Is Your SEO Agency Being Completely Transparent with You?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

In my opinion, the best SEO agencies should strive to be as transparent as possible with their clients. After all, your SEO agency should be as invested in the long term success of your website as you are! A good agency-client relationship needs to be built on trust and mutual understanding and it’s incredibly hard to do that if your SEO agency is hiding behind smoke and mirrors.

Here are 4 ways in which a good SEO agency should be transparent with you:

1. Sends completed link building reports.
At the end of the day, the SEO agency you decide to hire is responsible for helping your website do better in the SERPs and drive targeted, organic traffic back to your website. One, among many, of the ways they should be doing this is through white hat link building. Your SEO agency should have no problem coming to you with a completed link building report at the end of each month and showing you exactly what kind of links they built for you and where they came from. After all, your site is the one being “graded” by the quality of the links your SEO agency builds. You need to know they are building the right kind of links from the right sources so your website will succeed and not be penalized for web spam.

2. Willing to investigate unusual visitor trends.
Personally, I think any trend needs at least three months of data behind it before you can classify it as a “trend,” but if your website loses half of its organic traffic in a month your SEO agency should be willing to find out why! Was there an algorithm update and your site got flagged? Did pages of your site get de-indexed for some reason? Did search volume for your branded keywords drop? There could be a number of factors at play and a good SEO agency should be just as concerned as you are when faced with an unusual trend. It could end being as simple as the Google Analytics tracking code got messed up when you updated your CMS but your SEO agency should work with you to uncover the real why.

3. Explains the “why” behind their onsite recommendations.
This is your site and you have every reason to know why certain recommendations are being made. A good SEO agency should have no problem explaining their process to you—why they feel A is better than B; why your website would benefit from X; why should make these changes to this page and so forth. There are no “secrets” to SEO that an SEO agency wouldn’t want the competition getting their hands on.

4. Responds to question/concerns in a timely manner.
Now keep in mind that your SEO agency probably has more than one client on their roster, so they might not always be able to drop everything the minute you have a question, but a good SEO agency should get back to you sooner rather than later. If you feel like you have to track someone at your agency down something is amiss.