Rescuing Brands From Bad SEO: Tips for Choosing Best-Fit Providers

As a senior SEO specialist, you often get approached by brands that not only need help with their SEO but also need “rescuing” from past questionable and not-so-ethical SEO practices.

I’ve seen many brands, especially SaaS companies, make the mistake of choosing SEO practices that wind up hurting their sites much more than they ever helped them.

I’ll explain why choosing the right SEO service provider is important and something that you should be taking seriously, but before I do, I’ll give you some examples.

It’s not always as straightforward to spot the quality of work you’ll receive from SEO services. SEO is a mythical and magical thing to most people. And we can’t blame people for not understanding it fully, but that’s a post for another day.

Examples of how bad SEO practices can screw your organic search performance:

Posting content for traffic only

What it is: Creating blog posts, with little or very broad topical relevance to your product and mostly focused on keyword search volume or the top posts by competitors.

How to spot it: This one is easy. The relevance the content has to your product is very broad or not relevant at all. For example, if you have a SaaS product that is built around Instagram, but the post is about TikTok marketing strategies.

What this will do: There is a chance that the blog post will rank in Google, especially if you’ve spent money on promotion, distribution, and backlinks for the post. However, the users that are most likely going to visit this piece of content will have no interest in your product.

Why this happens: Either the SEO specialist is only in it for the money, is inexperienced, or the KPIs given to them are unreasonable, and instead of telling you about it, they choose to provide the service in fear of losing you as a client.

Will you be okay with this tactic? If you have the budget to focus on content and SEO efforts that are specific to your product or even broader, then you can do this. Remember, that your content is supposed to add value to your brand and business goals over time, and not bring empty traffic.

The point is that the users visiting your posts, remember who you are, even if they don’t convert straight away. If your SaaS tool is for Instagram only, giving away a free guide on how to do affiliate marketing won’t add any value or bring in the right audience.

Creating backlinks based on quantity only

What this is: When backlinks are created for your website at scale, without caring about topical relevance, website quality, or any of Google’s recommended best practices.

How to spot it: This is a popular tactic used in the SaaS industry. My guess is that it's either because startups don’t fully understand the implications of this or that they don’t know that their SEO service provider is doing this. An easy way to see this is to use a tool like Ahrefs to see the backlinks that are being created for your website on a monthly basis. You’ll spot these types of links because there will be a sudden influx of backlinks pointing to your website over a short period of time and most likely it will be from questionable or irrelevant websites, like Coupons and Crypto.

What this will do: Low-quality, irrelevant backlinks will be ignored by search engines and will not contribute value over the long run. Most of the time, these websites are flagged as low-quality websites or worse, spam sites. Over time, if search engines pick up that this is the method by which your website is going about creating links, you’ll be hit by a link spam update from Google. This means that you’ll lose rankings. Low-quality links don’t always lead to obvious manual actions and notifications in Google Search Console.

Why this happens: That can be due to a lack of experience or the price you are paying for the service. When ordering links from platforms like Fiverr, expect that you will have less control over the quality that you will get. And this matters. Quality backlinks matter. High-quality backlinks are usually pricier because it is still a very valuable SEO tactic.

Will you be okay with this tactic: Low quality and spammy links will have a negative effect on your search engine rankings, over time. This means all your website content and technical SEO efforts will also suffer.

Creating backlinks based on domain authority only

What it is: When the backlinks that are created for your website are from popular or high domain authority websites, but don’t have any topical relevance to your product.

How to spot it: You can use a tool like Seobility.net, Majestic or Ahrefs to keep track of your backlinks. Don’t expect your SEO service providers to provide this information. Honest and ethical providers will, but some might choose not to share all the link sources.

What this will do: Because the websites are popular, you will get an initial boost in rankings. It will look like it's working, but it won’t work for long. You will lose your rankings and money with the next Google Spam update.

Why this happens: The SEO service provider doesn’t expect your business to stick around long enough or doesn’t think that you will be a long-term client. You might have paid them for one task so there is no real concern about the consequences for them.

Will you be okay with this tactic?: This is not a long-term solution and will only work if you are serious about taking your SEO and content marketing game further. I’ve seen startups apply this tactic, but after 2 months of getting these irrelevant high-authority links, they make sure to replace them with high-authority, topically relevant links and put a lot of effort behind their content creation and SEO updates.

In my opinion: If you don’t have the funds and resources to apply this tactic, then the risk will not be worth the reward.

Cloaking

What it is: This is when keywords are placed on your page and the color of the text is set to match the background. This is a super old and sneaky  SEO practice that nobody should be doing in 2023 and beyond, but sadly, I still come across it from time to time.

How to spot it: It’s not so easy to spot and that’s the point. But you can check your web page source code or drag your mouse pointer over the whole page to see what it highlights. There are also SEO tools that can spot cloaking.

What this will do: The idea of cloaking is to add keyword placements on your webpage so that you can rank for it, but hide the keywords from the user.

Why this happens: The SEO specialist could be desperate to get results and you might have said no to on-page changes. Do not set unrealistic KPIs and expect SEOs to reach them without making changes on the website. There is no way around it.

Another reason is that again, the SEO specialist has reason to believe that you won’t be a client for long. And they are in it for a quick buck not to give you good service.

Will you be okay with this tactic: This goes against Google’s best practices. You can read more about their spam and cloaking policies here. Google can identify hidden content.

Relying on Google’s freshness index only

What it is: When new content is published, after search engines have crawled and indexed it, the content gets an initial boost. This is done on purpose to compare how users interact with the content to what is already available in the search index.

How to spot it: The content is not well thought through, specific, or expertly created at all. The content lacks depth and detail. Multiple similar posts are published in one day or within a very short period of time.

What this will do: Your website might benefit from an initial boost, and you might be lucky enough to rank high for some keywords, but there is a big chance that the keywords are pulling in people that are not your target audience.

Why this happens: Lack of understanding of what makes high-quality content, lack of understanding of what your potential customers would be interested in, posting content for the sake of posting to charge you for the content writing service.

Will you be okay with this tactic?: Similar to the irrelevant topic, popular websites, you could consider this tactic if you know that you will replace this content with proper content in a timely manner. If you have the type of website where you only care about traffic and not conversions, then this could still work for you. If you want some of the readers to talk about your brand and potentially become customers themselves, then this approach will not produce good results.

Free templates for everyone

What it is: When you create free template pages on your website to capture audiences looking for “free” templates and resources.

How to spot it: Fairly straightforward, there will be dedicated pages on your website or blog.

What this will do: You will get a good amount of website traffic from this tactic and if it's perfectly aligned with your product, it could even lead to conversions. Users who initially signed up for the free resources could become paying customers in the future. It’s a very specific solution. For example, this tactic will work great for brands like Notion, Canva, and Airtable. Their paid features are carefully integrated so that users still want to sign up for paid features and plans.

When this isn’t properly planned or rolled out, you will end up with web pages that rank for many “free + your template thingy” search terms. This will result in website traffic that will never convert and will pull in users who have no intention of ever becoming paying customers. You will end up with a lot of traffic and clicks, but a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate.

Why this happens: Creating free resources actually requires a lot of planning before they're rolled out. The page design, content, and CRO are just as important as the SEO here.

Oftentimes, this tactic gets copied because of all the successful case studies that are floating around the internet on how Monday.com, Notion, etc. have applied this tactic to get massive amounts of traffic. But it often fails to explain in detail the planning that went into what was done before it was executed.

Will you be okay with this tactic?: This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy. It’s just not for everyone. This won’t make sense for all types of products and software brands. Don’t force it, unless you only want traffic and conversions are not a concern.

Common themes here are unrealistic KPIs and expectations set by the client, clients putting price above quality, and not keeping track internally of your website’s content and SEO efforts.

You can use SEO and content tools that will give you a good overview of what’s going on. You can even share it with your SEO specialist. When it comes to choosing a good SEO provider, look at their approach in relation to what you want from them.

If you want long-term results from your SEO efforts, choose to work with an SEO specialist that thinks strategically and long-term. Be extra careful when you choose once-off SEO service providers. Only use these types of SEO services after doing extensive research and looking at referrals and testimonials.