SEO is basically snake oil. You try some things that someone in that dark corner over there tells you to do and have no idea if the black box called Google will rank you higher or not. Results are not instantly or even actually measureable. And in the end you spend cash and have no idea if it helped or not.<p>Basically, like someone else in this thread already said, SEO is best if you are not doing it actively, but when you are creating stuff that really benefits users, readers, etc…
1) SEO works best when you create real content targeted at real users<p>2) SEO works best when its not your end goal<p>3) Google knows this and is smarter than your SEO agency. Ditch the agency and simply create legitimate content your users find valuable and google will rank it.<p>It might take more than 12 months for everything to rank and pay off. But that's life. Google Ads exists for people looking for immediate results.
After about 2 years, I somehow started getting Google traffic to one of my websites. It wasn't much, maybe 1k to 2k views a month.<p>I didn't touch the website at all in those 2 years and when I started getting traffic from Google, I decided that maybe I should setup the Google search console SEO best practices.<p>I went through their entire checklist and my traffic went to flat 0. I scored a perfect 100 across every category on their web page insights and my reward was getting completely delisted from all of their search results.
Favorite quote from the article, and a conclusion many of us have come to:<p>"What's the use of ranking high with content that doesn't engage visitors? If they feel like a bot wrote the content, it defeats the purpose.<p>If this is what it takes to rank on a search engine, then there's something wrong with the search engine itself."<p>I've run a marketing company with 7 figure monthly spend. SEO can be extremely important and impactful, particularly in emergent markets, niche products/services, or brand-heavy offers (whether defensive or offensive - think "Best Notion competitors 2023").<p>But, sadly, it's mostly a devolved game of cat-and-mouse, subject to the effervescent whims of Google, whose ultimate objective is to maximize their ability to serve ads. It's near impossible to get organic content to the first SERP for any remotely competitive keyphrase unless you or your referrers are shelling out cash to Google in some capacity.<p>I've been pitched by dozens of SEO freelancers and smaller agencies, and the majority of them do have some basis in somewhat provable metrics, but the cost is completely unreasonable relative to the long-term expected value from their results.<p>I generally don't recommend budgeting for SEO specifically unless you have around $10k+/mo in marketing spend. If you have quality content written and informed by a decent keyphrase strategy, you're usually better off with paid search ads that direct to such content; the expectation is that if your content is relevant and engaging (especially if it converts and you're passing confirmation of that conversion back to Google via GTM or GA) your quality score will increase, which inversely decreases your CPC. You'll tend to rank higher organically for the same keyphrases you're running paid search ads on if you play things well.<p>Despite making plenty of money from doing this effectively, I long for a future where discovery across the internet isn't beholden to a few corporate gatekeepers.
Surely this is some link bait as an SEO play?<p>A company that says "Tinloof is a technical SEO agency that conducts audits, and implements the necessary optimizations on websites and ecommerces to rank higher on Google and other SERPs" and puts out this content would be shooting itself in the foot reputationally otherwise?<p>Surely....!?
My company is operating for, knocking wood, 20 years. We have worked with about a handful of SEO agencies, including some prominent ones, with budgets comparable to what is mentioned in the article. None of them have delivered anything tangible. Temporary increases in inbound leads can be attributed to changes in Google algorithms - they were followed by equivalent decreases. Overall, I'd say that the most fruitful effort for all that time was adding unique content valuable to fellow humans.
A personal anecdote. I run a (locally) popular online forum and many years ago I was approached by a company that bought a single-word domain name directly related to their core business. Our agreement was that I would use their API to load job listings in a dedicated sub-forum - our site is known around here for supporting the tech community when possible, so I didn't even charge for that.<p>So far, so good. One day, someone from this person's company registered on our site and posted a couple of spam messages full of keywords and links to this company's domain. Checking the user account, it did have that company's domain email (we validate registration emails), but the IP address was from a country very far away from here. The post was removed, and the account was banned per our rules.<p>I contacted the General Manager (GM) for that company and sure enough, there was an explanation: they had engaged a local SEO agency, and this agency outsourced some of the SEO work. Unknown to the GM the sub-contractor's link-building approach was "go around spamming comments and forums".<p>I told the GM that this was an unacceptable practice and that he was wasting money with that agency. Even more so because his domain name was so clear and related to their business that I considered that a waste of money.<p>His company didn't last long. The SEO agency is still around.
It looks like you arrived at the correct conclusion eventually, that producing your own expert content would pay off over the longer term.<p>Also, that chasing traffic can have negative outcomes.
If people bounce on your top ranked sites, google will punish you. After all, googles business is to find what people are looking for.<p>10 years ago I was working at a company that only lived on "organic traffic". And that page died overnight when google did an update. Competitors had better content.<p>You may moan about bad google search results, but believe it or not, thats the war google fights every day as 99% of the web is trying to do "SEO".
Having worked in the industry (though not for a while), I think the only thing you should should be paying for is experience. Yes, there are lots of scammers, even in fancy offices with fancy testimonials. But ultimately the only way you can evaluate an unknowable system is through experience, and the only way to improve the quality of that evaluation is by running lots of experiments.<p>Only agnecies who have lots and lots of clients are getting enough of an overview to test techniques in a repeatable way, across industries, audiences, etc. This one appears to have less than 10 employees and listed SEO last in their own list of services - suggesting maybe one or two staff who do a bit of it.<p>There is no way you should be handing over tens of thousands to someone who clearly doesn't have a lot of experience in SEO. They can only give generic entry level advice and hope for the best, which is exactly what this client got.<p>Is a big agency a guarantee of success? Absolutely not. But a tiny agency is almost a guarantee of failure of ROI. That said, I have known some very smart self-employed consultants in the industry, I don't want to tar them with the same brush.
'SEO' has a bad rep but there are legitimate concerns about how a site is made and how discoverable that information is.<p>I think of it as 'helping search engines understand your content', like preferably having your content in raw HTML rather than JS driven (less a problem nowadays with Google/Bing), a good site architecture, structured markup and avoidance of keyword cannibalisation.<p>Darker side is simply 'manipulating search engines'. Building pages for the sake of ranking, acquiring low quality backlinks, low quality content. Obvious paid for links on irrelevant pages. Daft things like keyword stuffing.<p>Google hires 10's of thousands of manual raters (at least last time I read about it) - generally if a site looks low effort and/or quality it's not going to succeed.<p>There'll definitely be actors in this world who know how to game Google at will, but obv plenty people who also think they can do a good job who actually can't, regardless of the ethics of how they do it.
> If this is what it takes to rank on a search engine, then there's something wrong with the search engine itself.<p>This is precisely the problem, not likely the SEO agency itself.<p>I used to run a content marketing agency (<i>not</i> a SEO agency). Early on, I quickly learned that there were two kinds of agencies that dealt with content: SEO agencies that focused on rankings and traffic, and content agencies that focused on creating content and capturing quality leads.<p>I was deeply uncomfortable with the SEO aspect of content. Most of it was churning out trash and loading up the domain with paid-for backlinks. But it did show results - at least in traffic and rankings.<p>For most businesses, however, this traffic would never really convert into paying customers. The kind of customer who searches for "website development" wouldn't be able to afford an agency like Tinloof.<p>You'll get much better results if you just focus on content that solves highly targeted user problems.<p>Forget keywords. Focus on credibility.
My experience with SEO is that it's very easy to rank for sufficiently niche sites with little competition. Even a 1 page site with keywords in the domain and the right H1 and H2 and maybe a paragraph of text.<p>If you're in a competitive field like a web dev agency imho the only way to rank is is write relevant articles for people looking for an agency to throw thousands of euros at (how much does a site or app cost, how long does it take, what to look out for, what are maintenance costs etc)<p>If you succeed at educating visitors maybe a few will think that hey these guys seem to know what they're talking about maybe I want to become their client.<p>It's as "easy" as that. Word of mouth would honestly be a lot better though.<p>Like they said themselves, "how to create a React slideshow" is irrelevant for a business looking for an agency.
I am 100% in agreement here. A lot of the shady practices thrown around by agency operators in the name of getting you leads, and showing you busy work. Social, SEO, PR, all are the same.<p>Everyone promises a bunch of future results and charges on basis of work done not on outcome.<p>At the end of the day as an operator and a founder you first need to figure out what works for you and use an agency only for scaling what you know works. Bring the agency for operating and not for strategy at all.<p>Even for scaling you need to have the playbook dry and cut. If you get the agency to sell you snake oil by promising leads by doing work, or getting you from 0-1 with a channel it never ever works out.<p>A whole lot of agencies go about doing a bunch of copy-paste work and well designed reports all to keep you chasing mirages that never manifest.
> If this is what it takes to rank on a search engine, then there's something wrong with the search engine itself.<p>This is so true.<p>We also engaged with a PR agency, but we were lucky to cut the cord just after two months. I don't blame agencies, they play the game.<p>I blame Google for gamification.
Aside from *don't outsource core competencies* (for a myriad of reasons)<p>From <a href="https://tinloof.com/services/marketing-websites" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tinloof.com/services/marketing-websites</a><p>> Your website goes beyond being a mere informational digital touchpoint - it is a reflection of your brand's values, ambitions, and unique identity.<p>> It presents a compelling narrative that captures users' attention, fostering a connection that transforms casual visitors into dedicated customers.<p>Everyone: Walk your talk.<p>Edit:<p>Holy moly. The page linked above loads 45MB of stuff through 10s of files. I'm not sure that's <i>We also optimize website performance</i>.
It's not all bad, SEO help can be useful if your business lacks basic measurement, pages, titles, conversions etc. Or you have those things, but in a mess. "SEO" can branch into general site maintenace aspects I guess.<p>Too much SEO help can be unhelpful, as the article mentions, messing up your site with repetitive patterns cut from the same mold as millions of other sites.<p>In some ways SEO companies are like ChatGPT. Neither cares about the specific content, yet both pretend to be experts. Both apply a formula of sorts to generate output from a weird top-down angle. The resulting SEO copy has the tone of "pretending to give a shit. Shop Today!"
That's a good article, it would be a benefit to all if there was less inane shit generated just to boost up the Google page rank.<p>Some things aren't even worth searching for anymore.
> We hope that this circus will eventually come to an end, and search engines will have to either improve their algorithms or people will lean more on solutions like ChatGPT, lessening their reliance on these engines.<p>Do they really think ChatGPT is gonna do any better at generating leads? The same ChatGPT that provides fuck all links to the outside web?<p>It's like they recognise one scam and jump head first straight into the next one.
> However, when they tried writing content for us, it was dull, repetitive, error-ridden, and superficial.<p>This might work for companies that are not able, on their own, to add any text content to their website? I would guess, even badly written content containing the correct keywords, is better than a website with no text paragraphs at all.
I'm disappointed that there wasn't a graph showing leads and conversions over time. They say "we didn't receive any leads from these efforts." but does that mean zero customers clicking through to their website?
They seem to be a web design/development agency who are looking for enterprise customers.<p>Is that something you sell via SEO? What are the terms that enterprise customers would search for when looking for a new web agency?