From what we've observed, SEO agencies seem to focus on 3-4 main areas:
1. On-page optimization (HTML/JS improvements which our team can handle with WordPress/Yoast)
2. Keyword analysis
3. Content writing
4. Getting backlinks
The SEO agency has been boasting about the backlinks they're getting us from their "partner" websites with high domain authority scores, and we know that backlinks are important for SEO. Maybe it's just us being used to medical journals and such, but the websites providing these backlinks look quite spammy to us. Does the value/importance of these backlinks justify the cost? Will Google's search algorithm changes announced yesterday render our SEO agency's questionable backlinks useless?
We're hesitant to contribute to the further deterioration of the web by engaging in questionable SEO practices, but we also want to ensure that we can reach potential patients effectively.
Additionally, it's difficult to prove the direct causality between the SEO efforts and increased traffic with concrete data. While we've seen an increase in visitors since working with the agency, we're not sure if it's due to their SEO work or our other PR and awareness marketing efforts.
We're considering handling the technical SEO ourselves and hiring a competent freelance content writer to create blog posts. We have a unique position and knowledge in the field, such as long-term efficacy papers. It's not easy to turn those papers into easy-to-read blog posts, and our SEO agency has been doing a surprisingly good job. But if original content writing is the most important part, wouldn't it be better to hire a freelance writer than an SEO agency doing a good-but-not-great job at writing with questionable backlink services?
What would you recommend we do in this situation? Is it worth investing in an external SEO agency, or are there better alternatives? Are there solid, preferably open-source tools that will allow use to see the impact/ROI of the SEO efforts more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?
Then spend that 6000 on your PR and marketing. After all, if we are talking about medical procedures, you want a focused target audience hitting your site, not internet randos, so generic SEO is simply not the correct tool to get your your desired audience.
It's incredibly easy to do with GPT 4 and now with Claude 3. Most likely that's what your SEO agency is doing, then editing a little with a human.
You sort of already decided what you want to focus on. But maybe the remodeling needs other things first, e.g. someone to clear out the stuff to clear the pathways, add new furniture, redo some of the floors, redo the tiles in the bathroom.
Same with the site, maybe you need someone to optimize the web site performance, maybe you need to create a funnel and several landing pages, maybe more marketing in LinkedIn groups.
SEO is important, but it should be part of a holistic approach towards marketing.
And if it looks spammy to you, it most likely is. I'd stop the cooperation immediately to prevent further reputational damage. Don't just check page views, but also if people are staying longer, clocking through the site, ordering anything, etc.
Regardless of what the agency provides, you really need to make sure you can answer that question. (And good SEO people should be able to show you those results)
On-page optimizations - have you got the before/after metrics?
Keyword analysis - have you got the click rates on the new / old keyword sets?
Content landing pages - do you know the click rates and monitor the contacts/signups coming in that way?
Backlinks - what's the traffic / result?
Maybe $6k brings you a good result? Maybe not? It's not too much if they bring you extra $1M in sales. It's too much if they don't make a difference. But only you can figure it out.
> more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?
Google analytics can be used for this. But you need to look at specific funnels, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974?hl=en) submit specific click events to track, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9322688?hl=en#zi...) etc. There's no magic tool that will make it easy though - you have to tag the pages / monitor what's happening properly. You can do it on your own too, but a good tool for exploration will help.
Backlinks are irrelevant at best or destructive at worst unless you have reports you can check manually. Check each link. Every backlink not on a directly relevant site is another signal to Google that your site should be deindexed.
Is your business doing better than it was before you started? If so, what do you attribute those improvements to?
Bottom line is having something on the screen visible and interesting to people get clicks, if that content is index-able you basically are "SEO" ready. All these old tricks to "game" search engines are all cut out, special tags and what not are ignored. People would be way better or investing their time and money into content or website connections that are REAL not fake. And no agency will make them.
I even think metadata is overrated, especially if you use WordPress and a theme that has a normal structure to the content and uses the proper tags like nav, main, article, aside. Google has learned long ago what the date and the author name and stuff is. I believe search engines are quite capable of indexing things correctly without having it all schema.org'ed up. But it for sure does not hurt. If your content is more specialized and has uncommon data then you probably want to, but if you just have a regular site, I think it's overrated.
Doing it by yourself it’s going to be cheaper on the money side but will require sourcing, hiring, management, supervision, and possibly training which should be taken into account because it will require your effort that could potentially be spent somewhere else with better results.
Take a step back. Is building many backlinks from low rep sources the right strategy? It would be in the gambling space. From the little I know I would use that money for sending people conferences/events, invest in facebook health community groups, content for socials like youtube videos. Hire someone for 6,000 who can get you on media. Hire a writer, write a book and give it away.