A very common request by clients, for their existing website, is that keyword research is carried out for it, with the expectation that the keyword research is carried out for the entire website. This is a mistake. If you're aiming to commission keyword research in order to identify the keywords you should target for pages, you'll want to ensure you're able to map keywords to pages immediately following the keyword research.

The traffic potential of high volume keywords is not enough of a reason to target the keywords if they are not relevant to your business. Relevancy comes over keywords. Always. So, as we approach the second half of the last quarter of the year, ask yourself this one question: how relevant to our business are the keywords we're targeting?

Do you have keyword cannibalisation problems? When the landing page that ranks for a targeted keyword keeps changing, you have a keyword cannibalisation problem. I'm betting you've seen this issue in your ranking report. Having your site rank for your targeted keywords is not enough. You also have to ensure you have the appropriate page ranking for the keyword you're targeting.

Agencies still have a culture where SEOs end up working late. Whilst 'working late' may be acceptable to some people, others (particularly Millennials and Gen Zs) see this as robbery of their time. This ultimately affects the agency who end up providing a terrible SEO service to their clients. Let me explain how this 'working late' culture is a problem for the agency, the SEO and the client.

The nature of the servicing industry is that there must be more work brought in than there is capacity to handle the work. Work is simply brought in and figured out afterwards. As such, there is always the need to pitch for work. As such, there is always the need for salespeople. Not marketers, salespeople. Some agencies that service clients with SEO have too much emphasis on sales. This is another reason why they provide a poor SEO service.

Not all agencies are great at servicing the SEO needs of clients. Yes, this goes for the big, more reputable agencies. Having worked at agencies, and also managed agencies whilst working client-side, I’ve formed an opinion on why some agencies have and deliver a shit service when it comes to SEO.