Not All SEO Reports Are Truly Honest

As a small business owner, you have no doubt become accustomed to the constant barrage of sales calls from a slew of marketing agencies promising you the world and asking for your money. As you well know many of these companies will use various tactics and technical information to try and trick you into buying their services. Sadly, this type of sales tactic isn’t going away and is used by many of our competitors. My hope in writing this article is to help you better manage the sales calls and technical sales reports coming in.

Here is the sad Truth In SEO Reporting

Let me relate a story to you. One of our customers, we’ll call him Bob called us one day and said “I got a report saying your SEO isn’t working and I want an explanation”. Bob forwarded the report over to me and I could immediately tell what happened. Some other SEO agency sent a report with a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo and numbers that scared Bob into thinking his marketing wasn’t working. Here is what some of those numbers showed.

If you’re like me, a score of 75/100 isn’t bad. But what stuck out to our customer Bob wasn’t the barely passing score of 75 but the BIG RED score of 12/47 for “Failed Checks”. 12 mistakes, 12 failures, 12 items my SEO company missed and is, therefore, hurting my website. Well, at least, that is what Bob thought.

You see, Bob didn’t understand that this was a sales tactic used by the company to trick him into buying their services. I say trick him because they used the scary 12/47 to tell him that he needed to fix these items otherwise his site could be penalized. I don’t blame Bob for his confusion. Some SEO agencies will try just about anything to trick customers into buying their services.

As we told Bob I will venture to tell you. There is one sure way to see past these SEO tactics right to the core. Here it is.

If you receive an SEO audit from an SEO agency claiming that you have mistakes on your website, ask them to give you an SEO audit of their own website.

Pretty simple right. You see SEO agencies that use this tactic claim that these failed mistakes are so big and are hurting your website that you should buy from them. But what if the SEO agency has these same mistakes?

Here is an example. I ran the same SEO audit that was run for Bob on the other SEO companies website. Below are the results I received.

Surprised? Not only is does this SEO agency have a lower overall score than Bob’s, but they have more failed checks than Bob’s website does as well.

By doing this exercise you can clearly see that the “Failed Checks” or errors aren’t that big of a deal or otherwise the SEO company would have worked on them sooner. You can also do this same test with popular or well-managed websites like Google. Below are the results of an SEO audit on the most popular and functional website in the world.

Keep Your Eyes Open

I think you get it. The point I am making is that most all these SEO Score reports are used as tactics to trick you or anyone else for that matter to believe you need that SEO company. And sadly, most of them are just that, tricks.

In 20 minutes or less find out the truth about your website

So, what are you as a business owner to do? How are you supposed to truly know what you are supposed to do to help your business grow in the digital world? This is where 33 Mile Radius can help. If you fill out the form below we will give you a call to discuss the important and only the important aspects of your digital marketing efforts.

Here are the items we will discuss. Keep in mind that these are the most important items to your digital marketing efforts. No fluff.

• SEO – Is your site properly set up, search engine friendly, and mobile friendly
• Google My Business – Is your Google My Business setup correctly
• Local Listings – Is your business listed on online directories and other online properties
• Review Generation – Do you collect customer reviews from all of your customers?
• Paid Search – How is your paid search performing