Should I Fire My Digital Marketing Agency?

New year new me, right? If you’ve joined the gym, quit drinking or stopped a bad habit, you’re already on the road to improving yourself. It shouldn’t stop there, what about your marketing strategy? Many businesses and marketing decision makers become complacent with marketing strategies that aren’t delivering the best results possible. Whether you have been with you current marketing agency for eight months of eight years, you should always be analysing the results and success of the campaign. You shouldn’t be afraid of change, change is good. There are so many benefits of switching to a new digital marketing agency, refreshing your strategy and taking on some new ideas. If its time to break up with your current agency, there are a few things you should know before getting into the ins and outs of switching digital marketing agencies. So many businesses have placed their trust in an SEO agency only to have their trust broken and results damaged. We’ve seen it all at Digital Ethos, trust us. From struggling start-ups who realised they’ve been scammed by huge agencies, to hidden and shady results delivered by foreign companies.

5 Reasons To Leave Your Current Marketing Agency

#1 My Digital Agency Are Lying To Me

If your digital marketing agency promise the world and deliver nothing, you should be concerned. The SEO industry has historically built a bad reputation for itself. In the eyes of many, SEO has long been seen as a way of manipulating your rankings in search engines through trickery. Black hat practices were common, and many shady agencies relied on gimmicks to attract and retain clients. Thankfully, the world of SEO has evolved. Agencies like Digital Ethos are more sophisticated, honest and driven by quality and results. Most SEO agencies in 2019 rely on white-hat techniques and organic strategies to help their clients. Still, some agencies deceive or lie to their clients—sometimes out of competitive desperation, sometimes because they’re still stuck in a black-hat mindset, and sometimes because they simply don’t know any better and they’re scamming *****.

#2 My Agency Don’t Deliver Evidence of Work

Ask yourself, do you receive regular updates from your marketing agency? Does your agency explain statistics and the impact on the campaign? Did your agency consider your business goals and set measurable KPI’s? If you’re new into a contract, then a couple of months might be a bit too soon to see any significant results but you’re well within your rights to ask for deliverables. That being said, your agency should be transparent from the start and should have delivered the following:

• An SEO audit of your site.
• An analysis of your site’s backlink profile.
• Optimised on-page content.

#3 They Can’t Share or Explain Their Techniques

If you’re curious about your SEO tactics, want to learn about the process or simply want to have more control over their work, you should be entitled to this information.

You should be able to simply pick up the phone and arrange a meeting to talk to you campaign manager about what’s going on, you are paying for it at the end of the day.

If you find yourself asking your agency a question about their work and get any of these responses, or anything similar, you should run!

• “As an SEO firm, our efforts on your behalf need to remain confidential. We don’t want to risk our competitors finding out our strategy.”
• “Oh, we’ve done loads, it would take far too long to explain.”
• “I’m not sure what we’ve done exactly, I’ll get back to you soon and let you know.”
• “We’ve done a variety of things but in short, but you wouldn’t understand.”

If your agency is honestly doing white hat SEO, they should have no problem explaining what they are doing. They should really do this without you having to ask them.

#4 They Arent Proactive To Algorithm Changes

The best SEO companies are pretty clued up when it comes to Google’s algorithm changes. Your marketing agency should plan proactively to prevent any negative effects on your site.

The reason why so many SEO companies of five years ago have disappeared is because they failed to adapt to the changing algorithm.

How often does the algorithm change? Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts answered that question: “We tend to make changes to our core search algorithms at least once a day.”

Most changes are tiny, but some changes are huge. Whatever the case, change is always happening. The algorithm is always evolving and so should your digital marketing agency.

#5 My SEO Agency Don’t Recommend Anything

The best SEO agencies don’t just deliver a campaign, they deliver it with a hands-on approach, explaining the process to you and consulting on any potential strategies.

SEO consultancy services helps to tackle hurdles before they become problems.  Quality SEO agencies know when to speak up and comment on an issue, even if its not directly related to their area of work. They may not be the ones who are responsible for performing conversion rate optimisation services, but they should have some advice for where you should go and what you should do.

Ready To Break Up?

These sounds like high expectations and they are. About 80% of the SEO agencies out there fall under this bracket of delivering either black-hat or low-quality SEO campaigns. Digital Ethos offer the highest quality, honest, white-label SEO services. We are recognised as a top Paid Media & Pay Per Click Company on DesignRush, winning 3 industry awards in 2018.

If you think some of these things are happening to you, you should do the correct research and consider moving to a new marketing agency.

When you make the shift to a new agency, keep in mind that they will be new to your organisation. They will need some time to become familiar with your products or services. In order for a new agency to be successful, they need the opportunity to familiarise themselves with historical performance data and metrics and develop a strategy to propel you forward. As much as we all wish it could be, this doesn’t happen overnight. It is important to share as much information and data as possible.

And remember, you are entitled to all the agencies information, data and results. Don’t be afraid of questioning them or leaving them! What are you waiting for? Get in touch today for your FREE website audit and start your journey with Digital Ethos today.