Our clients come from a wide range of industries, and each of them has a unique set of needs and demands that we have to fulfill. One problem that we’ve come across time and time again is clients who have had a bad SEO experience with another agency.
They often feel burned and disenchanted with SEO. In some cases, they aren’t excited to carry on. It’s a difficult situation that leaves in the SEO industry in a bad light. Unfortunately, some bad apples seem to want to poison the whole bunch.
It’s important that these clients learn from their bad experience but also let go of any resentment. We aim to give you an enjoyable and profitable experience that will make up for your previous bad one.
Think about what went wrong
The first thing that a client should do after having a bad SEO experience is to try and figure out where it went wrong. That isn’t to say that the customer is to blame, but there can often be faults on both sides that combine to make the situation worse.
Was the agency transparent about their tactics? Were you clear about your expectations? Did they give you a reasonable time frame? Was the budget feasible?
Spending some time thinking about what went wrong is a major step. This will allow you to notice red flags earlier and prevent the same thing happening again.
Learn from the bad experience
Once you know where it went wrong, it’s crucial that you learn from the experience. It’s easy to point to the problems, but both parties need to learn from it so that it never happens again.
Some of the questions you might ask yourself are:
- What did we expect last time and what will we expect going forward?
- What can we improve to make the experience better?
- What should the agency have done better?
- Which questions do I wish I had asked?
Asking yourself these questions will allow you to get a better understanding of how you want any future SEO experiences to go. This information will then enable you to ask better questions of us to make sure that you feel comfortable with our agency.
Don’t be afraid to ask challenging and technical questions of your SEO agency. It’s important that both parties understand what is going to be done. This understanding helps to prevent confusion and disappointment later on. It also helps you to understand the technical parts of the work and therefore have a better gauge on progress and timelines.
Identifying the solutions to your problem
The problems that you’re facing will be individual to you. Each business has unique requirements, but those burned by other agencies can require even more care.
The damage that bad SEO has caused to your business can only be fixed with sound SEO. Our efforts will be to firstly correct any mistakes that the previous agency made and to put you as close as possible to the position you were in before the bad experience.
Then, we will work with you to make the progress that you desire. Both of us will need to work closely to identify what the former agency did and how this has affected your website. Once we know the issues, we can discuss a budget, timeframe, and expectations.
Bad SEO can cause a broad range of problems, and some are more severe than others. Hopefully, the damage that is minimal, and we will be able to rectify it quickly. However, if there is a penalty, then it may take some more time.
It might seem logical to avoid SEO after a bad experience. But it’s possible to fix these problems and go forward to grow. Even in the worst case scenarios, there are tactics that we can use to remove and disavow poor quality links.
When you’ve had a bad experience, you obviously want to have the quickest solution possible. It can be difficult to be patient when you feel cheated. However, SEO does take time and removing penalties, and poor SEO can take months.
The time it takes will greatly depend on what went wrong. There are a few things that could have happened:
- They built poor quality links
- Your website was broken
- Duplicate content was published
- On-page guidelines were broken
Any or all of these mistakes could have been committed. These might lead to a drop in rankings, a penalty from Google or you may have even been de-indexed.
Conclusion
Overcoming a bad SEO experience is both of our priorities and responsibilities. You must come to terms with the previous work that was done, and we need to do everything that we can to fix the problem.
Together, we can work to remove any penalties, fix on-page SEO mistakes and build better quality links. Our aim will be to put you back into the position you were in before the bad experience. Then, we can look to the future and discuss growth.