A client of mine has an SEO company trying to rank him for 15 keywords and increase his organic presence in a highly competitve market. Ubersuggest and SEMRush show errors and quite a different story.

[MontyDon88]

Yeah that won’t do anything – get another SEO company

Changing meta descriptions won’t do very much

Content will but that depends on a lot of things – keywords targeted, readability, etc

Highly competitive keywords can take months to rank for (sometimes longer)

I remember 1 competitive keyword I was trying to rank for in a major UK city – it took 18 months before I reached Number 1

[khakeer]

Time to cancel the contract and attempt to recoup as much of the money he was swindled out of.

[boostedgts]

Haha, 6 google my business posts and 2 long form articles.

[tmblast1]

Sounds fishy. Do they report on traffic growth in relation to KPIS like revenue?

[JasontheWriter]

SEO copywriter here…Can you confirm that’s two longer articles monthly or is that two articles total for three months? (6k for two articles or 2k for two articles). Also, how long are these articles and how skilled are the copywriters?

[boycottInstagram]

That’s just ridiculous man. The only thing they are doing that needs done is write the posts… And that’s a 6k bill for two posts, which in itself it attriciously expensive. They are probably outsourcing these for less than 500 max

That company is why seos get a bad name.

Too answer your question, semrush is accurate enough, but check the SERPs and see where they are sitting. The errors are accurate as well, but they don’t always matter.

Again, they are getting rinsed for money for doing fuck all. I’d go as far as to ask you to name and shame, cause that is ridiculous.

[usctrojan415]

Did you account for lag?

Use ScreamingFrog.

Also, ask for client testimonials, examples.

[password_is_ent]

That’s pretty bad. Sounds like your friend is getting scammed.

[welcometosilentchill]

If all the agency is offering is what OP listed, they’re definitely overcharging but not by as much as what other people are making it seem like.

Agencies, especially smaller ones, typically have to charge more upfront for less work. Compared to larger firms, the ROI begins to even itself out as the client allocates a bigger budget. $2k a month isn’t much of a budget for a small firm and, depending on the hourly rate, is likely only 10-15 hours a month divided across an entire team. It’s important to note that for most small agencies to remain profitable they have to work less hours than they charge. This isn’t always the case, but when you start factoring in overhead costs this is a fairly typical model for your average small firm (which is why outsourcing is huge).

Right now we’re assuming that they’re outsourcing but, depending on volume of work, it’s also entirely possible that they have a content writer on staff. This would mean per month they’re delivering 2/3 of a blog (let’s call it 1400 words), 2 GMB posts, and fucking with the site’s metadata (this doesn’t really do anything on its own). For obvious reasons, this doesn’t add up to 10 hours of work – I’d bet at a relaxed pace it’s between 4 and 6 hours of content creation. Slap on an extra 1-2 hours for account management and add another hour for inefficiencies and time logging manipulation and you’re looking at between 6-10 hours of agency “work”.

So yes, he’s probably being overcharged, but not by all that much – I doubt they’re making much money off him which is why he’s getting subpar work. They can’t justify putting in more effort to turn a profit, so they’re just scaling back a canned strategy to accommodate their margins. To me, it seems like they’re just not a very flexible firm. I’m currently at a smaller agency and, while we wouldn’t be bending over backwards for a $2k monthly retainer, we’d certainly deliver a more strategic approach catered to what we can comfortably accommodate in 10 hours (but we’d charge you for 15). In all likelihood, he will probably get better work from another firm (if he’s willing to eat the setup costs that come with it).

[willkode]

1. Changing meta descriptions won’t doing anything to increase rank.
2. 2 posts won’t do anything by themselves, they need to build site authority, backlinks, etc. These blog posts would also need backlinks built.
3. Google My Business post doesn’t affect SEO.

If the current strategy is this, then the next strategy should be to fire them and hire someone who knows what they’re doing.

I’ve been providing SEO services since before it was cool, I work with a handful of high-end high-competition clients and a ton of small businesses like this.

**For 2k per month, you would get this**

* Technical SEO audit of your site and the sites your competition against
* Backlink audit of your site and your competitors
* Keyword Research
* Contest Strategy (covering the entire website not just the blog)
* Website completely void of any SEO issues.
* Constant Click Through Rate Optimization
* Conversion Rate Optimization Audit and website corrections
* 2-4 blog post per month
* Monthly backlinks (no PBN’s, all manually built from high authority, legitimate websites)
* etc, etc

[crimsong19]

They shouldn’t need to change the meta descriptions that often if the pages are evergreen.

As for site crawls, what does SEMRush show in terms of ranking keywords and errors (and how do Screaming Frog crawls look)?

Otherwise, is the site being tracked by Google Analytics and Search Console (with a proper sitemap)?

[vannguyen57]

It’s true! Somebody makes money so easily.

[Phantai]

No where near enough information to make a sensible judgement. People are very quick to jump on a bandwagon.

First, let’s get some big things out of the way:

– SEMRush is notoriously terrible at estimating traffic (especially on the lower end of the traffic spectrum)

– 3 months is barely enough time to START ranking a website in a non-competitive niche. The best SEO agency in the world would need considerably more time to get you ranking in a competitive niche if you’re starting from 0.

– Quantity of content is nowhere near as important as the keyword research and optimization of the content. Would you rather have 10 blogs published every month getting 0 traffic, or would you rather have 1 blog published every 10 months bringing you thousands of organic users every month?

– $2,000 for an SEO agency is ridiculously cheap if you’re trying to rank in a competitive niche. If your friend contracted a typical digital agency, he’s paying for 5 – 15 man hours of work per month. It’ll take a very talented SEO several hundred hours to get you ranking in a very competitive niche if you’re starting from zero.

Now look.

There are so many scenarios in which the SEO company is doing everything as right as they can be. It’s too easy to assume that they’re fucking your friend over.

I also don’t think you (OP) know enough about SEO to even be asking the questions correctly.

For example, you claim they change meta descriptions every month. I’ve never heard of any SEO company doing this as a service. Most likely, they’re doing on-site optimization on meta TAGS like title, H1, and H2 every month. In which case, that’s a perfectly fine cadence to revisit your optimizations and test alternative LSIs / Keyword densities / etc. Are they doing this well? I have no way of knowing.

Another thing that makes me believe that you’re not quite qualified to ask questions about this, is the fact that you pointed out missing and duplicate meta descriptions. Meta descriptions have absolutely zero impact on your ranking (confirmed a bajillion time). When you’re paying for 5 – 15 hours of work per month, do you really want it to be spent updating meta descriptions?

Now look, it’s totally possible that your friend is getting screwed. But I’d need to know more to say that this is the case.

Some questions:

– What is the niche?

There are many niches that have next to no solid keyword opportunities for informational content (unless you go very, very top-of-funnel).

It’s entirely possible that the SEO agency sees no strategic purpose of publishing lots of blogs, and are focusing on things like onsite optimization and link building. That’s totally valid.

– Are the keywords local?

If your friend’s niche is localized (i.e. needs traffic from a specific geographic location), then the focus on GMB posts makes total sense. The company is also most likely adding local signals to every post (like geo-tagged images and city keywords) and building up citations. If these things are all true, then the SEO agency is doing it right.

– Are the keywords commercial intent?

In general, commercial intent keywords will be much more competitive than informational intent keywords within the same semantic family. If the SEO agency is trying to rank for commercial intent keywords in a competitive niche, there’s a very good chance that they’re doing things in the background that your friend might not be aware of.

For example, to rank for a highly competitive term, they might be conducting manual backlink outreach to try and lock down backlinks for your friend’s site. If this the primary strategy, and it’s being done well, it’ll take quite a long time for your friend’s agency to prove their worth. Link placements need to be negotiated with webmasters. Topics need to be pitched. Articles need to be written. Posts need to be published. URLs need to be indexed. Content needs to start ranking. Link juice needs to leave the sandbox. Your friend might not see any value for 6 – 12 months.

Look.

I could go on, and on, and on. There’s just so many nuances to SEO, that comparing someone’s high-level strategy for a niche to a best-practices listicle you read on SEJ is pointless. We need to know **waaaaaay more** to tell you if they’re doing a bad job.

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[Viper2014]

Give me the

4 keywords
URL
Country

and I will tell you if he/she ranks in the first 100 spots. Then you can start a discussion about what is happening.