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SEO Agency I hired wants to wait for Volatility. Is that standard procedure?
Hello,
I hired an SEO agency recently to help me rank for some keywords and we are 1 month into the work. I am currently paying around $2500 a month for their work. So far, they’ve created a 2,000 word count blog post for my website and that’s about it so far. The agreement was to have on-site optimization, backlink outreach, and blogging done.
Right now, they want to wait for the google update volatility to settle before they make any changes or continue with their work.
Is this a normal procedure? My issue is I can’t afford to just pay them to sit idle while they wait for the google update volatility to settle. I need to see some sort of progress on a weekly basis that work is being done and we are moving forward. If that was the case, It would’ve been smarter financially to just hire them a month after the google December update because right now in my shoes, I feel like I am just paying for this month for 1 blog post and that’s about it.
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Update: So it sounds like I’m getting the runaround and being taken advantage of. I’m going to give them a call tomorrow and have them explain their work. If they continue to give me excuses I will shame their company here so the next business won’t be taken advantage of.
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Red Flag Discovery. I decided to look up their team members on their about profile and it seems they are all using stock images of their employees…. none of them are real. This isn’t looking good for me.
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30 Replies
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If you’re expecting demostrable SEO progress on a weekly basis then you probably should spend that $2,500 on Facebook ads or Google Search ads.
SEO is a long game
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Are they doing anything? What industry are you in? They should be able to do an audit (to understand your site) and create content without worrying about “volatility”.
I’m working with a client who wants weekly updates, but those relate to my work, not rankings. I think it’s fair to provide progress reports. -
Most likely you have hired scammers. Search engine optimization includes (just could remember right away):
* Metadata.
* Trustworthy of content.
* User experience design.
* Performance.
* Structured data.
* Off-site info and linked date.If all of this is there, then your website should rank high on the SERP and a blog article (especially one this expensive) is unlikely to have an important impact on your site’s rank.
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If they want to wait for a google update, and do not want to do any work in the meantime then they should not charge you for the days they are going to sit and wait.
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2000 words a month is too less from a blogging perspective. Also, if they wanted to wait for the volatility to settle, they could have updated your exiting blog posts, optimized your page speed, and built backlinks.
Also, what about future Google updates? They push out at least 1-2 core updates and many smaller updates every year, do they plan to keep a hold every time?
I can’t think of any of my clients who would agree to this. This is because good SEO cushions a website against Google Algorithms, sure there are fluctuations, but the rankings restore within a week.
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there’s 1000 things they could be doing that have nothing to do with updates
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No – this wouldn’t be normal. I can see holding off on some things if your site was penalized and they had made a bunch of changes right away. But you should have been updated on what they were doing and why.
I would also pay attention to your backlinks. Check and see if you start getting a ton of bad low-quality links.
Otherwise, if they don’t want to work on the site I wouldn’t pay them.
They could easily be checking for pages that rank between 5 and 10 and work on those – tech on-page and outreach if that’s a part of the plan.
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That doesn’t sound right… maybe they’re doing other things in the background, in addition to that 1 blog post? You should ask them for more details about their completed work and strategy + action plan once the “update volatility” settles.
There’s always Google volatility, updates, chatter, etc. The fundamentals never really change (quality content, technical SEO, and links).
They should be able to tell you what on-page optimizations they’re planning on, keywords they will be targeting, PR + link building strategy, areas for improvement, etc.
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Google rolls out updates all the freaking time. Not all major ones, but they do about 800-1000 updates to the algorithm yearly with major announced updates rolling about about 5-6 times a year, if not more.
If they are going to sit on their hands every time an update rolls out, they are going to have a lot of idle time.
That being said, if your site was significantly negatively impacted by an update, it’s not unusual or unreasonable to wait a few weeks to see if things rollback (they often do) rather than just starting to tear everything down and make major changes.
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Waiting for Google update volatility to settle… Complete BS.
Classic agency stuff to throw phrases at clients which they don’t understand just so they could do nothing and send you invoices to pay.
Happy to review any work they have done for you. I just hate when clients are getting abused.
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Run for the hills.
I run an [SEO agency](https://madx.digital) and would never say this to a client. If you’re producing quality content that satisfies user search intent, you shouldn’t wait for any Google updates to settle.
Even if they’re waiting for a Google update to settle (which would be a concern on several levels), they can still optimize the website, increase the loading speed, create backlink outreach, PR, guest blog, etc.
It sounds like you’ve got a case of slime there.
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They shouldn’t charge you for nothing.
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This sounds like complete bs.
Unless they are panicking because they have a lot of clients that have tanked recently and don’t have time to work with you.
I mean it’s bs for sure but that might be the real reason behind it
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Depending on your Industry, blogs usually don’t do much for SEO. I promise everyone here will rebut that, but, look at impressions in search console for blogs…they usually have very few. Blogs are a good part of a social media strategy, not an SEO stragtegy.
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Hey, depending on the size of your domain and the contract it can be fairly normal that in the first month, they’re just auditing your site, your niche and make a clear gameplan for the future. Didn’t you guys talk about the timeline at all? How many URLs does your site have? Do you have a shop as well? Random title optimizations before it’s clear, which site stays and which URL gets killed wouldn’t make sense. Why did you hire them? Did you have problems? Penalty etc?
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