A couple of months ago, the Head of eCommerce from a fashion brand reached out to me.

To give you some clarity, they were already doing a healthy $150k a month — so by all accounts, a successful brand.

However, they were working with another SEO agency (based in India) for two years and paid them $300 a month to do SEO for them.

And as usual…

They sucked!

Essentially, they publish a couple of blogs a month — which were obviously poorly written.

Plus…

• Zero internal linking

• No collection page optimization

• And arguably the worst part…

“Link building”

Every now and then, the agency would send them a spreadsheet of all the links they were building every month.

And they were getting 300 links every month.

There should be sirens going off in your head at this point.

So, before we decided to sign them, I asked their previous agency to send me the spreadsheet of the links they had built.

Because…I just wanted to know what I was getting myself into, if at all.

“Hey… I don’t want to end up in a situation where I’m disavowing 3 million backlinks.”

After a while, they sent me the list of the links they had built and…

OH BOY! 🤦

As I started to look through each and every single one of them…

These were just blank HTML pages.

I’m not even kidding…

THEY 

WERE

 LEGIT

 BLANK 

HTML pages!

Those pages barely existed on the fucking internet!

Basically, they had no links, and the ones that even looked real ended up being PBNs.

In simple…

It was worse than buying a 500-pack of links on Fiverr for $500.

Their organic traffic and revenue did not even move an inch for two years — not surprising at all — and lucky enough…

Their site wasn’t penalized by Google yet — considering the tactics they were using.

Anyway…

After reviewing the links, we got back on another call. 

I asked him if he had increased his ad spend over the last 2 years.

“Yeah… I mean we pretty much tripled it in the last two years?” he said.

“Hmm… well you might want to see this,” I said.

I immediately pulled up the Google search console for a few brands we work with and showed him how the traffic was going up & to the right (a good sign, obviously).

I filtered out all of the branded terms and showed him only non-branded traffic.

Because SEO doesn’t take credit for branded searches.

People already know what they are searching for: your brand.

But… when I pulled up his search console.

That wasn’t the case.

Essentially, if you continually increase your ad spend, your organic traffic should also continue to increase alongside it.

Now the reason that happens is because…

If you spend more money on paid ads (whether it be Google, Tiktok, and Meta), then you’re going to reach more people and those same people are going to search for your brand on Google.

For example:

Let’s say…

One month you spend $1000, then spend $2000, spend $2000 again, $3000 the next month, and then by month 12 you’re spending $12,000 a month on paid ads.

No matter what you do from an SEO perspective, your organic traffic should be moving up & to the right.

It’ll largely be branded traffic, but still.

But in this case, their organic traffic was totally flat for the last 2 years.

So even though this brand had tripled their ad spend, the previous agency was so bad that they actually negated the natural organic traffic growth.

The lesson here is that if you make a shit load of money, then you should pay for high-quality services.

If you’re going to pay $300 for SEO – expect to get burned.

They probably missed out on tens of thousands of dollars by “investing” in cheap services. 

The lesson? 

Invest in your brand.

If you don’t want to burn tens and thousands of dollars and rank at the top of Google then I recently posted a video on my YouTube channel that shows you exactly how do to that.

Check it out here:

 Until next time,

Kai Cromwell