Things to avoid with marketing agencies

Beware of online marketing companies who...

• Promise particular search engine positions, often very high or not specified for which terms.

They just can't promise anything of the sort, and is a classic sales tactic of less scrupulous companies.

• Charge levels for a monthly fee for SEOIt just doesn't work this way.

Although easy for their accounting and billing it generally leads to, and is based on poor value SEO work. SEO will generally involve a initial lump of work, then some specific link finding/brokering & placement or well placed content generation over the course of time.

• Offer linking deals like '150 links per month for £x' These links are going to be rubbish, and more likely to label your site as spam to search engines as they are low on relevance and automatically generated.

The damage this can do is inherently limited but in general does little for your company, and can cause penalties by search engines.

• Offer PPC deals like 'Manage 4000 - 5000 Words for £x'

Many companies are far better off with 10 or 20 carefully chosen words based on competitor and market research.

• Have a set up charge for PPC but do no visible research

Anyone can set up a Google Adwords account. It does not cost a lot to do, and if they do no research they are basically spending your money in ineffective trial and error marketing which may never result in good value for money. Imagine if a traditional marketing agency acted this unprofessionally!

• If they do not let you have access/ownership of the AdWords account

They may not even be using the spend they say they are, you cannot take the information gathered and move it to another company. Very poor practice!