How to Spot a Bad SEO Agency Before It Hurts Your Business?

There are many SEO companies in the market. However, the SEO industry also has its fair share of unreliable or low-quality providers. So, it is important to tell if your SEO service is helping or hurting your business.

If you’re not familiar with SEO, it can be hard to tell whether an agency is trustworthy. Here are some warning signs that may indicate you’re working with the wrong agency.

• Nothing to Show

Your SEO agency must have something to show you. It is not about a rise in rankings or the results. Rather, the SEO services must be able to show you the SEO practices they are using. Even after three to four months into the contract, it might still be too soon to see significant SEO results. Hence, you should not sweat when you fail to see the top results you were expecting. But the SEO service you hire must do something with the money that you give them. As a client, you can for deliverables.

• Long-Term or Permanent Promises

Promises that you can achieve first ranking for specific keywords for a long time or permanently is a giveaway that you have hired a bad company. The rankings keep changing due to the different changes websites make each second. When your competitors or other sites from the industry make alterations to their pages, search engines are going to update the SERPs, too.

A change made by a competitor can make you rank better. This makes the entire page reshuffle. Moreover, when websites adjust their pages to target specific keywords, it can sometimes lead to a temporary drop in rankings. So, you are changing the results unintentionally for other keywords while getting a foothold for the one they are looking for.

• No Suggestions for Improvements

If professional SEO services aren’t asking or telling you to do some things, it is a surefire sign that they are either doing nothing or something suspicious. Unreliable SEO services often create low-quality backlinks to your website. They wait for their low-level efforts to yield significant results. These services are not keen on interfacing with their client. Rather, they give you something that makes you feel you are benefiting.

The best SEO services will consider their relationship with their client as a partnership. To make your business successful, work with them.

• Poor Communication Efforts

For every healthy client and partner relationship, communication is key. Nothing is worse than working with an SEO agency where you are kept wondering what is going on. You must never feel like you are being ignored. Poor communication between you and your agency can lead to issues such as a lack of confidence and trust can lead to a conflict. A trustworthy SEO service will proactively inform its clients about the changes caused by algorithm updates, significant losses of inbound links, sharp spikes or drops in organic traffic, and a lot more. Your SEO service should not tell you about that vast drop in traffic a month after it has happened.