This morning I received an email from one of my clients who had been approached by another agency, who offer SEO as part of a larger service. The client in question is in the recruitment industry.

They had obviously been in a dialogue with the client as they knew they were using a service, and approached the pitch to the client as "look at these phrases that you aren't ranking for!", and proceeded to list 50 phrases that they weren't ranking in the 1st page for.

Suprisingly enough, they even said that if they went with them, they "promised" to get a first page ranking for these terms. Now this really frustrates me! As an SEO, there are many things that you can promise, certain levels of activity, hitting particular targets with gaining links for a website, but you cannot "promise" to gain particular rankings, and if you do, I'll bet that those terms aren't going to be ones that drive traffic to your website.

I decided to analyse the phrases that they suggested using for this campaign, and suprisingly a couple of the phrases did have some decent search volume. But volume alone is not reason enough to select a keyphrase, another core element is relevance. Now for this particular client, we have just about got them to the first page on Google UK for "banking jobs", a really competitive term that has taken a lot of work to get here. This is really relevant to a section of the website and is beginning to drive some traffic to the site.

However this agency suggested that this client of mine should be targeting "financial services". Now let's have a look at the results for this term.

Do any of these look like results for a recruitment agency? They sure don't to me. There were a few other phrases that were similar and not really relevant.

Now I'm not normally one to make comments like this about agencies that compete with Vertical Leap. However, some of the language that was used in the email to my client really irritated me, as they demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the clients goals.

Fortunately the client is happy with what Vertical Leap have done for her. I absolutely have lots more work to do to achieve their goals but I think language like "...[we will] provide you proof that you're paying for a service that isn't being done" and "This ultimately means the company you're using to manage and maitain your website haven't fully optimised
your site" is unnecessarily inflammatory and after a review from me was proved incorrect.

Its easy to look at a site and suggest areas that you would do differently. Sometimes though, its important to try and think why it wasn't done that way, or perhaps even ask whats being targeted before making broad sweeping statements about what shortcomings there are on a site.