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We look at the data in GA, but it doesn’t paint a good picture because we only care about one country (US), have only a couple pages that matter, and conversions are mostly from paid sources not organic search. One of our biggest complaints is that the search terms are mostly branded ones, even though we’ve been asking the agency to focus on unbranded terms. It’s possible that we’re being impatient to see results with only 6 months under our belt.

Can you share a bit more about backlinks not on a directly relevant site? Where do you check them? GA?

That’s what I heard, too, but I couldn’t tell whether they’re delivering good results on the backlink side. The only metric I see is the domain authority score, but I also heard it’s quite easy to game that. How do you usually tell the backlink building is on track?

Yeah, I’m not too worried about the tag/metadata part. WordPress/Yoast is great. Wasn’t sure about the backlink building efforts they’re doing for us.

Yeah, the backlink part is the most questionable one. It doesn’t seem right, but I keep hearing that it’s important and our team’s new to SEO, so we don’t know whether we’re doing the right thing. Hence this Ask HN post.

Agreed. We have a marketing strategy and SEO is just a part of it. I asked only about SEO since I found SEO to be the most opaque and hardest to calculate ROI on.

100%. This agency manages SEO. Google Ads and paid social are separate from what this agency is doing for us.

Like 10-20% increase in organic search traffic. Yes, technically it’s an improvement but not enough to justify the investment. We also have separate PR efforts (traditional media), so it’s hard to tell.

Yeah. Hopefully we’ll find another agency who can give us more visibility.

Makes sense. Thanks again!

Guess it’s just easier to do digital marketing, but we should definitely consider it.

Yes, totally. I'm fine with the sausage making part being a black box. But shouldn't they share more data/results with us? This is the first SEO agency I'm working with, and I'm not sure what the norm is.

Yeah, we’re new to this, so probably weren’t smart enough to work with the agency effectively.

Even though we’re providing a specific medical procedure, it’s for a common condition. And our doctors want us to build awareness about the procedure since we ultimately want to go nationwide (even global).

Thanks so much. These are fantastic questions. It’s not easy for us to answer these questions since our Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager aren’t set up to track metrics at a granular level. The agency has a dashboard for us but it doesn’t really answer any of the questions.

Ballpark, our digital marketing cost is over 50% of the revenue and it’s not sustainable. But we’re in the early days so was wondering if we were too impatient.

Like you mentioned, setting up Google Analytics properly and monitoring results would be a good start. Appreciate your pointers. I’m still curious though. You mentioned good SEO people should be able to show us the results. Do SEO agencies usually set up GA for their clients at this detailed level? Or does that fall on us, the client?

That's very true.

Thanks! We also felt that way but had limited data points. Also wasn't sure whether high-quality posts written by a freelance writer who may not have any SEO knowledge would do well in bringing in traffic.

We have an in-house designer and engineering team.