Your Level of Involvement With an SEO Agency

The concept of hiring an SEO agency to assist with your digital marketing comes about for really a multitude of reasons:

• You don’t know SEO but understand it could potentially help your business
• You do know SEO and what SEO fundamentally does but it would be good to get an expert on-board to fill in some of the blanks
• You are excellent at SEO but simply don’t have time and would like to give an agency guidance from your perspective when you can
• You have an in-house marketer but you are in such a competitive industry that it would be helpful to commission help elsewhere as well
• And maybe a few others

Some of our clients enjoy learning about what we’re doing and being a part of the “SEO process”.  Some clients hate marketing in general, don’t want to learn about it, and just want to see the results and progress – nothing more.  Even the clients that want to be as far removed as possible will still need to have a certain degree of involvement because an SEO agency that is being thorough cannot perform well on an island.  Today we’re going to talk about the level of involvement you should anticipate with an SEO agency working on your business and getting a feel for what might be too little, and when we’re crossing the line into too much.

The best way I could describe a good level of involvement (which Market My Market employs) is “autonomous with a level of meaningful interaction”.  So basically “we’re the experts, we know what we’re doing, and we’re not going to waste your time unless we have a question/required input of importance.”  We get business owners are busy, but we’re also never going to completely drop off the face of the planet.
During the first few weeks of working together, there will often be the most amount of interaction and then whatever is established to be appropriate times to have recap/strategy meetings. Meaningful interaction first starts with learning fundamentally what your business does and what makes you unique.  An SEO agency should know within the first several weeks the following:

• Not only what your business offers as a product or service, but what your most important products and services are to push.
• Appropriate point of contacts, business hours, best forms of communication, established meetings.
• All of your company contact details (phone, email, address) so can verify across all marketing channels.
• What your end goals and KPIs are

Even the most detached client should still verify content being produced for the website in the beginning to see if the topics, voice, and flow work with the personality being portrayed on the website.  Minimal involvement to maintain an effective relationship will look like the following:

• Approving content topics (at least first month)
• Approving content (at least first few pieces)
• Going over 30-60-90/strategy plans
• Acknowledging your starting point for traffic/keywords and confirming benchmarks for success

From there anything beyond that is dismissed may not be beneficial but shouldn’t be detrimental.  Just keep in mind that SEO relationships tend to work out better with communication.  It shouldn’t be the reason it doesn’t work though, so never heed that as an excuse.

If you want to be more proactive, you’ll probably be doing the preceding tasks mentioned along with:

• Strategy calls
• Discussions of additional vendors to assist, like directory placement
• Content brainstorming
• Many other things you have questions about

Keep in mind that SEO is a process so many things you implement may take several weeks to a month to show their results. Your level of involvement with your SEO company is important, especially at the very beginning of your relationship. However, even more important is the level of involvement of your SEO company. Is your SEO agency the one that’s lacking the involvement? Give us a call to discuss potentially switching over.