Uzun yıllardır F-Lancer oldu. Birkaç yıl önce oldukça kötü bir yaralanma vardı, bu yüzden son zamanlarda iyi bilinen bir dijital pazarlama ajansında bir SEO işi aldı ve bilgi/ beceri eksikliğinden dolayı şaşırdım. Bütün ajanslar böyle mi?
- Dijital pazarlama yöneticisi sadece meta verilerin temel bir anlayışına sahiptir, işte budur.
- Tüm DM Proje Görevlerinden/ Raporlamadan Sorumlu 1x Junior Asistanı
- Web Dev, WordPress’te özensiz, yavaş şablon web siteleri oluşturur, ($ x, xxx)
- 3 yıldır kitaplarda arama konsolunda kurulmayan müşteriler
- Bir kampanya 7 yaşında ve google’da sıralamıyor bile
- Bağlantı binası yok (riskli), daha fazla ödeme yapmadıkça (ve sonra AI slop almadıkları), yeni sayfa yok (daha fazla ödeme yapmadıkça)
- Temel Anahtar Kelimeler Araştırması (trafikle biraz ilgili herhangi bir şey)
- Sadece aylık raporlar ve rastgele ‘görevler’, sonuç yok yıl
Bir müşteri çağrısı sırasında hiç bu kadar utanmadım, konuşmanın tarafımızdaki bilgi eksikliği. Kanonik etiketlerin amacını (biri 10 yıllık dijital pazarlama müdürü olan) açıklamak için ikiden fazla yönetim seviyesinde yer almak zorunda kaldım. 6 profesyonelin zemini tek bir F-kiracıyla silmesini bekliyordum, ancak doğrudan görevlerinin dışında hiçbir şey bilmeyen veya diğer görevlerle nasıl ilişkili olan veya hatta umursadığı bir grup dağınık insan.
Bu bir ajansın içinde ilk kez çalışıyorum, bu yaygın mı?
Yes. That’s how agencies or old enterprise companies are working. And that’s exactly the level of knowledge they have.
I strongly advice you not to be vocal about… Anything. And just do your small part job if you care about your position in this agency or as soon as something will go south you will be blamed and removed.
I’ve been stunned how some of the biggest companies are missing opportunities with low hanging fruit.
It happens. It’s a combination of incompetence, lack of/misappropriation of resources, mismanagement, and practitioners failing to engage in self-improvement as just a few factors.
But agencies like these are a part what I dislike about this industry. However, I’ve seen some agencies have lower fees with pay-per-lead models that encourage the agencies to show actual results.
From a UK perspective, I’ve come up in SEO exclusively through agencies. I’ve worked in several, encountered and heard about dozens of others.
The quality of work being done in “SEO” as a whole is ***massively*** variable.
I’d almost be embarrassed to tell people what kind of tasks they had me doing at my first agency role.
But I’ve also seen some incredible work being done by hard-working people around the place, as much as I’ve seen organisations selling services who are basically just muddling through.
Now I’m in a hiring position, I find that trying to find a “good” SEO is a crapshoot. **Everybody** has a different opinion on everything in SEO, and there are so many potential approaches to *doing* SEO, so many things you can know and apply… It’s a nightmare.
It’s pointless painting the industry with one brush, but we should *all* know that it’s a wild west scenario. There’s no centralised infrastructure for the industry, or objective knowledge base, or regulation. And because it’s *digital*, and couched in arcane practice — and being real, the subject actually *is* massive, and hugely nuanced — it’s a ripe environment for the less knowledgeable to get suckered by profiteers.
Yes, and this is why people who know SEO know that, in most cases, SEO agencies are a churn and burn business model. They are designed to do the least amount of work possible until the client leaves, and use a good inbound funnel to refill.
I’ve seen this from the other side.
Working alongside an “rev ops/SEO” agency doing SEO strategy for an enterprise’s product line with us handling content marketing in a semi adjacent fashion.
They were picking random keywords that literally nothing to do with the company or its market, (trying to rank an enterprise software vendor for easy keywords around language learning that sounded similar but were totally unrelated) and using the traffic increase to pages to show progress.
That plus buying super spammy backlinks and calling it “digital pr”.
This went on for a year plus, then the enterprise moved out of the sector we all working in, agency went on to better things with a massive brand on their client list and apparently sold for $x million a year later.
This is really disappointing.
But I’m concerned it’s more common because just yesterday I had a marketing agency that I’ve worked with before as a white label strategy contact be about a new client they just got and need an SEO strategy for.
Apparently, this local service business had been paying an agency $5k/mo for YEARS and had zero ROI to show for it. A quick glance at their website, and it was obvious they had done nothing. The website has 18 pages with weird site structure. ZERO H1 headings on any page. Service pages (that were hard to find) had 1 paragraph and no headings or reviews or anything. Zero localized keywords (in fact I had to search out their GBP to find where they are located) – which I found only 12 reviews. I think maybe the agency did a little bit of backlinking, but looking at their backlink profile, even that was minimal.
What country are you working in?
This sounds like a small/medium agency 10 years ago not something that is still around.
When you say well known agency, are you talking about an international agency with offices around the world, like an agency that belongs to Dentsu or like Group M? Sounds to me that you are working at some kind of local agency thats been around for years, not an established agency or international group.
My experience is that skills are low at most agencies, but not at the level you are talking about.
Its not really possible to work the way you described with larger clients anymore since you can not “sell SEO” on the phone like that anymore. Another hint you are probably at a smaller agency. If i was you I would get out.
Our agency is not like this. Most agencies we interact with are also not like this. In my experience, the average standard is much higher than what you’re experiencing.
Yup. After years of pretending they are better just because they are organized behind an official business, agencies have now separated themselves so much from actual SEO experts that they often have no idea what they are doing, but because they work with clients who already have a strong and established brand that will literally “sell itself,” so to speak, they still see good results and assume they did that. When you don’t have to do anything to see results, it’s easy to convince yourself that everything you did previous to seeing results was the direct reason for those results.
It’s more common than you’d think. They’re probably good marketers who prey on people with no knowledge. If they get 10 leads a day and convert even 1 out of 10, it’s a win for them. The clients will still be ignorant, so they can use their marketing skills to keep them as long as possible (as you already noticed). If you have any doubt, just take a look at IG or FB ads with people making impossible promises. It happens in all areas of digital services, it’s not just SEO, just in case you’re wondering.
No, I wouldn’t call that normal. But it depends very much on the size of the agency, the client structure, and the country.
When there is only one person for each task, the quality depends entirely on their knowledge and experience. Then there is often only someone with limited knowledge available as a substitute. For me, that is a warning sign.
It’s similar with customers. Many smaller customers naturally have the advantage that the agency is not dependent on individual customers. However, if these customers are too small, then it’s like your current situation. The customers are not developed and cannot assess the quality of the services provided. Then they often receive poor or no services, because ultimately it’s enough to keep the customer and earn money. Unfortunately, such agencies then contribute to the poor reputation that SEO sometimes has. Larger customers often (but not always) mean that the client has technically qualified employees, and then the agencies are usually much more qualified.
Internationally, I see clear differences between SEOs and, as a result, between agencies for small and medium-sized businesses. German agencies are much stronger in technical SEO than I have seen in the US or UK so far. When it comes to content marketing, I would rank the US and Germany as slightly stronger than the UK. In e-commerce, I see the better agencies in the US.
Agencies for enterprise clients are very strong in SEO in many countries, but they have their areas of focus. However, these agencies are not the subject of this discussion.
Have worked with agencies and this isn’t normal. Clients aren’t this forgiving if they are paying.
You can leave. Or, paint a good picture for the CXO (or, whoever runs the show) and be part of the turnaround.
Link building is more of a PR job. Or I should say I’ve never seen it offered as a service at the agencies I’ve worked at.
The biggest fault is of clients, who are staying with this fraud agency when they are not seeing results