[nandreev]

Really curious about the state of agency SEO services these days. Do you guys just do the standard on-page tweaks, or is there some backlink building too?

I once looked into the backlink profiles of a successful SEO agency's clients and I discovered a makeshift PBN going on; they had 100s of sites ready to go and would just add client links to them. In predictable patterns (# of referrer pages would jump weekly etc.) Presumably this is fine because it's working and this is how they promise position increases / page 1 for certain kw etc.

[paulcole]

We don’t do the PBN thing. Honestly that’s pointless unless the sites have enough authority to give the shared link any value and it takes years to build up a useful network.

Honestly, our work isn’t really cutting edge or innovative. Optimize content (we usually rewrite/redesign it all from scratch to hit both keywords and user-experience), claim profiles, get a few good backlinks.

I think the biggest thing is simply to track results over 6+ months and react to what you’re seeing. And looking for opportunities to continue creating good long-tail content, which is admittedly a crapshoot sometimes. But by working with a lot of similar companies, we kind of have a head start on what will probably work.