If you’ve been keeping up with our blog for a while, you’ll have noticed that our advice often ends with something like the following: “If all this seems like too much effort, consider hiring an agency like us to do it for you!” In many cases, letting professionals help you with your Google Ads and SEO will save you not only time and work, but money.
However, your job isn’t over the moment you sign our agreement. There are several things you can do as a client that will affect the outcome of our work (and your advertising!), both for better and for worse. If you want the best possible results from your internet marketing agency, here’s what you can do to help.
Follow Our Recommendations
It might seem obvious, but to get your money’s worth, you’ll have to actually follow our advice! Fixing deeply rooted issues on your website or in your online advertising can require some work on your part, whether it’s updating code on your webpages to help Google’s crawlers, contacting your business affiliates to increase the number of backlinks to your site, or adding keywords to your landing pages for Google Ads or title tags and meta descriptions for SEO projects. Sometimes, significant structural changes must be made to your website and landing pages.
We work hard to identify any issues preventing your site from attracting visitors and converting them into leads, but ultimately, the implementation of some of our research and recommendations will fall to you. Make our job easier (and your digital marketing more effective) by utilizing the advice that you’ve paid for!
Keep in Touch
Has your marketing focus shifted? Does a targeted audience or location need to change? Have results come in from a time-sensitive campaign? We need to know! If we’re not up to date on any new developments on the back end, our decisions won’t be as informed.
Please let us know right away when you’re planning to make changes to your website! If new product pages are implemented or the structure of your website changes, there can a significant impact on the structure of your online advertising. When we analyze your website traffic and the performance of your ads, we depend on the data being up to date so that we know why changes in results occur and what still needs to be done. By keeping us in the loop even before you implement changes, you’ll ensure that our future work is as efficient as it can be – and in some cases, we may be able to help you avoid costly mistakes.
Part of our job is to answer questions and help you understand the work that we’re doing, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions. For example, let’s say a paused ad campaign is approved by Google: this doesn’t mean you’re paying to run an old, out-of-date campaign, just that Google has okayed it to run. Or, say you get an alarming message from Google alerting you that an active ad is suddenly disapproved: Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm, and there are any number of reasons this could happen. Just let us know. Chances are we’re already on it, but in any case, we’ll check into it and let you know if there’s a problem and what, if anything, you need to do.
- (Note: this goes not only for Google, but for other search engines and social media sites like Facebook, too. These sites update in ways that affect your ad campaigns every day, so don’t be alarmed if you see an email from them saying something has changed.)
Be Patient
Everything on the Internet moves at light speed, so it follows that fixing an issue on your site, or starting up a PPC campaign, will result in an immediate boost in traffic and instant sales, right? Unfortunately, for SEO a number of factors influence the speed at which you’ll see a visible change in your business. Remember, your competitors may also be making changes that could affect your rankings. Sometimes it takes a few days before Google crawls your new content and adjusts your rankings.
We are big believers in A/B testing, but collecting the amount of data needed to draw a reliable conclusion can often take even longer than a few days.
Similarly, when you make changes to your campaigns in Google Ads, it will take a while for those campaigns to ramp up. Then, depending on the length of your sales cycle, even more time will have to pass before you get sales or form fills. Users might see your ad and take a couple days or even weeks to decide before coming to your site and converting.
If you’re curious whether your ads are running or how your site is ranking, ask us rather than searching for yourself online. Googling for your own ads and giving them impressions (but not clicks) will lower your CTR and Quality Score, resulting in higher costs as well as skewed data.
In short, the effect of our work on your site traffic and search engine rankings might not be immediate. Allow time for the results to show. Give things a chance to settle, and don’t keep making changes under the hood just because you haven’t seen the results you were hoping for within a few days! Successful online marketing is the result of continuous, incremental improvements based on reliable data.
