Let’s Get Real – Is It YOU Hurting Your SEO?

Let’s Get Real – Is It YOU Hurting Your SEO?

Let’s Get Real – Is It YOU Hurting Your SEO?

Episode 010

Last week we spoke about the dodgy tactics some SEO salespeople will use. This week, we’re looking at the other side of the coin. It’s true, not every failed campaign is the fault of a “dodgy agency”. Sometimes, business owners that engage an SEO agency will contribute to their own campaign failing, often without even realising it.

We cover off the main contributing factors from the client side that we have seen over the years derail the success of an SEO campaign. If this knowledge is all out in the open it means these mistakes are less likely to be repeated, so tune in and we hope you get some value from it.

Hey, Check These Guys Out

The SEO Show is brought to you by Local Digital – need more customers? That’s where Local Digital comes in.

Stuff You Need To Know

The SEO Show is released once a week so subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts and if you’re feeling extra kind we’d love it if you leave us a review.

Learn more about us at https://theseoshow.co
Check out our YouTube content at http://theseoshow.tv

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:04
It’s time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine

Unknown Speaker  0:08
optimization,

Unknown Speaker  0:09
so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now,

Unknown Speaker  0:14
here’s your host, Michael and Arthur.

Michael  0:23
All right, we’re back for another episode of the SEO show.

Arthur  0:27
We’ve been looking forward to this one,

Michael  0:28
we have been because last week we were trashing dodgy SEO, sales tactics and dodgy agencies and all the unscrupulous stuff. But this week, after working in the game, for the last decade, we’re going to trash some of the stuff that clients do that contribute to SEO not working. So we thought it would be cool to put an episode together that explains the stuff that we see clients do a lot that hurts them, and they don’t even know that they’re hurting themselves. So our hope is that by sharing a few war stories and our battle skars, we’ll be able to help people understand that, you know, in certain scenarios, you know, if you act one way it can lead to this outcome. If you act another way, the outcome might be better.

Arthur  1:07
Yeah. And we don’t want to, we don’t want you to think of it as trashing.

Michael  1:09
No, that’s just a quick and easy way of summing it up. Because, like we said, last time, a lot of this comes back to having the right expectations at the start and making sure that when you work with an agency on SEO, it makes sense. If that is done from the start, then there shouldn’t be these problems that we’re going to run through today. But they do occur from time to time. So let’s run through them and have a little chat about them. And hopefully, it helps you out when it comes to making your own decisions about working with SEO agencies. So getting into it, the first one that we see a little bit or quite a bit is expecting instant results, or even results quicker than six months or so with your SEO campaign, right?

Arthur  1:54
Yeah.

Michael  1:56
This, speaking from our own agency’s perspective,

Arthur  2:00
it’s a waste, it’s a waste of time

Michael  2:02
for everyone.

Arthur  2:02
Yeah, it’s a waste of your time, it’s a waste of our time.

Michael  2:05
And we try to avoid this as much as possible by being very clear about timelines and expectations and the like. And, you know, we specifically have slides in our in our proposals that explain all of this. So people understand it. But be that as it may sometimes people come in and they just sort of hear what they want to hear exactly they want to see,

Arthur  2:23
Or they’ll claim to understand it, then you send them a report after the first month. They say, Look, I’m a little bit disappointed. I was expecting a bit more than this, like we’ve explained to you it’s going to take upwards of three to six months to see results. Yeah, yeah, it happens all too often.

Michael  2:39
Yeah. So that is the thing that that sort of say, Well, I really expected more to be done or better results by now, I would have thought that, you know, we’d be here by now. But like, you really shouldn’t have thought that because no, SEO is a long term play. And we told you that and you know, we made very clear what was going to happen. So you just need to go into an SEO campaign with your eyes open that it takes time and you need to trust that the people you’re working with have the tools and the skills to get the job done. Right. And if you do trust that then trust that the the timeframes they are telling you are right as well,

Arthur  3:10
definitely, the onus is on SEO as well to be able to kind of demonstrate the progress, the gradual progress over the months. So showing things like you know, the work that he’s been doing things like, you know, organic visibility going in ahrefs and showing you know, you might not see your traffic increasing at the moment. But look, how many more keywords are starting to appear on page one, positions 123. Yeah, so kind of giving them peace of mind that way, I think is very important. Because three, three months is a short period of time when it comes to SEO, if they can see, you know, DR improving these things improving gradually, they’ll probably be a bit more. Yeah. What’s the word I’m looking for? comfortable?

Michael  3:44
Yeah, that you know that the work is having an impact. Yeah, because you don’t want to be investing money every month, and absolutely nothing happens. So, look, and it’s not always the clients fault, you know, SEO might not be the right channel for them to begin with. And a good salesperson needs to take that into account and suggest the right channels and understand their goals and their timeframes and what motivates them and their budgets and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. But the general jist, don’t expect SEO to work in one month or two months or three months.

Arthur  4:14
Exactly. Like we said, it’s a it’s a waste of everyone’s time. You know, we spend a lot of time onboarding a client. A lot of the work is upfront. All the deliverables, the keyword research mapping content. That takes a lot of our time. Yeah, so for a client to sign on and leave in two months. We don’t we don’t make any nothing from it. It’s

Michael  4:30
just not good for anyone.

Arthur  4:31
So they get nothing out of it. We get nothing out of it. So. Exactly.

Michael  4:35
Exactly. So another thing we see a lot is that, you know, they engage the client engages an SEO agency, but then restricts what they can do to the website and then complains that there’s no results which search engine optimization, you know that last word optimization, it means you’re optimising your website so it can perform well in the search engines. Without the optimization, it’s just a website that exists in Google the way it always has. So yeah, you need to let your agency do the work.

Arthur  5:06
There’s like two camps. When it comes to this, I find that there is clients will give you free rein and say, you know, you’re the expert, do what you think will help my site. Then there’s the flip side of that, where there’s people where they will critique every little recommendation that you put through them and say, I don’t want this. I don’t want this. There’s also the middle. Yeah, people I kind of, you know, they agree, and they’ll kind of listen to you. But yeah,

Michael  5:28
yeah. So look, a lot of clients look at their website. Well, let me rephrase this. No one looks at your website, the way you do as a business owner,

Arthur  5:38
exactly.

Michael  5:38
Some business owners will like, let’s say, we want to put copy into a little read more toggle, so that, you know, if you click read more, there’s some SEO copy.

Arthur  5:48
And no one’s ever going to read that note ever unlikely. very unlikely.

Michael  5:52
SEO people will maybe you as a business owner

Arthur  5:56
sometimes, you know, people will kind of sit there for weeks just trying to perfect it. Yeah, as we’re trying to explain to you Let’s get content on the site, you know, give Google the time to crawl it, index, and you’ll start seeing results a lot sooner. There. Yeah.

Michael  6:09
Yeah, you need to be a bit more objective as an owner of website and just say, look, yep, get it on there. As long as it’s, you know, good, written and good.

Arthur  6:17
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. If they’re keyword stuffed and it reads like crap, then obviously, no one wants that on their site.

Michael  6:24
Yep. The other thing is, like, you know, sometimes they will refuse to share CMS logins, or

Arthur  6:31
I understand that a little bit, a lot more than, you know, refusing to do the work or recommendations that you put across. Some people are very, you know, pedantic about their site,

Michael  6:40
and don’t want to break it and take the site down. Sure. But things work best when you can move quickly and get the work done that you need to get done without having to sort of go back and have the client in the middle because the clients always busy. And, you know, things will sit in their inbox for weeks, when you could have just done it, you know, in a matter of minutes, if you had the access.

Arthur  6:59
Yeah.

Michael  7:01
The other thing I think on this point I think is being tight.

Arthur  7:03
Yes, yeah, I was gonna say that,

Michael  7:05
you know, if you’ve engaged in agency, and you’re spending a couple of grand few grand a month or whatever, on SEO, and you’re trying to get to some outcome, you know, leads new customers that are going to grow your business, whatever percent or revenue, why then say, I’m not going to invest in proper hosting, or I’m not going to invest in that CDN. Because, you know, it’s it’s eight bucks a month. And we don’t need to do that, you know, there’s small costs that make a big difference, though,

Arthur  7:31
especially hosting.

Michael  7:32
Yeah, hosting is a big one there. You know, you invest in it. So you get the results. If you don’t sort of want to take that advice on it can hurt the results. So, you know, just those restrictions that sometimes business owners or people that run a website impose on an SEO agency. Yep. Make it very tough to do the optimising part of SEO.

Arthur  7:52
Yeah, I think this leads nicely into the next point. So are you being the bottleneck? So basically, you know, a lot of people that we have worked with in the past, you know, we wait weeks and weeks and weeks just for feedback for basic things, such as metadata. You know, we spend a lot of time chasing them, it’s a lot of wasted time on our side, that could be better applied, working on the site working on the campaign, you know, link building, things like that. So you could ask, Are you being the bottleneck? Yeah. And often,

Michael  8:19
this is a, this is a common thing. You know, again, as we said, business owners or managers, they can be busy. And they expect you to you when I say you, I mean the SEO person, they expect them to chase them over and over, I’m an SEO person. But this client, right, like, instead of having their own time management, or project management, yeah, they just say, well, you follow up with me until I get back to you, you know, and they expect you to chase and chase and chase the small things, you know, like, adding content to the site or updating metadata stuff. The

Arthur  8:49
page title is, you know, sometimes you could be waiting a month to get back, you know, that’s a month, you basically put themselves back a month.

Michael  8:55
Yeah. The whole campaign. Yeah. What about, like on this note, being vague with your briefs and what you like and don’t like? Yeah,

Arthur  9:04
we’ve got a little story that we wanted to touch on.

Michael  9:07
Yeah, well, well, I’ll let you take the story away. Because this is a an experience you had, right.

Arthur  9:11
Yeah. So it’s not exactly SEO related. It’s website related, but it kind of applies to SEO, and I guess, to most marketing, but a couple of years ago, I can’t even remember when I was maybe 2018. We were going to build a website for one of our new clients.

Michael  9:26
So it’s just Just let me interrupt here. We don’t build websites anymore because of stuff like

Arthur  9:31
Yes, exactly. Yeah. Well,

Michael  9:32
I don’t build websites. Well, we as a business, yes, avoid them

Arthur  9:35
as much as possible. But yeah, basically, this guy came to us with no brief. He wanted a new site. He wanted a fresh site basically gave us free rein, so he said, I trust you guys. You guys are the experts. Just go go and do what you want to do. So we sent him some wireframes and build out a site and staging you know, gave us the green light. Everything was going well. got to the point where the site was at a stage for him to review. And they kind of turned around and said, Oh, you know, this is not what I’m after. So we’re like, Okay, well, you never really told us what you wanted. What did you like about it? So we got into like a loop of rather than him telling us what he liked. He was telling us what he didn’t like. And it was just very difficult to kind of, you know, figure out what he was what was going on inside his head. Anyway, one day, he turned around, basically, he had a he had a side of reference site, it was a site from the UK super complex, it was a beautiful site, a lot of parallax. So not just basic parallax, like an image behind or like text behind an image. But super, super complex. So when you scroll down, think of Apple, you scroll down, and all the elements were kind of moving along and animations, animations that yeah, it was it was really impressive, but it was a pain in the ass to put together. We needed like, you know, went through three developers. A lot of them couldn’t figure it out. Eventually, we got there. I’ve got to the point where you know, we needed content for the site. So I gave them a call. You guys are looking. It’s a long weekend. I’m going to sit down, get through it all and send it to you on Tuesday. So comes Tuesday, I give him a call. He says to me, you know, I had a cracked open a beer on Friday and completely forgot to garden. forgot about it. Sorry. I was fuming.

Michael  11:15
Yep. Because Because the agreement was like he was providing the content for the site. Yeah, it also has the

Arthur  11:20
agreement. So a bit of context. Yeah. But this goes back to him initially saying, Are you going to have to chase me, you know that you have to chase me. And we did chase him. And I did chase him. You know, it got to the point a couple of weeks after that. He caught up. He was like, Where’s my site? Yep. Mike was still waiting for you. And he started blowing up at me. Yeah, saying, you know, this is like, this is not acceptable. My I’ve got my marketing ready, I need to go live in two weeks. And I’m like, Look, with all due respect, there’s no chance we’re going to live in two weeks. We’ve been doing this for six months, I’ve been chasing you. Six months. And no, it’s gonna take at least two months to have the site ready. No, no, no, I needed done by this date. I was going overseas as well at the time, if you remember. So it just didn’t end up happening. So I guess the end result was, you know, he still hasn’t got a new site. He wasted a lot of our time, we probably lost money on that project. He was unsatisfied. We were pissed off and not

Michael  12:14
anyone know.

Arthur  12:15
So it just comes down to Yeah, he was a massive bottleneck a by not having a brief, but more so you know, relying us to chase him. You know, we’re marketing agency. You know, we’re not assistants. We’re not Yeah, we’re not there to chase you. Yeah, we want to help you reach your goals. We want to, you know, in this, this case, want to help you build a nice website, but we’re not going to be chasing you. Yeah, every day trying to get stuff out of you.

Michael  12:36
Yeah. So I guess a good thing, their email comes in reply to it, you know, in a business day, if you can.

Arthur  12:42
And, you know, like you said before, people have lives, people get busy, you know, stuff gets missed, and like, we miss stuff. We’re human. Yeah. But you know, to rely on someone to constantly chase you. It’s just unreasonable.

Michael  12:51
Yeah. unreasonable and disrespectful of their time. Absolutely. Yeah. I guess the thing is, if you if you get back to emails quickly, and the other thing is dribs and drabs, you know, sort of like drip feeding information back or responses, you know, if you can try and be concise and comprehensive with the feedback that you do give that prevents bottlenecks from forming, you know, otherwise, you might find situations where we’re waiting back for something from the client, we go and make changes on the back of it, but then they drip feed some other information. And then that means work has to be revised and that sort of stuff. So just, yeah, in addition to getting back promptly, just being very comprehensive with the way you get back to people.

Arthur  13:30
Yeah. And on a side note, I had a look into the site that still hasn’t changed since 2018. And hasn’t gotten very far with that project.

Michael  13:37
Right. Yeah, well, yeah. thing, not a good experience. We’re not in the business of running a half build websites, you know, no,

Arthur  13:45
absolutely not.

Michael  13:46
That way, we’re not even in the business of building sites anymore for reasons like this God. So look, another one that is a little bit of a, this is less common, but it does happen. A client will trust an agency enough to engage them. So like, you know, that’s the first hurdle, but they don’t trust them enough to work with them and sort of just accept what they’re saying. So they might stop doing mines. You know, my friend is an SEO expert. And, yeah, he works here. And he says that you should be doing this or, you know, they sort of like there’s someone watching over your shoulder, and it sort of leads to this environment where the clients essentially saying to the agency, I don’t trust you. Yeah, and I’m going to have someone critique your work that knows nothing about the strategy or what you’re up to, or the way you do things or why you’re doing things. Yeah. They just sort of throwing in their feedback from the sidelines. Yeah, for sure. And that’s not a good environment. Really,

Arthur  14:38
you know, SEO can be black and white, but it can also be very grey. And, you know, everyone’s got their opinions. Everyone has strategies, you know, a particular way of doing things. I want to give a shout out to rob, our SEO specialist, Local Digital, because he’s a debate demon, Rob. He’s dealt with some interesting clients over the years. Yeah. But in this particular example, he had he was Working on a client. And there was an external third party that basically the whole time just looking over his work critiquing everything, so he would send through document or whatever. And then you hear back from this third person didn’t even really know who he was. We don’t know his experience. We don’t know who he is. He was basically just calling out everything. So we had a look through whether that everything that Rob did say, was right, right, right.

Michael  15:22
Basically, back was garbage, by the way that yes, external person was giving. So

Arthur  15:26
it was an uphill battle, trying to you know, get anything done, because you had this third person, basically saying, No, no, no, no, no, we’re like, well, you get to the sorry, you get to the point where, you know, you’ve spent this money to work with us, obviously, you’ve trusted enough trusted us enough to spend that amount of money with us. Why do you have a third person they’re kind of looking over everything that we do. It’s a it’s, I find it a bit disrespectful, that be it’s just causing a very unworkable environment and just very hostile because you’re basically, you know, what’s, what’s the analogy? You’re like pedalling up up? Creek, or whatever, like, you’re basically fighting to get anything done? Yeah. And it’s just a waste of time. Because you know,

Michael  16:05
and look, I get it from a client’s point of view, like, it’s the old second opinion, like if you go to a doctor, and they say one thing, and you’re, you don’t necessarily agree, or whatever, you go get a second opinion. But you can have second opinions in your SEO world, but you don’t need to have them sitting on every call and watching over the shoulder and giving feedback directly to the agency. Maybe you

Arthur  16:25
get this in this situation, it was horrible. It was horrible is every email every call, they wanted weekly calls, which is something we’re going to talk about later on. Yep. But it was just, it was just not workable, basically. And needless to say, they’re not a client anymore. But and we say we we have had other

Michael  16:43
I guess scenarios where someone that wanted to work with us would suggesting that this is not an SEO example, but a Google Ads example, they would say, look, we weren’t gonna have you and one other agency in the account, and one agency can run a couple of campaigns, you can run a couple, and we’ll see what works better. The other agency was like, yeah, we’ll do that. But we said, Look, we’re not going to do that those campaigns are going to be competing each other for similar keywords, it’s all going to be a mess, it’s not going to be a true indicator. If that’s how you want to do things, it’s probably best to just work with that other agents definitely Wait, we’re here in the future, if it doesn’t work out.

Arthur  17:16
And guess for us as well. We don’t want to kind of show how we structure our campaigns and things like that. It’s, it’s our IP, basically, so giving access to, like our accounts to the different agency.

Michael  17:26
Yeah, look at that happens, like when it happened. But in that case, it’s just it’s not looking at it purely from the clients perspective, it’s not a good outcome for them to have these campaigns competing with each other, and it never works out.

Arthur  17:39
We’ve never there’s never been a situation where we’ve had a situation similar to that where it’s worked out. Well.

Michael  17:44
Yeah, it can be very sort of hostile, hostile, and adversarial. So funnily enough, in that case, when we said that the client said, the other agency, we’re going to go with Local Digital, because they, you know, they respected that we were truthful, and we’re happy to walk away. So, look, if you trust an agency enough to engage them, then give them enough time to get the work done without before you start bringing in other people to critique it.

Arthur  18:12
Yeah, would be the point. Fair enough. If it’s been three, four or five months, and you don’t see results, you can have week, you can do whatever you want. But I mean, that’s more reasonable. How can someone have a look through the work in a later day, but we just starting off having someone just critique every little thing? It’s just not a good environment to be working in?

Michael  18:29
Yep. So the other thing that is, I guess, a bugbear when clients come to an SEO agencies, if they want, you know, reporting is good. We love reporting. But constant, frequent reporting doesn’t go hand in hand with SEO, we move slower,

Arthur  18:46
especially weekly, we’ll put reporting weekly calls, yeah. Because I can understand at the start of a campaign, you probably gonna have a lot more communication with the client may be sending deliverables, you’re going to be getting access to things. So there’s a lot of you know, back and forth, but you know, month to month three, you know, you’re at that stage, we just kind of, you know, doing link building and things like that. There’s no need for a weekly call. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. There’s no reason why someone can’t pick up the phone if they have a question call whenever they need to, but to have like a reoccurring weekly meeting structured meeting, yeah, it’s it’s a waste of time that exec or whatever SEO person can be, basically, basically, you’re utilising it better when they come in.

Michael  19:27
Yeah. Do you want their time spent on meetings at on achieving anything? Or do you want their time is spent working on your campaign? Exactly, improving your flat? So I guess the only thing I would say to that point is know if if a client’s running multiple channels, and there’s like an overarching strategy then maybe weekly whips?

Arthur  19:45
Yeah, we’re working in the right situation. Yeah, just sending up a call for the sake of having a call just because you want to talk to them. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a waste of time. And like I said, that time is a lot better spent on the campaign building links, you know, optimising content, things like that. stuff. That is going to get them results, exactly not regurgitating information that they can get themselves. Yeah, especially, you know, we give clients a dashboard. So if they want to know how much traffic they got, that week, they have the logins and they can have a look themselves. It’s not, you don’t need a call for that.

Michael  20:13
Yeah. So I guess it also comes back to expectations and investment, like if a client really wants whips, but they also really want results in they need to be investing enough to be covering the time for the whips and having the time for the results. So all sorts of courses. Absolutely. But as a general rule, you don’t need that level of granular, frequent reporting,

Unknown Speaker  20:36
no SEO,

Arthur  20:36
no way.

Michael  20:38
So another big one is stopping too soon. Right, right. SEO, you could be investing in it. And if you pause, after a couple of months worth of work, you’ve effectively, you’re not going to benefit from that work as much as if you’d kept going with the investment. There’s a bit of an analogy that I like to use on this, well, I don’t like to use it. I just heard it the other day from Dom at work, and I thought it would work well here. But in the book thinking Grow Rich, there’s an analogous story about a miner like a gold digger, who bought all this equipment is digging a hole, trying to get down to this rich vein of gold. And he doesn’t quite make it there. So he decided to give up, you know, saying I’m not gonna keep investing in this and doing all this work. So he sells off all his machinery to some other dude who does the research and sees that their gold is only three feet further down. So then he jumps into that hole that’s already been dug, and digs and gets to the gold. So the the moral of the story of the point I’m trying to make here is do you don’t want to be digging this massive hole and being so close to that gold, and then do the Ico doesn’t work? So I’m going to stop and basically lose all that investment you’ve made all the time or the effort or the expense? Exactly, yeah. So that comes back to the SEO should be communicating the work that’s being done. They should be communicating the promising wins, and you know, the gradual progress that increases the improvements and rankings and visibility and things like that. Yep. And giving you the confidence that your investment is having an impact. And if you keep at it, you are going to get to that rich vein of gold. Yeah, definitely. A cool. big one. real big one, is when clients just change things on a website, or not even change things. I wish that they just changed things. But don’t

Arthur  22:26
say it again. Yeah. Oh, it’s the most frustrating thing ever.

Michael  22:29
Yeah. Because, again, SEO optimization. We’re doing work to a website. If you then come along and copy over that like, like, paste new content. Yeah, change the content, get rid of all the internal linking we’ve been doing absolutely. Update plugins and break the site, that thing

Arthur  22:46
anything, Australian one? Yeah, updating plugins? Well, now like going back to what you said, like as frequently as we do look at clients websites, you know, we’re not on there, like observing every page D page. So clients can go in there and start changing things up. And that’s happened in the past. And we’ll see that, you know, traffic and rankings to a specific page will drop, have a look. And we investigate, we find they’ve completely rewritten the content or removed something, or even removed the page in some instances without saying anything so as to get a tonne of traffic. Absolutely. Yeah. So that in it’s just super frustrating. Because all it takes is just a quick email saying, hey, look, I want to do this.

Michael  23:20
Yeah, that okay. Communication. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, that your agency is your, ideally should be your partner. They’re an extension of your team. They’re there to look after your SEO. So keep them in the loop. Yeah, because another one that happens all the time, is a client would just build a new website and launch it. And then tell you after. Yeah, tell you afterwards. Oh, by the way,

Arthur  23:43
doesn’t happen all the time. But it has happened.

Michael  23:45
Yeah, it happens more than it should. Yeah. Like, it doesn’t make sense that you would have an agency working on your SEO and that you just launched a site. But yeah, it does happen. And look, that means that your traffic rankings can tank in a lot of times they will tank if you haven’t

Arthur  23:59
done a proper migration.

Michael  24:01
Yep. So this just comes back to communicating things. Yeah, asking the question, you know, hey, I’m thinking about doing this. What do you think we can easy, and it can often save a lot of hard edge. And yeah, cold hard cash being lost by the business that sort of made the changes.

Arthur  24:17
Yeah. And you also touched on the plugins and updating things that that’s really frustrating. Because you know, if you’re going in there, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can break your site. And you will probably break your site. If you’re doing a big WordPress update, chances are, it’s going to break the site. Then what happens is, you know, the client will call up frantically saying, Oh, look, my site’s broken. I need help. I need help. I need it all. Fair enough. We’ll do what we can to help. But again, you really should be letting us know or asking someone who knows what they’re doing to be doing those sorts of updates.

Michael  24:44
Yeah. And you should have a backup of your site every time daily backups, staging server, you shouldn’t be changing things in a live environment. Never. You should change it on the staging. You can do a little things like metadata tweaks. I’ll show content in lecture content things but if you’re going to be doing big changes updates, plugins, updating themes, doing any sort of like custom development to a site, you know, like, hey, I want this awesome form embedded in this page and do it all on staging. Yeah, sure, it looks good, push it to live. And you should be investing in a hosting environment that allows you to do that that comes back to the point we made earlier that being tight when you really don’t need or shouldn’t. Yeah, for sure. The other thing that we see a bit is, and it sort of ties into, you know, the first point we made about being unrealistic with expectations of time. The other one is being unrealistic with expectations when Google makes changes. is Google make changes a lot. Yeah, broad core updates happen. The search engine result pages can be in a state of flux and chaos. And you know, a client that was previously ranking well, and getting traffic might dip in that. Yep. And they want to fix it instantly. The problem with that is that Google are deliberately vague with these broad algorithm updates about what’s changing. So turning to your SEO agency and saying, well, what’s happened? fix it? You should know. Yeah, is I guess it’s kind of productive? Because for sure, good SEO agency wouldn’t know yet. Like, they

Arthur  26:13
might be the time to figure out what has happened. Exactly. So you’re not gonna figure it out on the day of an update? Yeah, it can take weeks months sometimes to know what the update was targeting.

Michael  26:21
And a lot of the time, you might see a drop, and then a couple of weeks later, you might see that keyword pop right back up exactly like if you if you react too quickly to a big change in the Google algorithm a lot more harm than good. Exactly, exactly. So you need to be cool with the fact that SEO, it’s like growing a business, it doesn’t just grow in a linear, not a perfectly diagonal up and to the right, so the ebbs and flows. And definitely that will happen with your SEO, Google will change things often. Sometimes you do really well out of that. Other times you do poorly. If you do do poorly. It’s good to just take a breath, take a step back, let the dust settle a bit. And don’t go too wild with the changes that try and be a bit, I guess, remove emotion from it and be methodical and allow the time that it takes to to make an informed decision. Once it’s time to have a look at things. Yeah. And we’ve

Arthur  27:11
seen this happen in the past so many times.

Michael  27:13
Yeah. we’ve, we’ve had clients like the minute that happens. We’d say, Listen, you just need to wait a bit, let the dust settle. And they say, well, that’s not good enough. And they leave. Yeah. And they’re in a nation. And then a couple of months later, they’re back into position one without having to change.

Arthur  27:27
Yeah.

Michael  27:28
Anyway. I think that was pretty, you know, we we spent some time putting your head together thinking about this sort of stuff. These are the main common things that from the client side will hurt SEO campaigns. Yeah.

Arthur  27:42
stuff that we deal with on a day to day.

Michael  27:44
Yeah. And we’re not trying to trash clients or ex wives or anything like this. It’s just, we see the same things happen over and over again. And it’s not, you know, we did that last episode about bad agencies. It’s not always the agency’s fault. Sometimes it is the clients fault. So look, hopefully that helps in regards to, I guess, working with an agency. That is Episode 10 in the books pretty good. We are going to be back next week with another episode of the SEO show. I hope you enjoyed this one. It was very exciting.

Arthur  28:16
I enjoyed this one. This is my favourite one. today.

Michael  28:19
Okay, what we get to drop Rob’s name in there, not just once, but twice now. Yeah, good as well. So

Arthur  28:23
we’ll come we’ll drop his name more frequently. I

Michael  28:25
think every night. He’s our number one fan and some more shout outs. But look, we hope you enjoyed it. And we will see you next week with another episode of the SEO show. So have a good one. Bye.

Meet your hosts:

Arthur Fabik

Co-Host

Michael Costin

Co-Host

Type at least 1 character to search
Everywhere You Listen: