Thread by @GiordMarco96

Some tips for business owners or whoever is going to invest in #SEO services.

This thread will cover the most frequent cases where you should stay alert and how to spot scammers 🧵

Many service providers sell you data dumps, i.e. exports from SEO tools. This practice is unfair because they are just clicking one button and making you pay for an export.

The fun thing is that a dump is not actionable and doesn't tell you what to do.

If you are a non-technical person you will have a hard time finding what is dumped and what's not.

In general, if you get a super simple Excel "report" and some random advice that doesn't fit your business, then it's the case.

This is a very common practice, be careful.

A list of 404s or missing meta descriptions is not necessarily a problem. Just because you have a long list of issues it doesn't mean they are going to move the needle.

Focus on value and quality first and address technical issues if they are crucial for your success.

Not getting your pages crawled is a serious issue but it's not the case if you have 2 missing descriptions.

Each fix has a priority level and you should never blindly trust what a third party says. You should have that "threshold" that makes your website good enough.

E.g. a large publisher gets a list of 3000 broken links. Is this an urgent problem?

More info: 30% are no-indexed, 20% have no backlinks/no use, the leftovers are thin content. These 300 URLs are just 0.0001% of the total website.

See, it's not that urgent or important.

On the contrary, bad SEO providers ignore serious issues such as intent cannibalization, ahref implementation or canonicals.

Don't waste money on agencies or SEOs delivering data dumps as outputs.

Good SEO agencies/SEOs give you tailored advice and have their own templates.

You can clearly see the gap in quality by understanding the key difference between tailored solutions and generic ones.

Inform yourself before you do something, there are a lot of good agencies!

As said many times, SEO is just a channel that can be used for many purposes.

If your business is about selling gadgets, your strategy will be much different compared to a large publisher or B2B SaaS.

What do you want to achieve with SEO?

To achieve results you need the right budget. In competitive markets, you have to invest more for obvious reasons.

You cannot expect to outsmart your competitors w/ the time and the resources.

A good agency or SEO can help you win, given the right premises.

Reporting is one of the things where you can spot the worst offers. What are they tracking? Are they using KPIs you deem valuable?

In general, if the reporting contains a lot of "ifs" it's bad.

More examples are below.

"We had no increase in sales after 8 months but we ranked better for this high volume term"

Sure pal, and why should I care? I just want to sell my gadgets, NOT ranking for one single keyword (which is very unlikely btw).

SEO packages are evil. There are cases where you cannot just get results with a "una tantum" SEO intervention.

I think that prices should vary according to the business context and to the scope of the project.

You don't always need a full process in place, you can just outsource some parts of it.

Agencies are a great help to handle some tasks that would be too expensive or complex to be handled in-house.

Just be careful and define your business objectives.

You cannot trick Google Search Console. Filter out branded queries (i.e. your brands/products) and see what happened to the Impressions.

If they are increasing it means there is some movement, more queries are ranking. This is not true if there was a shift in search demand.

More impressions are generally very good if there is no seasonality involved.

If clicks are going up as well and you see an upward trend, it means you are in good hands. That's not all though, getting traffic is not what we really care about in most cases.

Keep reading.

In some niches, you care about ranking for super niche terms with low Search Volume but high conversions.

Getting more clicks/impressions is not always indicative then!

Keep this in mind for B2B or if you sell in a super-specific niche.

In such cases, you already know if SEO is working, you get more leads and eventually sales.

In other cases, it's not so simple! Think about a company requesting a content creation service.

I can read 1 article and buy after 6 months.

It's not so easy to attach the right value to content but checking what ranks is smart enough, in most cases.

Are these keywords related to my business? What's the intent behind them?

Informative content educates the reader and can later convert them into buyers.

However, ranking for super generic keywords like "dogs" is useless and impossible.

I cannot give you the best solution because it changes accordingly to the business context and competitive landscape.

The best takeaway here is to define a business goal and stick to it.

Beware of agencies or people promising you guaranteed rankings. No one can tell you what Google will do and give you that 100% success rate.

In less competitive markets it can be super easy to rank but it's not a guarantee!

The same is true for backlinks. Buying a load of bad links from bad websites is going to hurt you in most cases.

If someone doesn't consider your business or what you are doing and proposes you to buy backlinks, you're in bad hands.

Backlinks can be extremely powerful but don't replace value proposition and a real strategy.

Sure, you can get away with it for some time, good luck with the next Google update.

At the same time, writing content because it's cool doesn't work.

It's important to know your audience and what you should be doing. Are you sure that writing 200 articles are not going to hurt you via cannibalization?

I am a big content apologist and there is so much to say about it. Great content is not what many people think it is, just look at great examples like:

- canva.com/learn/
- realpython.com/start-here/
- monday.com/blog/

I know, SEO is a super complex and obscure topic for non-technical people.

Just look at those "SEOs" spreading misinformation and you realize why we are here.

I don't blame business owners at all, it's hard to find good deals.

SEO takes time to be effective, I don't have a magic answer.

No one can promise you rankings or give you the exact time. I would say that in less competitive scenarios some months would be enough.

This is under the assumption you have the resources to support SEO.

To sum up, look for agencies that care about your business and can deliver what you asked for.

A good agency/SEO doesn't help you, they educate too. An informed customer is a win for everyone (but scammers).

Be suspicious and think about how you can add value.

On the other hand, a business owner should never put pressure on an SEO after 1 week of work.

SEO requires time and effort, it's a process. The effort of being honest applies to both parties.

Different niches/markets require different approaches. It's not useful to compare your SaaS to a publisher just because they had the same agency working on the website.

The SEO strategy is going to be focused on other KPIs, just to say.

I am sure there will be more experienced people reading this tweet. Please, give me your perspective on this topic because it's quite complex and deserves more attention.

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