@tjrobertson52

If you're paying an SEO agency and you don't know what they're doing, they're probably not doing much. I talk with business owners every week that are paying an SEO agency, and I always ask what the agency is doing, and the most common response I get is, I'm not sure.

And this is by design. A lot of SEO agencies don't want you to know what they're doing. They want you to think that SEO is some kind of black magic, that they're doing some kind of invisible work behind the scenes that's ultimately gonna improve your rankings.

And these agencies can get away with this for a long time for a few reasons.

One is your rankings naturally fluctuate. Even if you aren't doing SEO, your search traffic is gonna go up and down month by month. It's very easy for an agency to point at the times where it went up and said, hey, that was us!

And pointed the times where it went down and said, oh, that was Google. They put out an algorithm update, we couldn't do anything about it.

And a lot of business owners suspect this is happening, but they still don't fire their agency because it's really painful to leave your agency. And a lot of these agencies will even lock their clients into three months, six months, 12 month contracts. I speak with business owners all the time that desperately want out of these contracts, and the agencies won't let them.

But here's the thing. Good SEO isn't invisible. Most of what works right now is content creation, and the rest is getting links or recommendations from pages that the algorithms trust.

Your agency should be able to show you exactly what work they're doing for you. This is why we give all of our clients access to our task management system. I never want them wondering what we're doing.

Now, of course, just because your agency is doing a lot of work doesn't mean it's actually helping you. I might need to create another video explaining how to know if SEO work is actually helping.