Work with your agency during a crisis

Quotes

• “Its important that our agencies understand what resources are existing in their potential clients. Is it a small SEO team? What resources lie within that team? And therefore where can the agency come in and not just fill the gap but add a lot more value than if the client just expanded their in-house team.” -Glenn

• “Again it comes down to the agency having a clear sense of where a brand or an organizations SEO strategy is, being able to identify where the gaps are, and being able to articulate to them what they, as an SEO agency are able to bring and exactly how they will solve the issues of the lack or non-existence of SEO team is causing the clients problems.” -Glenn

• “Its about understanding your customers business and being able to provide a resource that they cant necessarily replicate in-house and its something that has to be prioritized over some of the things that they can do in-house.” -Ben

• “It needs to go back to a clear definition at the outset of what the agencys role is for that brand in terms of their content and SEO strategy. If its not defined from the start, you run the risk of agency being construed as doing perhaps redundant functions.” -Glenn

• “You can look at the overarching goals are for the business that you are talking to. What is going to constitute success for that business in the coming months. From that, it is being able to tie what they do as an agency to those overarching business goals.” -Glenn

• “So, for example, if the goal is increasing 20% revenue within the next year, the question is how can the agency position themselves as integral to the contribution on that goal in the realm of SEO and content.” -Glenn

• “They can then turn the conversation around, in the SEO traffic sense contributes to the goal and tie that to the metric Searchmetrics has, such as Traffic Index, back to impact they can have to that bottomline ROI, and they can demonstrate they are in a unique position to mature the existing SEO and content strategy, and this is how much traffic they can deliver, it becomes clear how they can contribute to the overarching goal.” -Glenn

• “I think the best agencies and the best agency relationships are the ones where the agency isnt seen as an external entity but they are actually integrated in the relationships.” -Ben

• “Agencies are not just singularly focused on your business KPI. They have an understanding of the broad set of the industry and really the internal workings of multiple different companies and that perspective can be really valuable.” -Ben

• “Setting up at the beginning of the relationship what success looks like is important in figuring out who are the best in class SEO agencies. You can look at what the KPIsthat agencies brought to deliver. It shouldnt just be a bi-weekly or monthly report of keyword rankings.” -Glenn

• “The key word here is relationship. There has never been a healthy relationship that started with one eye on someone else. So at some point, constantly evaluating your agency against every other possible agencies and against this perfect agency doesnt allow you to really work with them and integrate them.” -Ben