7 Things You Do That Ruin Your SEO Agency’s Branding

Branding is not just about color schemes, logos, and stylish websites. It’s also about how your SEO clients, leads, and colleagues perceive your SEO agency and trust its expertise. In fact, this perception is a more important aspect of branding than your brand colors and logos. It significantly affects your bottom line and should be part of the foundation of your digital marketing business.

Here are the worst things you do that ruin your SEO agency’s branding, affecting your client acquisition and retention, reputation, and overall business success.

Table of contents

• Not having a brand at all
• Using blackhat SEO tactics
• Overpromising and underdelivering
• Communicating poorly with your SEO clients
• Neglecting analytics and reporting
• Failing to manage your reputation
• Publishing low-quality content

1. Not having a brand at all

Your branding is your company’s identity. Without branding, you don’t have an identity that makes you recognizable and stand out from the crowd. It can also significantly affect your brand recognition, making it difficult to build trust, get exposure, or attract top SEO talent. To establish a brand identity, follow these tips:

• Clearly define your values, mission, and unique selling proposition. Your story is one of the most fundamental elements of your branding. Who are you and what are the problems you have encountered that made you establish the company and solve the problems yourself? What are the things that make your SEO agency unique? Your unique value proposition can come in many forms, like unique SEO approaches and executions. When you have a clear brand identity, you have a foundation for all your branding efforts.
• Establish your digital channels. You are an SEO agency. One of the best ways to build a brand is to showcase your company in various online channels. Have a website, establish social media profiles, and build profiles in directories like the Google Business Profile. Make sure your channels are professional and have a consistent messaging style and visual identity.
• Position your SEO agency as a thought leader. Share insights, tips, and other things related to SEO and digital marketing. It’s a very competitive space, so consider niching down. Look at Marketer’s Center, for example. Our blog focuses more on SEO as a business instead of as a technical field. We are one of the few blogs that specialize in this department, positioning our agency as a thought leader in SEO business management.

2. Using blackhat SEO tactics

Yes, you should deliver results to boost your SEO agency’s branding and satisfy your clients. But this doesn’t mean you can just use blackhat SEO tactics. These results can actually backfire. Your unethical practices can lead to penalties on client websites, damaging your reputation and even risking legal action. To avoid the mistake of using blackhat SEO, here are some tips:

• Focus on whitehat strategies. You are an SEO professional who already knows the difference between whitehat and blackhat SEO tactics, so this tip is easy to follow. Blackhat SEO may seem attractive at first, but it makes poor business sense in the long run. Creating high-quality content, naturally attracting authoritative links, and prioritizing the user experience are more sustainable approaches.
• Set clear guidelines. Fix your internal processes in your SEO agency. Establish clear guidelines and follow standard operating procedures. These techniques won’t just help you avoid blackhat SEO strategies. They also help make your processes more streamlined and scalable.
• Stay updated on algorithm changes. Some SEO agencies still use grayhat SEO tactics – techniques that hover between blackhat and whitehat SEO. With a few algorithm changes and updates, these techniques can quickly tip one way and become blackhat. It’s important to stay updated with the latest search engine algorithm developments to prevent using blackhat SEO techniques unknowingly.

3. Overpromising and underdelivering

You may be overpromising to your clients and leads, especially when you are pitching SEO services. But promising exaggerated results just builds unrealistic expectations for your clients and leads. When you don’t deliver, you don’t just ruin your SEO agency’s brand. You also drive your clients and leads away, losing potential revenue and affecting the growth of your business. Here are some tips to avoid this mistake:

• Set realistic expectations. You should control expectations right from the beginning, even before onboarding an SEO client. Thoroughly assess their situation, analyze their goals, and see if their situation can really warrant such a goal. Communicate this clearly as early as possible to avoid false promises and unrealistic expectations.
• Underpromise and overdeliver. It’s better to have humble goals and get better results than to have grand goals and get worse results. Set conservative goals and timelines and do your best. Who knows? Maybe you can exceed the controlled expectations of your SEO clients. When you go beyond what you promise, you are building your SEO agency’s brand and strengthening your agency-client relationship.
• Be honest about limitations. While looking at your SEO client’s situation and goals, you may find anomalies. For example, their situation may be in a far worse position relative to their goals, meaning more work and time may be required to achieve the results they want. They may also have a limited budget compared to what they want to achieve. Be upfront about these challenges and work together with your SEO clients to solve them.

4. Communicating poorly with your SEO clients

Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings about expectations and goals, project milestones and timelines, and strategies and executions. This can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction with your SEO clients, damaging your SEO agency’s branding. By communicating poorly, you may also miss out on opportunities, especially when your SEO clients know SEO and can share insights and make informed SEO decisions. Here are some tips to communicate effectively with your clients.

• Establish clear communication channels. Establish what kind of communication you may have with your SEO clients. Are you going to give regular updates via email reports, collaborate through video calls, or work on SEO management platforms? Your communication channels need to be established as they are the foundation of all your collaboration efforts.
• Provide regular updates. Keep your SEO clients in the loop. Give them scheduled updates about their SEO campaigns. How is the progress of their campaigns? Are you hitting target metrics and tracking key performance indicators? Do you have new insights that may be relevant moving forward? Regular updates demonstrate the value of your SEO agency and its brand. They also help build client trust.
• Be responsive. Respond to your clients as soon as you can. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer to their concerns and inquiries, acknowledge that you have received their message. Your timely response reflects your SEO agency brand’s commitment to client success. 

5. Neglecting analytics and reporting

Analytics and reports have valuable information and insights to truly understand an SEO client’s situation and progress. Without these two, it’s difficult to demonstrate the value you provide to your SEO clients. It’s also almost impossible to create and execute effective SEO campaigns. Without analytics and reports, you ruin your SEO agency’s brand because of your lack of numbers to work effectively and show results convincingly. Here are some tips on how to effectively use analytics and reports.

• Use comprehensive analytics and reporting tools. There are comprehensive analytics tools like Google Analytics and reporting tools like AgencyAnalytics to make analytics and reports accessible and manageable at the same time. Make sure to learn how to use such tools and invest in them. They are worth the time and money. Many of them also have white label capabilities, which can only help your SEO agency’s branding.
• Customize reports according to each SEO client’s needs. Don’t just use the same key performance indicators, metrics, and templates for all SEO clients. Sure, creating templates and streamlining processes can help you scale your business, but some things just need personalization. Different businesses have different needs, so make sure to track and report data that is relevant to each of your SEO clients.
• Offer insights and recommendations. Nobody wants to look at just pure numbers. The least you could do is add visual aids like charts and graphs. But what really takes analytics and reports to the next level is the addition of insights and recommendations. Analyzing data is a completely different but equally important skill to have as an SEO professional.

6. Failing to manage your reputation

Poor reputation management or having no reputation management at all is hurting your SEO agency’s branding. In today’s digital age, potential customers look at your website, social media profiles, business profiles like your Google Business Profile, and other online channels to help determine if you are worth their money. If you have a bad reputation online, you are affecting not just your branding but also your lead generation and conversion. Manage your online reputation with these tips:

• Monitor your online presence. Regularly monitor your online channels and other online spaces where your reputation may be discussed. This may seem overwhelming, but there are reputation management tools like Yext to make it easier. You can also set up alerts to get notified whenever your brand is mentioned.
• Respond to negative feedback. You will receive negative reviews no matter what you do. Demonstrate that you care about feedback and client satisfaction by replying promptly and professionally to these negative comments. Resolve issues and explain your side to soften the blow on your SEO agency’s reputation. If you have more time, it doesn’t hurt to reply to positive feedback too.
• Invest in relationship building. Cultivate strong relationships with clients, leads, industry peers, and everyone else who may see your brand. There are many ways to do this, like posting regularly on your online profiles, participating in industry events, and actively reaching out and networking.

7. Publishing low-quality content

On your quest to becoming a thought leader in the space of digital marketing and SEO, you can find yourself regularly publishing content to boost your chances. But a common mistake many SEO professionals make is just pop out as much content as they can, often leading to low-quality content. This can reflect poorly on your SEO brand’s credibility, expertise, and professionalism. Avoid this brand-ruining mistake with these tips:

• Invest in content quality. High-quality content rarely comes cheap. You often have to dish out significant money to create content that truly accomplishes your goals – building your reputation and engaging your audience. If you can’t do this in-house, consider outsourcing to contractors, freelancers, or even other agencies.
• Focus on relevance and value. Ensure that your content is actually relevant to your target audience. Offer actionable advice, insights, and tips that can provide solutions to their problems. And before you can do that, you have to know your audience first. Understand the interests, pain points, and preferences of your audience before committing to a content type.
• Monitor content performance. Make sure the content you are spending money on is actually accomplishing your goals or at least trying to. One way to find out is to use analytics tools and look at different metrics like conversions, engagements, and page views. If you are not satisfied, review the quality of your content and your approach to putting the content out into the world. Try to make changes until you see what works.

Your SEO agency’s branding is crucial to its success

Maintaining a strong and reputable SEO agency brand is crucial if you want to succeed in the world of digital marketing and SEO. There are so many simple mistakes that can ruin your brand, and if you continue doing them, you can ruin your agency’s authority, credibility, and ultimately, its sales.

Avoid making these mistakes to take your SEO agency to the next level.