On Saturday afternoon, on what was the last session on the last day I spoke to a rather larger than expected audience at the London Affiliate Conference on ‘How to Choose an Agency”. Seeing as this was the last session on the last day I, of course, involved chocolate and zombies. Why not give attendees added value of both learning about how to choose an agency while also learning how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse I thought.
Kicking off with an informational slide on how exactly to kill a zombie (later used as the question to win the block of chocolate I had bought to give away), I launched into a series of slides on the questions to ask, what industry bodies exist, what to do if things go wrong and what to expect of your zombie agency. I outlined some of the red flags that people may encounter like guaranteed rankings, refusing to say what you get for your monthly fee or charging for Google Analytics. I also explained how to examine linkbuilding, what free tools exist for benchmarking and how a site owner can double check what their agency is doing.
While I was dismayed that companies still try and use guaranteed rankings tactics to win business, I explained why that isn’t possible in organic search with something like 400 – 650 changes to the algorithm a year and 200 elements involved in assessing the relevance of a page for a specific search term. Hopefully those who attended left armed with knowledge to challenge or hire an agency with and survive the zombie apocalypse. Much chocolate was distributed and hopefully much awareness was raised.
The main message I hope I got across was – don’t blindly trust your search agency. There are free tools available to check the work they are doing. Expect reports and simply outputting Google Analytics (a FREE analytics software package) is not enough. They need to add insight. While some things they do may be covered by IP, most cannot and will not and with link building can be easily checked. If you have thousands of new links in a month you have to check I should say that a) that’s bad and b) that’s really bad. Check the links they claim to have built monthly.
Don’t just take my work for it – check out my slide deck