SEO Agencies - do they all do the same thing? i.e. not much?

It depends on how much you paid for them? Few hundred for them would not get you anything.

Might as well save up and do some guest posting. Use the money for content creation.

[self-promotional comment removed by moderator]

As I read your question there is some misconception on the backlinks topic. See if you are hiring an SEO Agency for your business then there are many things you have to take care like first analyze what is your requirement? Because the things you mentioned above are different. First, you are talking that you want traffic from that backlink, Right? So it is a different task. Getting traffic from backlinks is a different process. And the SEO agency you hired doing a different thing. They are trying to rank your website on Google for that purpose they are making backlinks. It is for building the reputation of your domain technically which is called "Domain Authority". And when your website starts ranking on Google then you'll get the traffic automatically. So it is better to justify things before taking any action.

Now let's talk about the thing that you actually want. If you want traffic to your website via links then you have to tell the requirements to the SEO agency clearly and if you want both then tell them about your requirement. I am sure there is some misunderstanding occurs between you and your SEO agency.

This is not your fault. It is the fault of these agencies. They did not serve as they committed on So next time you will be careful and not try them again. All the agencies are not same, some are very hardworking and they work according to their commitment.

They all talk about relevant because they think that is what they have to say not because they know it works.

First, define relevant.

If you are about mortgages, you might say a link from a page talking about roof repair on a site for a window replacement company, is it relevant?

The subject matter is different but a good number of people looking at roof repair are looking at remodeling projects that are big enough to require a mortgage.

Relevant is really useful to get people who are likely to buy from you to visit your pages. But if the page they are visiting from has no power to pass along, it passes no power to your pages, so not good fir SEO.

On the other hand, a link from, say Bank of America or the City of New York, would do nothing for you in Australia from the point of view of visitors, But 1 link from one of them would give you quite an SEO boost.

Seems to me - from my experience - that the best SEO is:

- creating helpful content (your effort, or outsource to skilled writers)
- befriending other bloggers (genuine blog commenting, promoting bloggers on your blog and through social; an be outsourced but the agency needs be genuine and pay strict attention to detail)

Then, backlinks build organically, through your generosity, and the rank slowly builds.

Many agencies skip the above 2 steps, so you never rank.

je be clear on what you want, i know it's not fun but you can't outsource seo without knowing some of it so you can ask something like "i want links from a PBN that talk about the same niche i'm in"

In SEO, you generally get what you pay for, assuming you know what you are paying for.

If your agency partners were basically in the lower tier of cost (less than $1000/month) they were trying to maximize profit by automating as much of the service they provided to you as possible. At that price, SEO is rarely profitable if they are spending more than 5-10 manhours per month on your project.

If you want a personalized strategy which would give you real growth and results, you do need to be willing to pay for it. Find an agency or consultant who is willing to audit your site up front (and you be willing to pay for that service-a good audit should require some effort) and give you actionable steps with approximate impact/outcomes for each phase of the strategy. These estimates should NOT be considered guarantees (run from anyone who guarantees you anything in SEO) but should give directional insight you can use to evaluate how valuable SEO will/would be to your organization.

Be willing to pay a reasonable amount (reasonable is always contingent on impact to your business-if this will make you $100,000 in sales, $10,000 in expense is a very reasonable amount as in marketing terms, a 9:1 Return on ad spend is phenomenal) for a personalized strategy to grow your business.

I understand your problem. But I would suggest that you talk through your issues with your seo agency. If they really care about customer satisfaction then they will try to analyse where they went wrong in fulfilling your needs. If you still feel dissatisfied by their services, then it is time to look into a different agency and this tome you should layout your needs for your website very clearly. Thank you.

It's best to completely ignore S.E.O..
EVEN if you crack it...Google can and will change the game. You have no long term control.

I dont know about what kind of SEO agencies you hired for your projects. But most of agencies are still doing on the same old school SEO methods. Most of SEO agencies still doing old tactics which is still working but it is not essential to getting on top search positions via such kind of stuff. All SEO agencies can't relay on the old methods they must need to be learn new tactics which those agencies weren't did for you. Basic link building is OK but there are so many other link building stuff which you have to do for your client website if you're want to get your website on the top search rankings.
Also SEO agencies, have different kind of SEO plans for monthly work. I don't know which one they offered you and you paid for it. Remember, if you pay less and expecting big results then you're wrong. This scenario is also a big point for you.

I think the mistake was made at the point of contracting the agency. If you told them that you wanted traffic on your website, then that is what they are doing. You should have specified the kind of traffic you want.

Every agency are followes almost same staratagy , there are no level of research work.
They are handling multiple project in single time,with minimum employee.

I would suggest that you earn your back links instead of hiring an agency .Buying low quality back links will get your site penalized .You need to do your own seo You can read blog post view YouTube tutorials and learn instead of wasting your hard earned money.

Buy Quality backlinks from high domain authority sites. That will improve your rankings as well as traffic to your sites.

Just curious here, but has any of the agencies you worked with done any on-page SEO work at all? Backlinks are definitely important and to be honest, I don't see site-wide relevancy as being too much of a deal really as long as the linking pages are mostly relevant. But it seems like you are also concerned with link quality, and that's definitely something to address.

Hopefully, someone has done the work to look at your keywords/competitors and put together a solid on-page strategy though. Building links without a certain level of on-page is just a waste of time really. I'd be happy to take a look if you want to send over your URL too.

Also - how long did you let each agency work? Being on the other side of this more often than I would like, I've seen a few clients give up on SEO work after 3-4 months and either drop it entirely or switch agencies. No one has a strategy that's going to work magic in a short amount of time unless you have deep pockets and $1k/month is probably a 6+ month investment to see break-even ROIs in a competitive industry. So, I would suggest having a real conversation about key performance indicators early on and focus on conversions instead of vanity metrics like ranking or traffic.

If calls to the business are your primary lead source, setup CallRail and there's no question on whether your SEO works or not at that point. Just know that it's going to take more than a few weeks with SEO and maybe talk to your agency about running Google Ads + retargeting in the meantime.

We do a lot of that and even with a modest ad budget the ROI from ads typically keeps clients happy long enough for the SEO to kick in. We also have accounts that broke even in month 4-6 and actually stuck with it for over a year and they can hardly handle the business, so don't give up on SEO entirely if you've already sunk a decent investment into your site.

Consider it a long-term play for the business and know that you're really not just doing 'SEO' if you're doing it right, but instead building a brand that will get better with time and investment.

I am an owner of a SEO Agency. Well, I am not that good in English but I have employees which studied in English. We have worked with a local UK business recently. Our works are generally global but we started to do local SEO a few months ago...

Well... The website I got was seriously a kind of spam. All articles were scraped. All content was filled with keywords in every single sentence. So it wasn't even ranked in search result. The keyword has high competition already. Even in the local... In global websites, you can find cheaper ways for link building at times. However local seo is totally different. You need to spend for it. As same as many others told in the subject, it shouldn't cost you less than 1000-1500$ monthly to you. Because a single link building costs about 80-150$. You will need links from .au domains. They will be boost for you but they will be also expensive. Besides your SEO company should be knowledgeable (or they should learn it well) about your business. They should ask you questions. Then they should create good and high quality content for your website which is related with on-page seo. They should speed up your website and make research about how to improve UX.

Not all digital marketing agencies do the same thing. It will also depend on how much you paid them. Of course, when you have a bigger budget, you are more likely to get more experienced marketers. But if you only allotted a small budget, then expect fewer services from them.

Also, backlinks are still relevant today, but you need to fill them with quality and trustworthy links to reap the rewards of SEO.

I hope this helps!

I find the best services is to do the link building yourself. If you enjoy the subject matter of your website, it should be fun naturally linking to websites within your particular niche if you are looking for backlinks to your niche. Paying for them means you are more interested in making money and putting your website into the hands of someone or organizations who do not share your same passion, instead they make links to where they have had success linking to before which may be outside of your niche. I dont think its that bad if you build links to sites that are not in your niche when done naturally. You may have a friend who owns a site in a different niche or participated in a forum that is outside your niche however you are interested in the topic like makeup or movies and they let you leave a link to your business. But blasting links to sites out of your niche and not naturally building the links puts a red flag on your website and Google and Bing know all the tricks which means your site will not rank while other people are working hard to build links naturally which Google recognizes. Your basically building a black hat site at that point which means your just putting a link anywhere and everywhere you can leave it. Which is not that bad but you should not invest in SEO services like that because the point of the black hat tactics is to get real traffic in hard to reach places and not to rank neccessarily which is what your paying the SEO services to do. Those sites that claim to be SEO may bring you "bot" traffic which is not something you want. You want real people and eyeballs looking at your site.

If you naturally link build, your going to run into so many blog, forums and websites and naturally make connections to propel your business because you share the same passion.

I am not saying SEO services are bad either.

I am positive many people and organizations have had success link building with services from the Warrior Forum, Moz, and others. I have used SEO services in the past and they never did what they were supposed to. I signed up for them only because I had NO IDEA how to do SEO and since its such a vital part of ranking your site, figured the only way to be successful was to pay for it.

Instead, I found out investing in a keyword tool was the best way to rank. So what that did was organize a bunch of keywords to write about in my niche and then use Google and Bing to find forums, blogs, article writing services, directories to link to, write articles to, etc. You also can write guest posts, and/or do a link swap etc by contacting the webmaster via email. Its more time consuming but your site continues to grow and rank naturally over time. Its not easy to find links but they are definitely out there. Working and doing the link building on your own might be a fun option for you once you get started doing it. It is for me because the keyword tool I use with moz has all the information I need and shows the competition and much more other resources I cannot begin to explain.

You can even use there free seo tool for a while and every month before you get comfortable enough to invest money into and explode your business. You can see how the tool will work for you for free and then go from there. Your just going to have to do work to naturally build the links and dont slack off. Just make sure you eat and shower because if your anything like me, you work at it tirelessly, almost becoming homeless etc.

If you do decide on a SEO service again, I wish you much success. I hope it does what it says and your website becomes the next mainstay in one of the main keywords on Google which brings in hoards of traffic. I am betting a good SEO service costs a lot of money to start and maintain. Its good to grow your business and then jump over to an SEO service who you develop a relationship with through talking after you establish the business. Or if you have the budget and know the right SEO business or businesses to connect with then that would work as well. I am just surprised these bad "SEO" businesses are allowed to rob people like this.

It all depends on your budget. If you have a small budget does not bring anything good. For good results, you need a long and high-quality promotion.

I do it myself to save money, simply do not trust the SEO Agency.

All the SEO agencies do not follow the same strategies but maximum do that. Creating a backlink from irrelevant, no-follow and low authority sites are to much easy. Most of the SEO agencies really do that. As a SEO expert and SEO service provider I can share my strategies with you. I think it can help you.

1. Always done On-page perfectly
2. Choose the right content topic which is relevant with your niche or service
3. Write a unique, shareable and depth SEO friendly content and optimize with focus and targeted keyword
4. Then competitor analysis (backlink,content,social share etc)
5. Always try to create relevant, high authority and do-follow backlink
6. Social share (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) help you to viral your content
7. Make a YouTube video

Always mind that, High relevancy backlink is more than powerful from high authority backlink