5 Huge Warning Signs Of A Bad SEO Or Digital Marketing Agency

We’ve all been there. You’re looking for a new marketing agency, and you find what seems like the perfect fit. But after a few months, it’s clear that this agency is doing more harm than good for your business. So what do you do? Do you keep them? Or should you cut ties with them and start over again?

We’ll tell you right now: cutting ties with your current marketing agency is the best move! It may be very hard in the moment (especially if they’ve done some damage to your site) but it’s totally worth it. You’d rather stay small than work with an incompetent team of people who don’t know how to help grow your business or deal with their mistakes effectively.

So how can you tell if an agency or freelancer is bad? Here are five signs that will help:

They have a high turnover rate.

  • What is the turnover rate?

The turnover rate (or churn) of an agency is the number of employees who leave in a given month. For example, if you’re running a company and have 20 employees, but 10 people leave at the end of each month, your turnover rate is 50%. Companies with high churn are likely to be less productive than those with low churn: if it takes more time for new workers to become familiar with their job duties and get up-to-date on the latest strategies and projects, then the business will suffer from lower productivity levels overall. In fact, one study found that companies with higher rates of employee turnover tend to perform worse financially over time than those with lower ones!

They don’t care about your site’s conversion rate.

If they don’t care about your site’s conversion rate, it’s a sign that they’re not really invested in getting you the best possible results.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who actually buy something or perform the action you want them to take. If you have a goal of converting 1% of visitors into customers, then your conversion rate would be 1%. This is an important metric for SEO because it measures how well your SEO efforts are working. It also gives insight as to whether or not certain pages on your website are performing well enough for their intended purpose (e.g., lead generation).

If a potential SEO agency doesn’t seem interested in hearing about these types of metrics from you, then it might be time to look elsewhere—because their lackadaisical attitude toward this information definitely won’t help grow your business!

They make promises to get you to buy their services.

One of the most common things we see from agencies is that they will promise you the world. They’ll tell you that if you hire them, they can guarantee that your site will be on the first page of Google and get thousands of visitors every day.

They may even say “we can guarantee high rankings” or “we can guarantee a certain amount of traffic”.

It sounds great, but it just isn’t possible.

They send you a bunch of emails from fake accounts.

This is a red flag that should immediately make you wary of the company. If you see several emails coming through from accounts like “[email protected]”, “[email protected]”, and so on, it’s likely that these were created for the sole purpose of tricking people into buying things and are not actual employees or reps from the company.

This is a sign of a scam because anyone with good intentions would want to offer their services in person or at least under an account with their real name attached (like “@yourcompanyname” rather than “@gmail”).

Their ‘experts’ are not at all knowledgeable.

If your SEO or digital marketing agency claims to be an expert, but they don’t know what they’re doing, or if their experts are not truly experts in their field of expertise and therefore cannot do the job properly, you cannot trust them.

They need to have experience working in SEO and digital marketing for other businesses before they can be trusted with yours.

Your business can be damaged if you pick the wrong marketing agency

You might not think about it, but your business can be damaged if you pick the wrong marketing agency. While some agencies are great at what they do, others are not so good. If you’ve ever worked with an SEO or digital marketing agency that has been unprofessional and ineffective, then chances are your business has suffered for it (and you probably don’t even realize it).

Here’s how to avoid making this mistake:

  • Understand what a good digital marketing agency should look like and how they can help your business grow. Don’t just ask someone who knows nothing about SEO/digital marketing to recommend one—they probably won’t have any idea what they’re talking about anyway! Instead, do your research on reputable agencies in your area and ask friends or colleagues who work in related industries which ones might be right for you.
  • Look at their portfolio of past work before making a decision on whether or not to hire them as well as references from clients who have already worked with them in order to get an idea of their quality level first-hand rather than relying solely upon online reviews written by strangers online since these reviews may not always reflect reality due to false advertising practices by unscrupulous companies trying desperately hard  to get into Google’s Top 10 results page when really all they want is money from naive customers who don’t know any better than spending money blindly without doing research beforehand first (and sadly there’s plenty out there like this too…).

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an agency, make sure to avoid these five signs that you may be hiring the wrong one. If you do spot one of them during your search, look for another company to work with instead!