‘Do everything SEO’ is the sales team selling the dream, and not delivering. You’re promised position 1 rankings and end up getting reports showing you impressions…meaningless right?
That’s a problem with the brief. The expectation from the outset that all of these SEO *things* are going to be delivered, which looks great at the start because there’s *output*.
Three months in, nothing’s moved. No one cares about output. You want results. That means thinking differently about SEO.
Start by asking why you need SEO help. What’s actually broken? Are you facing the same issues as last year? What’s changed – new competitors, products, markets?
Those answers give you the business context. That’s the most important piece of any digital campaign.
The rest – the technical graft we should always handle (performance, optimisation, indexing), to borrow from the great man Roy Keane: that’s our job.
This is where agencies and clients go wrong.
Once you understand the business context and how technical SEO will support it, don’t do everything.
Yes, you could spin up service pages, crank out blogs, chase links, and pitch digital PR.
But you shouldn’t.
You should figure out which of those are going to make the biggest difference. What do you need to do that’ll get results long term?
I’ll give you an example:
- A client of ours, ACRE, were doing fine.
- A creative agency had bolted on SEO (red flag).
- Most traffic was branded – people who already knew them.
- We found the gap: category and product pages with real search demand. So we focused there. More non-brand traffic. More new customers (a lot of them – read the case study here).
No link spree. No blog factory. Just stepping out of the SEO bubble and doing what makes money.