Do you see this?” The vendor asked me over the phone. We’ll call him Henry. I was a newly hired Director of Marketing for a national law firm, living in South America at the time. The law firm had asked me to consider a different vendor. Sitting in my small (though luxurious on local standards) apartment, I stared at my screen in disbelief.
“I go way above and beyond what most SEO people do,” he boasted. “Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the white space.”
I double-clicked and, with the area highlighted, found some 40 white-colored keywords in the blank white area. I didn’t know a lot about SEO at the time…but I sure knew that that was not a good practice.
One client’s website was erased. “And just like that: thousands of dollars gone. And now I have to pay someone else to rebuild it.”
Recently, I read an email sent to one of my clients from a prominent SEO company that rhymes with — nope, not going to write that here — and they were boasting about the results they were getting for my client. The thing is, the lawyer’s SEO presence was riddled with poor practices.
That same company turned off someone’s website before the law firm could switch to their new vendor.
One lawyer found out, while on the phone with a potential vendor, that three of their four Google My Business listings had disappeared (including their home office).
One client spent $20,000 on digital marketing and wasn’t getting any calls. The vendor claimed that there were dozens of calls (turns out there were technical issues on their end).
I can go on with more stories from clients… and I don’t have that big of an agency.
I think you get the picture and it’s probably no surprise to you, even if you’ve never had a terrible experience with an online vendor. Here’s the deal: there’s one thread that connects all of these scenarios: the problem was not identified by the vendor.
Things go wrong.
Websites go down.
Technical configurations fail.
Mistakes slip through the cracks.
I’m not talking about when a vendor fails to get results. That’s a separate issue entirely. I’m talking about vendors not monitoring their work closely enough.
Now, let’s be clear, I’ve made mistakes too, that I didn’t catch quickly enough. I’m not suggesting that every vendor should catch every single thing that ever goes wrong. But the real problem lies in the fact that many vendors don’t put in systems or processes to monitor your web presence and marketing.
This means that something can go wrong, and you don’t find out for days or weeks, and you can lose significant investments and opportunities.
Okay, okay! I hear you. Stop painting the world with such a dark stroke.
It’s not all that bad… (if it’s not happening to you). The good news is that there are a few things you can do to help reduce the odds of it happening to you.
How to Protect Yourself
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Quartely
Each quarter do a thorough test of all your digital marketing. This means that you need to go through your website on a computer in different browsers. Use your website on tablets and various smartphones. Call the phone numbers on your marketing to ensure they go to the correct places and are tracked properly. Fill out the forms. Do you get contacted quickly? Does it get pulled into your CMS?
Read the content on your website. Does it make sense? Is it authoritative?
When it comes to SEO, do a competitive analysis to see how you rank up against your key competitors. Are they doing anything that might affect the way you should be doing SEO? (In a perfect world, you’d do this monthly. It’s not often practical or necessary to do it that frequently.)
Monthly
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Each month, you should be digging into your analytics to make sure that what your vendors are saying match up with the stats you see on your end. If there’s a disconnect or anything seems off, investigate immediately. Sometimes it’s nothing, other times a simple change somewhere along the lines has had cascading effects.
When it comes to SEO, I recommend doing reports in a variety of software. I like to use SiteBulb, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, and WebCEO.
When I look at reports like these, like I just did for a client today, I want to spot any oddities so that our SEO vendor can quickly adjust. This client’s SEO team is great, but like every other company on the planet, they miss things. By going in and sifting through reports for 30-60 minutes each month, you can help ensure that any issues can be addressed and resolved with expediency.
Daily
This is where automation comes in handy.
Ensure that your Google Search Console account is configured to notify your email when there are notifications.
In Google Analytics, you can set up Custom Alerts. Talk to your SEO team about which alerts make sense here. It’s heavily dependent on your website.
Use a tool like GTmetrix or Pingdom to have your website continuously monitored and configure custom alerts to make you aware of things like your site speed suddenly increasing, your website going down, and other technical issues.
Take Control into Your Hands
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to take control. Even if you have a great vendor, it’s worth taking a few minutes and paying ~$100/year for a tool like Pingdom. If you spot an issue before your vendor, great! Just let them know and have them fix it. This isn’t about micromanaging vendors.
This is about protecting your investments with a little bit of time on your part.
