We’ve all heard it a million times, “we guarantee you the best results.”  Then that guarantee simply turns into a broken promise.  As a business owner, there’s nothing more frustrating than investing in a marketing program or strategy and then not getting what you expected in return.  It doesn’t matter the business, broken promises and false guarantees are everywhere.

So, how do you protect your investment? Hold your B2B SEO agency accountable!

Are You Speaking The Right Language?

A large piece of any marketing is finding the right voice.  This holds true when it comes to B2B SEO as well.  What criteria did your SEO agency use to select targeted keyword phrases? This is a very important step because those keywords will lay the foundation for your B2B SEO program. Are they using terms that will resonate with your target audience?

The keywords have to line up with the intent of the searcher.  When they search using those keywords – are they looking specifically for your services?  Do the keywords have decent search volumes (the number of searches in a month for that word or phrase)? Using a keyword research tool, your B2B SEO agency should determine appropriate keywords based on search volume, level of competition and applicability to your service offerings.

Rankings Mean Nothing Without Traffic

Getting back to our broken promises, when it comes to tracking results you should be considering more than just rankings. There are B2B SEO “experts” that will “guarantee” you higher rankings among search engines. First of all, there really isn’t a way to guarantee results in SEO.  Second, if you are only receiving rankings data from your agency – beware!  Rankings are very hard to track across the whole of your target audience due to localized and personalized search.  What you see on your computer at the office could be completely different from the search results displayed for your audience in another state or county or even your home computer.

If your B2B SEO agency has taken the steps mentioned above in selecting keywords and phrases for your campaign and have properly implemented a SEO strategy, you should see an increase in traffic from search engines in your web analytics data.  You should see website traffic coming directly from your target phrases and variations of those phrases.

What about ROI?

In B2B SEO, it’s tough to track organic traffic all the way to the end conversion (obtaining the client). This is generally due to the long and complex sales cycle of most B2B companies. Nearly all end conversions take place off-line making them hard to track in your analytics.

Your B2B SEO agency should be using web analytics to help you measure your conversion rates.  Analytics can measure your “soft conversions”.  Filling out a contact form, downloading a whitepaper, reading a case study, signing up for a newsletter are all considered “soft conversions”.  While a prospect has not converted into a client, they have taken steps to engage your company at a higher level.  This will help you track what keywords are providing you the best quality traffic.  Because in the end, it doesn’t matter if your website ranks well, if it’s not converting traffic what’s the point?

Laydown the B2B SEO Hammer

The bottom line is everyone wants to get good results and make money from their investments.  While you may not know how every detail of SEO works, you can hold your B2B SEO agency accountable!  If your agency did not reveal the data and reasoning for selecting your keywords – and only shows increase in search rankings as a measure of success, it’s time to reconsider the value of their services.

When you hold your SEO agency accountable, you will avoid broken promises and false guarantees; setting the stage for success with your B2B SEO program.

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