Digital marketing has always been one of those industries that has many grey areas, where the majority of marketing companies try to bamboozle their clients with technical jargon and vague statistics. I’m certain that most business owners will be approached by marketing companies or SEO experts on a daily basis, so I wanted to share my thoughts on how to actually measure a company’s credentials.
Firstly, check their Google rankings.
This should be the first clear indication of how good a marketing company is: are they high up on Google? Don’t just search for what they tell you to search for! Search for what services they offer, without mentioning their company name. This gives you an idea of how competitive they are amongst their competition.
You should also search for their services related to which city they are in, for example “logo design Swansea” which will give you a good idea of their SEO / Digital Marketing presence. If they are in the top 1 to 5 on the search results, this indicates that they are fairly proficient at SEO.
A common trick with dodgy SEO companies is to tell you exactly what to search for, including very specific phrases or their company name, then when you see them at number one on Google, some people are highly impressed by this. But if they are searched for using less specific terms or phrases, they may be way below their competition.
Look at their portfolio of work.
Most design or marketing companies will have a Portfolio page, or previous customer projects. You really need to take a look at this to see the volume of work they have done in the past, and the quality or scale of their previous work.
Very often you will find that they have a small selection of clients on their portfolio, and it can be a little vague about what they specifically did. While a genuine design company will have a long history of projects including a description of what they actually did for that client.
Are their customers genuine?
Many bogus design & marketing companies will actually copy & paste projects from other companies and use it on their portfolio. So you should take the next step, do a quick search on the projects on their portfolio, perhaps look at any web design projects they claim to have done and look for a “Website by XXXX” on the client website. You would be surprised at how many portfolios are completely fake.
Look at their reviews.
Fake reviews are becoming more sophisticated. But they are still fairly easy to spot. Even Google reviews and TrustPilot can’t be fully trusted, you need to look at all of their reviews – perhaps filter their reviews to show the bad reviews, this often reveals the unhappy customers.
How to spot fake reviews.
I’ve seen cases where one web design company acquired over 800 reviews within 2 or 3 months, all of which were completely vague and very similar. It would be totally impossible to get this volume of reviews in the real world.
Fake reviews are often quite generic, they will not mention a specific customer or job. On most occasions they will be worded in a way that sounds a little suspect, almost like they are being written by someone from another country… because they usually are!
Are their previous marketing projects local or nationwide?
In a previous article about PPC campaigns, I alluded to the fact that an international campaign will be far more difficult to get right, where a locally based advertising campaign can be fairly successful with very little technical knowledge.
So, if a marketing team has only locally based clients on their portfolio, with no national customers, they may not be fully prepared for the pitfalls you experience at a higher level. And this could indicate that they may waste your advertising budget.
How do they create their websites?
If I am investigating a web design company, I will look at their website and their customer websites to see how the websites were built. You can do this by viewing the source code: right click on a website, then click “View Source”. This often tells you what platform they used to build the website.
If they are using Wix or the GoDaddy website builder, this should raise a red flag. Because a professional website company should be using WordPress, or building a website using custom HTML / CSS, or perhaps Squarespace and a few other platforms are acceptable.
I have to admit that Wix websites have improved quite a lot over the last two or three years, in terms of SEO and usability, but they are still way below the standards that can be achieved with WordPress or other platforms. I can say this with certainty, after seeing a client switch from WordPress to Wix, then seeing their volume of customers and Google rankings plummet quite dramatically.
Owning your own domain.
One of the main issues with platforms like Wix or Squarespace is that you are usually forced to register your domain (web address) on their platform. Which means it is extremely difficult – almost impossible – to take your domain elsewhere in the future, if you wanted to.
When you create a website with Wix or Squarespace, you are stuck with their platform forever!
When I get a web design customer, the first thing I do is explain the importance of ownership of their domain. They should be able to take their domain and use it with any platform in the future.
Did they cold call you?
It should be obvious, if a web design or SEO company cold calls you, they must be desperate for work! Surely, if you really needed a web designer or SEO specialist to assist your business, you would search Google and find the best one, which would usually be near the top of the search results.
A truly professional marketing / SEO / web design specialist will not need to cold call people. They will usually be too busy to even think about it! So, if anyone cold calls you, they are best avoided.
To summarise…
As I have alluded to before, the explosion of AI marketing companies has increased the number of times you get approached and offered SEO services or web design services. But you really need to delve deeper into a specific company to determine if they are the real deal, or just completely winging it!