Thinking of Hiring an SEO agency That Growth Hacks?

Keith Gill
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read
SEO Growth Hacking
SEO Growth Hacking

In an age where the science and art (mostly art) of trying to rank a website on Google for highly competitive keywords has gotten more and more difficult, new fly-by-night SEO gimmicks have popped up under the guise of Growth Hacker SEO. You need to be real cautious when anyone says they do “new generation SEO”, “SEO 2.0” or my personal favorite misnomer “Growth Hacking SEO”

Is SEO Growth Hacking Even a Real Thing?

For me, the jury is still out on this question… With this being said, “Growth Hacking” itself was a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis. In short Growth Hacking is a DIY and creative marketing tactics that highly leverage limited resources to produce ROI focused pure business growth. It is very internet technology and coder focused to efficiently sift, sort, convert and customer retain to the nth degree. Growth Hacking is utilized successfully primarily by super fast growing tech start-ups. Think Uber, Think AirBnB, Think DropBox and Think the JXTGroup in the Digital Marketing Agency and SEO space.

To make a long story short, SEO Growth Hacks and SEO Growth Hacking is basically just taking the tried and true SEO fundamentals and best practices and being open minded enough to creatively use new and more holistic tactics to synergistically amplify SEO efforts that retains growth over the long haul… This last point is extremely important. It means you will never be able to retain a true growth curve in SEO if the SEO marketing agency you use constantly uses shady, questionable “black hat SEO” methods. These methods are NEVER able to sustain growth and ultimately just harm SEO efforts in the long run, such as Google de-indexing wholes sites from their index for web spam and TOS violations. So Stay away from these shady aforementioned techniques. This brings me to the first thing to look for before hiring a Growth Hacking SEO Marketing Agency…

Stay Away From Any SEO Agency That Uses Shady Black Hat Methods

What is “Black Hat SEO”? For better or for worse “Black Hat SEO” are any techniques that Google determines is web spam that mucks up the integrity of their search results. Sometimes Google is reasonable in this determination and then sometimes certain rules or best practices seem to come out of left field. At the end of the day, Google owns the index that commands over 80% of all the search traffic on the whole internet so they can set the definition of what Web Spam and Black Hat Techniques actually are and there is not much anyone can do about it. With this being said, the obvious horribly blatantly bad tactics to stay away from are, Hidden text, Keyword Stuffing, Content Scraping, Comment Spam, Referral spam etc.

Look For an SEO Agency That Is a Certified Google Partner

This is important because the Agency has to remain compliant with ALL Google TOS and has to maintain a certain level of customer spend management on the paid / PPC Google Adwords side. Partner status almost guarantees that you are going to have an agency do everything within their power to rank your site w.ithout risking any site penalty from Google that could harm your rankings and site traffic.

Look For an SEO Agency That Uses a Multi-Prong Approach To Their SEO

This means an SEO agency that employs multiple tactics to drive organic traffic to your site while staying Google compliant. Multiple tactics such as content writing, PR authority site article publication, YouTube Marketing to drive organic traffic, fundamental on-site optimization, site code tweaks to increase page load speed, site architecture optimization, quality back-link profile building strategies, off site content syndication strategies, social media strategies to amplify organic traffic etc.

Look For an SEO Agency That Can Show You a Portfolio of Their Documented Success

This means actual sites they can show you and show you documented and verifiable before and after Live Google Analytics walk troughs showing the trend in organic traffic over a given period. Now this one may be a little tough because some SEO customers require an NDA. But if an SEO agency has done any volume with documented success they should at least have 1 account that they can show you with the customers blessing.

Look for an SEO Agency That Has Raving Reviews for being Responsive from Verifiable Current or Previous Customers

This is similar to the last point except you are able to independently find these reviews on 3rd party sites. It’s even better if you are able to contact the one doing the review via phone and have a real conversation with the customer.

From my experience, most customers will give you real raving reviews if you at the very least listen to their goals and objectives and execute a plan that is in line with those goals and objectives while meeting and exceeding their expectations. Most times this means it is extremely important to be as responsive to the customer as possible. If you see an SEO agency that has a bad review, more than likely it has less to do with their SEO results for the customer and has more to do with a customer feeling like they are NOT responsive enough. It‘s just human nature.

In closing, be wary of the “Shiny New Object” syndrome or gimmick that some unscrupulous SEO individuals will try to lure you with. SEO takes work and when done right there is no true shortcut or gimmick that exists that will be able to sustain true growth in organic traffic.

Thanks for reading

Keith Gill

Keith Gill

Written by

#Technology #GrowthHacking #SocialSelling & #PunkMusic. #SEO #InfluencerMarketing Founder of #PunkPit https://DigitalKeith.com

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