There are two types of people who say things like “Oh <insert marketing/sales tactic> just doesn’t work so there’s no point investing into it”
- Fake experts trying to convince you to invest into their services instead of others
- Business leaders who rely on feelings and anecdotal evidence to make decisions
If you’re trying to grow beyond word of mouth and referrals, you need a scientific, very strategic approach. Bad experiences must be analysed and understood properly, through multiple perspectives, before conclusions are drawn.
Otherwise, you run the risk of unnecessarily eliminating one of the most lucrative growth channels from your growth strategy.
SEO, much like WordPress, has an undeserved reputation problem.
People don’t trust it because they try it a few times, often with a tiny budget, then wonder why their nephew’s cat, or some guy off Fiverr, struggled to get them any results.
But not before committing to ranting about their experiences any time SEO comes up, despite choosing not to do any due diligence or really getting to grips with the basics so they can tell the difference between a bare faced lie and genuine critical insights.
Classic dingus behaviour.
Before investing into SEO for the first time or signing up to monthly/long term commitments, please, please, please conduct proper keyword research. Ask an expert to identify the best 10 keywords they can find for your business and make sure that for each keyword you are given, it scores well:
- Monthly search volume (250-1000+)
- Click through rate (50% or higher)
- Keyword difficulty (25 or lower)
- Degree of intent to purchase (high)
What you want is a bunch of keywords that people are searching a lot, that aren’t too difficult to rank for and that people, after hitting enter on their search term, will actually click through to a resulting website for more information.
For any keywords you’re presented with that don’t meet the above criteria, remove them from the list.
If your SEO expert cannot fully and help you understand the concepts behind these data points, and it feels like they’re struggling to communicate in a way that’s easy to understand, there’s a good chance they’ll end up letting you down as they likely don’t understand SEO enough to be charging as much as they are for it.
If you can’t find at least 5 high value keywords, find someone else or send us the last SEO research report you did and we’ll help you analyse it for free.
If you already have a large website with dozens of pages and loads of content, you can aim for higher keyword difficulty ratings, no more than 50 though, unless you’re prepared to invest 5-6 figures.
If you get past this stage, ask about the KPIs they use to track progress. Keep digging into the details, it should be immediately obvious whether their KPIs are relevant or not and if they’re not analytically minded enough to speak convincingly on the subject, your SEO efforts are likely to fail.
