SEO in New Zealand: How Do You Know If You’re Getting Ripped Off?

It’s an unfortunate truth. Just as finance has their scams, marketing does too. And it’s especially more difficult when the system is designed to be confusing so that you’ll give full control to the professionals who reap enormous fees by keeping you in the dark.

And since the market is unregulated, there is no system that people have to be accountable towards. Unfortunately, this gives them free reign.

I’ve been obsessed with finding a way to help everyday people take control of their marketing and fight back against a system that’s often been rigged against them.

I’ve personally been doing search engine optimisation (SEO) for about 8 years and digital marketing for even longer. As a younger person in the industry, it became second nature to me and it baffles me that in the age where data, programming, and digital marketing reign supreme, half the industry are still pecking at their keyboards making glacial progress.

During those years I’ve also worked with hundreds of businesses and the sheer amount of them who had a problem with their previous agency started to hurt. Just imagine someone who is struggling financially, looking for a way to grow, then giving the last of their dollars to an SEO agency only to have them do essentially nothing with it.

One such business owner was complaining to a friend who told me, “we can’t even tell if it’s working!"

That’s when I lost it. The fact is you can tell if it’s working.

That’s the beauty of the digital age, you can track everything! And furthermore, a good agency should be tracking that for you! It’s their job to let you know how it’s going and what return it’s producing because at the end of the day you’re paying them to produce a positive return.

So I wanted to put together a few questions that your agency should be doing if they’re doing good work.

Also, note that there are also a LOT of great agencies out there in New Zealand and hopefully these questions will help you discern between the two.

Questions To Ask Your SEO Agency

• Have you set up Google Analytics for me?
• Have you set up Google Webmaster Tools for me?
• Have you integrated them together?
• Do I have admin access to these accounts?
• Do you know what my goals are for leads and sales each month?
• Have you set up goal tracking for the website so I can see if my numbers are actually increasing?
• How are my numbers going? What's the exact increase?
• What keywords you’re focusing on?
• Can you tell me how many searches those keywords are getting a month?
• Are you tracking the search rankings for my main keywords?
• Are you doing any work for my competitors?
• If yes, how many?
• Ask them to share the exact work they’ve done. Ask them to share the backlinks they’ve created for you etc and see if they share it all. If they say they can’t share it with you, run. These backlinks are assets that you should own or at least be aware of.
• One last trick is making sure you’re looking at the search results from the ‘private’ or ‘incognito’ mode of your browser. Google picks up which sites you visit often (like your own) so if you search a term that your website will appear for, it’ll show yours up the top. A lot of people use this fact to make your website look higher than it really is (because it is only appearing higher to you).

So that’s a super quick guide on how to tell what your agency is up to and if they’re doing something transparent or something a little funky.

Note1: Some questions might not be in the scope of what you signed up for, and some they may have genuinely forgotten about. This isn't an all or nothing questionnaire, but once you ask these questions, you'll definitely start to get a feel for if they're working with you or not.

Note 2: SEO is a long term game. If you signed up to an agency 15 days ago, don't expect these questions to accurately represent an agencies progress. But on the other hand, if you signed up 3, 6, 9, 12 months ago and they're having trouble with the answers and showing you results, that's when you should start to question the quality of their work.

An agency should be working with you, so if they’re explaining things that you don’t understand and they’re not willing to explain it in English, question them. I always ensure my clients know exactly what I’m up to and I make sure I explain it always in a way that they understand.

--

So if you have any questions or need a second opinion about if your agency is doing good work or not let me know. I'll be very honest either way.

If you want to empower yourself or your employees to be an SEO whiz - I have also developed a course specifically designed for the Kiwi landscape. 

The first version of the course had over 4,000 students with a 4.7-star rating and I’ve literally just updated it in November 2016 for all the new changes. Businesses around New Zealand are loving it including one of our iconic zoos. 

In the course I go over exactly what my agency does for our clients for SEO so if you have 30 mins a day, why not save yourself $500 - $3,000 a month?

I’m passionate about teaching Kiwi companies to fish if they have the time, and if not, I’m more than happy to fish with you and provide some excellent results.

--

I really hope this helps. And if you know anyone else who is with an agency, please pass this along. It’s time to make the industry more accountable and to help make sure as marketers we start delivering on our promises.

Cheers,

Steven Male

www.StevenSomething.com