts like the SEO show?

ARTHUR: Case studies is another one. Case studies.

MICHAEL: We didn't touch on. Yep. Case studies and how in depth are they? Are they really sort of pulling back the curtains a bit and you know, how, how voluminous is their library? Is there a lot of case studies or just one or two? The types of businesses they work with, you know, are they similar to yours? Are they a range of big and small ones or are they just focusing on smaller ones? You know, sort of have a look at that.

ARTHUR: Yeah. What about asking for a reference? Because I'm on the fence about that one. I completely understand. And I think, you know, if an agency's good and honest, then they would have no issues. Giving out a number from a client as a reference, it's just sometimes it's hard to tee up, to have someone agree to have a chat with someone else about their business isn't easy. But I mean, any reputable agency wouldn't have any issues. you know, teeing that up for you.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And we do that. I'll tell you what's annoying though, is we get asked for that sometimes and we go and ask our client, Hey, would you mind having a chat to this person? They just wanted to sort of pick your brains. And then the client says, sure. Yeah. I'll wait for their call. And then the prospect never calls them and you sort of, and they still sign on or, well, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but like, it's just sometimes maybe agreeing is enough.

ARTHUR: You know, if you agree to it, they might be all right. Well, they're not hiding anything. Yeah. I can't be bothered to do it. It's too much time on my behalf. So maybe just did that act of agreeing is enough. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I think so. They should be, I guess it comes back to, they've got nothing to hide.

ARTHUR: No, they're not sort of, it's just, it's just difficult to tear it off sometimes.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So look, I think this has been a pretty good summary of the main, you know, the dodgy things to look out for, but also the signs of a good agency. Was there anything else there that you sort of. we haven't covered or you think would be useful because I, you know, we've, we've done this, but in the next episode we are going to talk about the stuff that clients do, you know, that contribute to SEO campaigns not working. So it's not always the agency's fault. It can often be a client's fault. So we're going to be quite honest about the stuff that goes on there to try and illustrate the, some of the pitfalls that, that happened from the client side. That'll be really fun actually. Chance to blow off some steam from a, from a years of frustrations. But look, I think from an agency sales perspective, that's the main points, right? You keep on top of all of that stuff, you're going to end up having a good experience or avoiding a bad experience as the case may be. So that's pretty much all for this episode. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you listening. We'd love those reviews and subscribes, follows if you're feeling up to it. If not, we'll see you next week and maybe we'll win you a follow then. So have a good one. Adios.