Managing Your Agency

November 27th, 2009 by admin

Is it just me, or do too many agencies claim to be able to perform organic search optimization for clients? I mean, really. An agency that charges someone for doing “SEO” as part of a site build should be able to understand how to populate meta descriptions, and what to populate them with. Right? Sitemaps should be easily handled as well. None of that grab-a-third-party-tool and send over whatever output it coughed up as a legit sitemap – especially if that sitemap happens to include advertising links embedded in it and links to competitor’s websites.

What are agencies thinking when they do things like this? I’ll tell you what they are thinking: “We don’t understand it, the client certainly doesn’t, so anything we do will be good enough to justify the fee.” Truly a case of not knowing what you don’t know.

I realize I’m casting dispersions broadly here, but, ah, I’ve seen it happen. So if you’re an agency and all upset, calm down. I’m not naming names here, but I have to ask. If you’re upset, why is that? Perhaps you need to review your own work for clients?

The real trouble is, as an in-house SEM, it’s on your neck if things go south. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to ensure your agency knows what they are doing, if you are using one. There’s a reason licenses are issued for drivers – it shows they know how to control a car. Well, in theory, at least. Come to Seattle and you’ll wonder.

Back to the point though, should we have SEO licenses issued to agencies to prove they “know how to drive”? Too many agencies made their name managing paid search programs in past years. Their transition to managing SEO consisted of nothing more than adding that to the list of services provided on their website. No talent to back it up, nothing beyond grabbing some best practices online, swapping a logo in place and starting to charge clients. While this isn’t the case with all agencies, far too many are still at this point.

I mean, can you truly trust a “full service agency” to do the organic search work carefully when they build web pages and actively choose to replicate the title tag across an entire subsection of the website? When they hand you the keys to your shiny new website and say it’s all done, did they really work in your best interest and include proper optimization techniques? Did they think to put in a robots.txt file and populate it correctly for your application? How well are the images optimized? Did they test page load times?

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