Took me 4 months to admit our SEO agency was just writing blog posts for bots

I hired a firm back in March to handle our local service business. They promised rankings in 8 weeks and sent me pretty reports with all these green arrows. By month 3 I noticed our phone calls actually dropped from before we started. I finally asked to see the raw analytics and found out they were targeting keywords nobody in our city ever searches for. Like we're a plumbing company in Austin and they optimized for 'emergency pipe repair efficiency guidelines' which gets zero monthly volume. Has anyone else had to dig through agency reports to find the real traffic numbers?

2 comments

2 Comments

ray_carr14d ago

Hear me out though, are you absolutely sure the drop was from their bad keywords or just a slow season for plumbing work in Austin? I get that the reports looked fishy but four months of declining calls could have other factors like weather or competition running specials. Sometimes we blame the agency fast when it's really just a slow market.

paulperez14d ago

Four months is a decent chunk of time to blame one thing, but yeah, market shifts happen. My buddy runs a similar shop in Dallas and had a dead August that nobody saw coming, just slow. It's easy to get tunnel vision on the Google stuff when the real culprit might be people holding off on big repairs.