Ask HN: Is it worth paying $6k/month for an SEO agency?

[qax]

I'm part of an offline healthcare provider specializing in a procedure pioneered by our founding doctors. For the past six months, we've been paying an SEO agency $6,000 per month to increase awareness of this new procedure and help reach more patients. However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment. (We've looked at other SEO agencies, and the minimum cost seems to be around $3,000 per month.)

From what we've observed, SEO agencies seem to focus on 3-4 main areas:

1. On-page optimization (HTML/JS improvements which our team can handle with WordPress/Yoast)

2. Keyword analysis

3. Content writing

4. Getting backlinks

The SEO agency has been boasting about the backlinks they're getting us from their "partner" websites with high domain authority scores, and we know that backlinks are important for SEO. Maybe it's just us being used to medical journals and such, but the websites providing these backlinks look quite spammy to us. Does the value/importance of these backlinks justify the cost? Will Google's search algorithm changes announced yesterday render our SEO agency's questionable backlinks useless?

We're hesitant to contribute to the further deterioration of the web by engaging in questionable SEO practices, but we also want to ensure that we can reach potential patients effectively.

Additionally, it's difficult to prove the direct causality between the SEO efforts and increased traffic with concrete data. While we've seen an increase in visitors since working with the agency, we're not sure if it's due to their SEO work or our other PR and awareness marketing efforts.

We're considering handling the technical SEO ourselves and hiring a competent freelance content writer to create blog posts. We have a unique position and knowledge in the field, such as long-term efficacy papers. It's not easy to turn those papers into easy-to-read blog posts, and our SEO agency has been doing a surprisingly good job. But if original content writing is the most important part, wouldn't it be better to hire a freelance writer than an SEO agency doing a good-but-not-great job at writing with questionable backlink services?

What would you recommend we do in this situation? Is it worth investing in an external SEO agency, or are there better alternatives? Are there solid, preferably open-source tools that will allow use to see the impact/ROI of the SEO efforts more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?

[codingdave]

No, it sounds like you've got an SEO firm just churning you through their machine. I'd stop using them immediately, and do the basics yourself - Write good content, with valid HTML and decent metadata.

Then spend that 6000 on your PR and marketing. After all, if we are talking about medical procedures, you want a focused target audience hitting your site, not internet randos, so generic SEO is simply not the correct tool to get your your desired audience.

[qax]

Yeah, we’re new to this, so probably weren’t smart enough to work with the agency effectively.

Even though we’re providing a specific medical procedure, it’s for a common condition. And our doctors want us to build awareness about the procedure since we ultimately want to go nationwide (even global).

[codingdave]

One thing to think about is whether or not your marketing should even be digital. There is a lot of noise online, and a lot of traffic that would never be a qualified lead anyway.

I've seen just as much success in my career with radio as I have with anything online - but it all depends on who gets this common condition - radio works better for older audiences, but if your condition impacts youth as much as older folks, maybe that is the wrong answer.

The bigger point is that your procedure is not an online thing (presumably), so even if the web site is one way you want to share information, that doesn't turn your business into a digital business. Put a reasonable amount of effort and resources into the web site to share info, but don't go overboard.

[qax]

Guess it’s just easier to do digital marketing, but we should definitely consider it.

[tonyoconnell]

> It's not easy to turn those papers into easy-to-read blog posts, and our SEO agency has been doing a surprisingly good job.

It's incredibly easy to do with GPT 4 and now with Claude 3. Most likely that's what your SEO agency is doing, then editing a little with a human.

[qax]

That's very true.

[t1c]

In my (not quite professional) opinion, $6K for an SEO agency is not worth it, and you'd be better off with a freelance writer and potentially a freelance web designer to enhance your landing page and blog layout IF you feel it's necessary.

[qax]

Thanks! We also felt that way but had limited data points. Also wasn't sure whether high-quality posts written by a freelance writer who may not have any SEO knowledge would do well in bringing in traffic.

We have an in-house designer and engineering team.

[kugelblitz]

I suppose hiring an SEO agency to do marketing is like hiring a painter to remodel a house to sell it.

You sort of already decided what you want to focus on. But maybe the remodeling needs other things first, e.g. someone to clear out the stuff to clear the pathways, add new furniture, redo some of the floors, redo the tiles in the bathroom.

Same with the site, maybe you need someone to optimize the web site performance, maybe you need to create a funnel and several landing pages, maybe more marketing in LinkedIn groups.

SEO is important, but it should be part of a holistic approach towards marketing.

And if it looks spammy to you, it most likely is. I'd stop the cooperation immediately to prevent further reputational damage. Don't just check page views, but also if people are staying longer, clocking through the site, ordering anything, etc.

[qax]

Agreed. We have a marketing strategy and SEO is just a part of it. I asked only about SEO since I found SEO to be the most opaque and hardest to calculate ROI on.

[viraptor]

> However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment.

Regardless of what the agency provides, you really need to make sure you can answer that question. (And good SEO people should be able to show you those results)

On-page optimizations - have you got the before/after metrics?

Keyword analysis - have you got the click rates on the new / old keyword sets?

Content landing pages - do you know the click rates and monitor the contacts/signups coming in that way?

Backlinks - what's the traffic / result?

Maybe $6k brings you a good result? Maybe not? It's not too much if they bring you extra $1M in sales. It's too much if they don't make a difference. But only you can figure it out.

> more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?

Google analytics can be used for this. But you need to look at specific funnels, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974?hl=en) submit specific click events to track, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9322688?hl=en#zi...) etc. There's no magic tool that will make it easy though - you have to tag the pages / monitor what's happening properly. You can do it on your own too, but a good tool for exploration will help.

[qax]

Thanks so much. These are fantastic questions. It’s not easy for us to answer these questions since our Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager aren’t set up to track metrics at a granular level. The agency has a dashboard for us but it doesn’t really answer any of the questions.

Ballpark, our digital marketing cost is over 50% of the revenue and it’s not sustainable. But we’re in the early days so was wondering if we were too impatient.

Like you mentioned, setting up Google Analytics properly and monitoring results would be a good start. Appreciate your pointers. I’m still curious though. You mentioned good SEO people should be able to show us the results. Do SEO agencies usually set up GA for their clients at this detailed level? Or does that fall on us, the client?

[viraptor]

> Do SEO agencies usually set up GA for their clients at this detailed level?

I don't know how common that is for agencies, but it's a normal thing to expect from a good internal SEO team. Implementing good tracking ends up being half their half dev responsibility.

But at the very least I would expect them to be able to handhold you through this process for that price.

[qax]

Makes sense. Thanks again!

[fragmede]

How much of that $6k is going to them, and how much is going to Google? I'm paying $1k/month for AdWords for a small project, and another bit of money to a person to manage it. What balloons the cost is spending money on Google ads, not my person's time.

[qax]

100%. This agency manages SEO. Google Ads and paid social are separate from what this agency is doing for us.

[fragmede]

oh yeah then ouch. an full marketing/ad agency could do a lot with $6k, not just seo.

[tomcam]

Obviously, stop for a month or 6 and measure the results. I can already tell you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Backlinks are irrelevant at best or destructive at worst unless you have reports you can check manually. Check each link. Every backlink not on a directly relevant site is another signal to Google that your site should be deindexed.

[qax]

Can you share a bit more about backlinks not on a directly relevant site? Where do you check them? GA?

[tomcam]

For whatever else their shortcomings, Google is relentlessly focused on a good customer experience in search. If you are on a guitar site, do you really want to see an ad for knitting supplies? If your business is making sure senior citizens get the right medical workups, do you really want to see links from plumbing supply places?

You need to check those links one by one yourself. There is no other way to do this effectively. Suppose you are getting links from a porn site, for example. Google will not like you. Not one little bit.

[paulcole]

What actual, measurable results have you seen?

Is your business doing better than it was before you started? If so, what do you attribute those improvements to?

[qax]

Like 10-20% increase in organic search traffic. Yes, technically it’s an improvement but not enough to justify the investment. We also have separate PR efforts (traditional media), so it’s hard to tell.

[paulcole]

How closely have you looked at the data besides the increase?

Are these visitors coming from countries where you actively want customers? What pages are these entrances landing on? What are people searching to end up on these pages? What are these people actually doing on your site? Are they converting?

[qax]

We look at the data in GA, but it doesn’t paint a good picture because we only care about one country (US), have only a couple pages that matter, and conversions are mostly from paid sources not organic search. One of our biggest complaints is that the search terms are mostly branded ones, even though we’ve been asking the agency to focus on unbranded terms. It’s possible that we’re being impatient to see results with only 6 months under our belt.

[paulcole]

I mean it seems like you have your answer.

SEO tricks and optimizations to rank for unbranded terms are very very very unlikely to work. Really the only thing that does work is creating useful content and in some cases creating a lot of it.

And remember SEO can't create demand where there is none. So if there's no KW volume for the terms you want you shouldn't be surprised if you're not getting a lot of results.

If there's demand and the bulk of the effort hasn't gone into creating good and useful content then you probably won't see any results no matter how long you wait.

Or why not put $6k/month into Google Ads for the unbranded terms and just buy the traffic you want?

[redder23]

Absolutely fucking not. 90% of that they call SEO is total bullshit. And people involved with this shit are so invested into it that they themselves believe what they are selling.

Bottom line is having something on the screen visible and interesting to people get clicks, if that content is index-able you basically are "SEO" ready. All these old tricks to "game" search engines are all cut out, special tags and what not are ignored. People would be way better or investing their time and money into content or website connections that are REAL not fake. And no agency will make them.

I even think metadata is overrated, especially if you use WordPress and a theme that has a normal structure to the content and uses the proper tags like nav, main, article, aside. Google has learned long ago what the date and the author name and stuff is. I believe search engines are quite capable of indexing things correctly without having it all schema.org'ed up. But it for sure does not hurt. If your content is more specialized and has uncommon data then you probably want to, but if you just have a regular site, I think it's overrated.

[qax]

Yeah, I’m not too worried about the tag/metadata part. WordPress/Yoast is great. Wasn’t sure about the backlink building efforts they’re doing for us.

[tucaz]

In addition to what others have said here it is important to consider that when you use the agency, even though it’s expensive, they are doing the work for you in a black-box way. You pay them and get the work done without having to know the details of their operation.

Doing it by yourself it’s going to be cheaper on the money side but will require sourcing, hiring, management, supervision, and possibly training which should be taken into account because it will require your effort that could potentially be spent somewhere else with better results.

[qax]

Yes, totally. I'm fine with the sausage making part being a black box. But shouldn't they share more data/results with us? This is the first SEO agency I'm working with, and I'm not sure what the norm is.

[tucaz]

They definitely should if that’s what you need to feel comfortable with your choice of working with them. If they can’t support you in a way you trust you should look for alternatives (like you are).

[qax]

Yeah. Hopefully we’ll find another agency who can give us more visibility.

[aga98mtl]

Getting quality links is usually a long and expensive process. Paying $6k could make sense if they are delivering good results.

[qax]

That’s what I heard, too, but I couldn’t tell whether they’re delivering good results on the backlink side. The only metric I see is the domain authority score, but I also heard it’s quite easy to game that. How do you usually tell the backlink building is on track?

[KingOfCoders]

No.

[ipaddr]

$6,000 could be reasonable but you don't understand what your goal is, if the method you choose was right and how much value the SEO company is delivering.

Take a step back. Is building many backlinks from low rep sources the right strategy? It would be in the gambling space. From the little I know I would use that money for sending people conferences/events, invest in facebook health community groups, content for socials like youtube videos. Hire someone for 6,000 who can get you on media. Hire a writer, write a book and give it away.

[qax]

Yeah, the backlink part is the most questionable one. It doesn’t seem right, but I keep hearing that it’s important and our team’s new to SEO, so we don’t know whether we’re doing the right thing. Hence this Ask HN post.