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Losing Faith in SEO Companies
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You shouldn’t SEO as it currently stands is almost dead and it’s sort of the fault of the SEO companies themselves but it’s mostly Google. Google simply decided that 95% of websites are CRAP. AI ruined it all and literally everything is melting down on all fronts. Thats something companies probably won’t tell you but it’s a fucking mess. I’ve been in SEO for 6 years and now I’m trying to move on to something not as affected by AI. But let’s face it all of tech is going to get jumped by AI at some point.
Since you do tourism you’d probably be better off advertising on Instagram or some other marketing type company that focuses on social media like Pinterest or Ticktock, depends on your target demographic obviously. You should focus on associating things that customers care about and your company. Is there some Movie or Tv Show that had a similar experience, was there some Instagram model or celebrity or something that did the same thing. Video games like Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth are set in Hawaii can you offer fans tours or something of the locations?
The good things is you probably didn’t waste money, you ranking didn’t drop and you stayed relevant. Stuff like that is sadly upkeep cost. But then google fucked you over. You and millions of others. Thats why I’m personally quitting SEO as a job. Not only are we full of outsourced workers for all over the world driving wages into the dirt we’re also basically useless because we depend on fucking google to let us do our job. They’re a monopoly that decides stuff overnight and just fucks people over. I’m done cleaning that shit.
My advice as someone who worked for SEO companies. Put your money elsewhere and wait for things to improve. Maybe google will stop fucking everyone in the ass. Maybe they won’t…
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Until Google gets their s*** together, I would focus that revenue on paid advertising.
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Ever think “Maybe there’s no traffic to be had anymore because Google sends it all to ad clicks.”?
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A few points worth noting:
1. Google went hard after the travel industry in the last year and was gobbling up traffic for themselves.
2. AI Overviews in Google have made this even worse.
3. Google has flooded the SERPs with their “stuff” to keep people in Google. This is referred to as zero click.
4. If you or your SEOs used AI to write content, Google is after you and not in a good way.I am not defending the past companies, because they may have been crap. However, you need to be aware of the above items because it has changed the landscape of SEO.
Things you can do to figure out if the SEOs sucked or if Google has shifted your niche:
1. Look at Google Search Console and compare data across timeframes to determine what changed. Was it traffic, impressions, rank, or click through rates.
2. If you see rank improving and impressions holding or growing, but click through rates and traffic declining it is a signal Google has shifted the SERPs and placed the priority on itself.
3. If you see rank and traffic both degrading then you can start to point the finger at your SEO or see if search intent shifted for those keywords.You can tell a good SEO company or consultant if they are willing to:
1. Provide you with detailed plan up front
2. Be transparent in what to expect given there current stage of Google
3. Expect you to be an active participant in the process
4. Expect real content (not AI fluff) to work with
5. Request details on what the past companies did so they know what they are up against.SEO still works, but it is way different than it was years ago.
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From personal experience tourism has become a really hard niche to rank organically, starting with the pandemic and then all the major updates happening these few years since the introduction of transformers and the inclusion of generative AI.
If you are losing faith in SEO agencies or companies, with all the experience you had from these years, maybe switching to get an in-house team that you can monitor closely, can make a huge difference creating a change of the strategy that’s not working anymore for your company.
With all the money you had invested annually I think you can put together a good team under your management, probably more work at the beginning, but as time goes by you can hire a manager, or keeping the team reporting to yourself directly.
I wish you the best of luck and 27 years means you really know how to do it, and now is the time to get reinvented and things needs to be done differently.
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Try monitoring their progress with a 3rd party auditing tool like hostmuch.com/seo or semrush.com – my guess is that you are over paying and they are under qualified for such an account.
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Part of the reason most of them do not take a holistic approach and look at it as search optimization not search engine optimization so looking at all the different platforms on mine, looking at the audience and taking that angle
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You spent 100K, forget about rankings; how much money did you make back? That’s all that matters really.
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seo is not a “thing marketers do”, it’s the (in)tangible way all systems operate.
use your business plan, design a treegraph wireframe of customer journey.
tie the nodes of the journey into user intent nuances, map it out end to end.
plan the data to gather and crunch, and make improvements monthly.
iteration and user experience assessments, are more important than rankings. -
Find a high level freelancer with verifiable proof. Their job relies on their work.
Agencies are hit or miss.
With a freelancer whose job relies on their word, you can trust them to give you no shit. They’ll tell you why it isn’t working, but you’ll have to trust them.
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You guys doing any digital PR? I just talked to an agency that specializes in small businesses in the travel sector (but in the UK) and she said it’s super helpful. FWIW I agree it’s the best bang for your buck (if done we’ll) because it can help rankings and overall branded traffic.
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No tangible results in 6 years just means all of the companies you’ve retained have likely been ass at SEO, or undersold what was needed to win your business.
100k over 6 years is less than 1.5k per month, that’s a minimum retainer for my business and most good ones I’ve consulted for. If somebody says they can rank you for mildly competitive keywords in your state or large city for less than 1k per month, run.
If you get a proposal from another agency, feel free to PM me, happy to bullshit check proposals and give you some follow up questions to check if they’re shit or not that GPT-4o wont give them a great answer to.
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SEO can be tricky because not all companies have the same approach or level of expertise, and it sounds like you’ve been getting the runaround. Honestly, a lot of times, SEO firms might not even be fully transparent about what’s really going on with your rankings.
One thing that helped me get a clearer picture of where I stood was using a keyword rank tracker. It’s not about hiring another company, but just having a tool that gives you an honest snapshot of where your keywords are ranking. I’ve been using SERPtag, and it’s been super useful in showing exactly which keywords are climbing or dropping. It’s not a silver bullet, but at least you get real-time data that you can trust. Might be worth checking out just to keep track of things yourself.
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