Are Free SEO Reports Worth The Money?
Are free website or SEO reports worth while accepting?
SO, you get many emails daily from various SEO agencies offering free reports on your website – we even get them and we are a digital marketing agency – as do many of my cohorts.
Why do we all get these emails? Basically due to the fact that certain agencies send out mass spam emails to any email address and as they are usually based in the Far East – do not worry about being collared by spam bots – filters that check for spam email, if they get “caught” they will just open another IP address and carry on sending out spam emails.
Cold calls offering free reports
Again, the phone never stops ringing, from agencies, usually those in the UK, that are calling you to offer a free search engine optimisation report.
Why?
There is usually a different reason to that of the spam emails above; and that the agency has probably – not always – in my experience of people calling me!! – looked at your website, noticed that it is not ranking well, due to its current optimisation levels. They have taken the time to invest in looking at the issues that stops the site from being “Google friendly”.
Is There Value In A FREE SEO Report?
YES-Unless you are an expert in SEO, how are you going to know whether your website is fully optimised or not? As a SEO or digital marketing expert, we know what Google wants a website to be like, and some of these key areas are listed here:
- The design
- Content value
- Keywords
- Mobile friendly
- User Experience
How are you going to know if the site is “Google friendly”?
What Is Google Friendly?
All search engines, not only Google but as Google has approximately 89% of the search engine market, we want websites to follow Google’s guidelines. Google wants websites to provide the information that searchers are looking for. So the search engine algorithms look for keywords – those that people ACTUALLY use searching for services or products – in certain areas within a website to match to search queries. They want their customers – those searching on Google’s search engine to have a high quality user experience (UX).
A website that is “Google friendly” will appear high in its search engine rankings when matched to the keywords used by people looking for those services or products.
SHOULD I ACCEPT ANY FREE SEO REPORT?
The answer here is NO! A lot of agencies will provide a computer generated report that means absolutely nothing to the average business person. Whilst it will generally look good, lots of figures, colours (usually Red, Amber and Green), lots of positives and lots of negatives – but unless you then want a 2 hour telephone meeting or in person visit to explain what it all means – what’s the point?
What Type Of Free SEO Report Should You Accept?
Wouldn’t it be great to get a report, in plain English, with some technical bits really explained well? A detailed report that highlights what is currently wrong with your website and what an agency will do to rectify those issues?
BUT….. what will you do with this report??
Do you give it to your trusted web designer? Who if they were good at SEO, would have surely done the work before – so saving the reporter time and money making the report? NO!
If your website is new, you have paid good money to pay a web designer to make you a website, and what is the point in having a website if it cannot be found in search engines? 99% of all websites are made to promote the company who owns it, the other 1% are either golf societies or Nuclear power companies who are so few and have little competition, do not need to get found in search engines.
So, what do you do? Why not talk to the person who has provided you with a report? They are obviously experts in their field and should have the backup to be able to implement any changes required.
AND then what should you do?
Any website and business needs an ongoing digital marketing campaign to ensure that it keeps rising in the search engine ranking results and then maintains the lofty position you desire. An ongoing digital marketing campaign will promote your website and business, to qualified visitors – those that actually want to buy your services or products now. What you may not want, is any old visitor going to your site, too many visitors may upset the “bounce rate” and then the rankings. So targeted visitors to your site, who want to buy your services or products.
SEO Reports:
Get monthly – or more often – regular reports on how your digital marketing campaign is working, what your rankings are, what your conversions are, how effective the campaign is for your goal targets and your return on investment is for your digital marketing campaign.
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