“We’ll take your money, do no work and deal with the consequences if or when you notice!”
Yes, sadly this seems to be the attitude of a lot large companies in our industry. Whether it be SEO or PPC management services, I’m agitated (But no longer shocked) every time I hear about the lacklustre effort and shoddy attitude towards providing the service they are being paid to do.
I’ve written a number of blogs on this subject because it’s something that annoys the heck out of me. I understand first hand that client expectation is often unrealistic (We all want clients to make money and be happy straight away!) but PPC management (and SEO services to an even greater extent) are not an instant win. In fact it can take months to get an Adwords account in shape and years potentially for SEO to see a positive ROI.
If They Fail You: You Fail.
The problems as I see them are ones of trust, expectation and ability. When you hire someone to do work on your behalf, there needs to be trust in the beginning and that trust should grow. Communication lines should be open and you need faith that the person you work with has given realistic expectations and information that they are delivering upon. If you dealt with a salesperson in the early stages then you may not even have an account manager to communicate with.
Then it comes down to their ability to manage your account or accounts.
Now the first pitfall is that many people hire an agency based solely on price. “This is the cheapest! I’ll take it!” – Which nearly ends in tears. There’s a reason Bentley cars cost hundreds of thousands and you could buy dozens of family hatchbacks for the same price: Quality.
Quality of service and ability may not be clear for the first few weeks… Or months. It becomes apparent when you start seeing traffic that was not there before coming to your site and resulting in enquiries or sales. Simply seeing lots of traffic is potentially a very bad thing when it relates to Pay Per Click because you’re paying for those visitors and they need to be as relevant as possible ideally turning into a conversion.
One classic line is “guaranteed traffic” – Any Adwords campaign guarantees traffic but a good Adwords campaign should be bringing traffic with intent to buy or engage in using your services though getting this right won’t be an overnight success.
Smoke and Mirrors.
Once again within the last couple of weeks we received an enquiry from a chap who is using *Name Removed For Potential Legal Reasons!* to manage his Adwords account and SEO services and they’ve been doing so for well over a year. Once again we’ve heard the same story: He has no access to HIS Adwords account, he has no conversion tracking, he is paying a set fee and seeing nothing back, his reports are very vague and dressed up to look positive and his organic listings have hit an all time low.
After 12 months of not questioning the work of *This Huge Company* he decided to take a look for himself at what was actually being done which was not easy because they’ve locked him out of most tools he’d need to do so!
A few panic meetings later and a few more promises have been made about running his online accounts for free over the next few months but the truth is it’s too little too late and the same story we’ve seen play out time and time again.
Salesman > Promises > Sign Up > Neglect > Disappointment > Frustration > Wasted Budget > More Promises > Back Peddling > Eventual Realisation That The Company Are Useless.
Free services for a month or 2 may seem appealing but I suspect it’s delay tactics and will result in no further improvements.
TL;DR
Bigger is not always better. When picking a company to manage a portion of your business, do some research and trust your instincts about the person or persons you’ll be working with. Potentially they will be costing you money and moving you no further forward than you were in the beginning or in some cases having a negative effect.
