5 ways to spot a crap Content Marketing agency

Content Marketing is this season’s buzz word. Like ‘Social Media’ was a few years back and ‘Web 2.0’ a few years before that… Content Marketing is apparently all the rage now.
Only there’s a big problem with that.

To try and fill the gap between client expectations and delivery of these, a bunch of agencies have recently cropped up offering: Content strategy, Content Marketing, In-bound marketing and the rest. You know the ones… they email you all the time (well, they fill up my ‘Promotions’ tab in Google Mail – which I now treat like a second inbox for spam) and make it seem like they are a reputable company and not just a bunch of people jumping on the latest digital bandwagon.

Yes, there will be the odd one out there who has actually done what they say and possibly for some brands you may have actually heard of. But a lot of them have either just re-purposed their existing Search Engine Optimisation efforts or may have worked out how to do the basics in Google Analytics (e.g. look at in-bound source URLs, print out a PDF of landing page bounce rates, etc.).
So here’s my tips on the ways you can spot a crap content marketing agency:

1. They send you an email such as “understand blogging basics” or “free website content review” when they've not even looked at your site
2. They don’t actually have any content creation and copy writing skills (they typically only offer to suggest blog posts or to analyse what you've already written)
3. They have spelling or consistency mistakes across their website (an obvious sign of poor content quality) 
4. Despite claiming to have been doing “Content Marketing for years” their own twitter feed and blog posts go back less than 12 months.
   (And watch out for the tell-tale sign of sudden flurries of blog posts all written around the same time, and then large gaps where they haven't been bothered)
5. They make wonderful sweeping statements like “you need to increase brand engagement” with no indication of how you actually do this, let alone measure it.

So. Did I miss any points? Let me know. 

The rubbish that spammers write

It is easy to criticise people who send spam emails. They are probably written in a hurry and by people who don't have English as their mother tongue.

But there is also a part of me that likes to read them and to get a little amusement at the same time. I therefore thought I would share some snippets of real emails that I have been sent in the past... so you could smile as well. These aren't all just examples of bad grammar; some are factually incorrect and others just plain absurd.

We provides Guaranteed first page ranking in Google.
You have to say this with a pirate accent. But more importantly... any agency that offers to guarantee you a first page listing on Google is either lying or using black hat SEO techniques.

We use 100% white hat stuff.
Made out of stuffed white hats one assumes. Aside from the unprofessional approach, any SEO agency that isn't prepared to share a little more of their methodology might well have something to hide.

Hello Dear, How are you doing
I'm fine, thanks for asking. Being over familiar in email correspondence to someone you don't know is just as bad as being too stuffy and stiff to those you do.

This is not A spam please
ReAlly? Nothing says "this is spam" like an email subject line saying it is not.

So come on, has anyone else got any funny / cringe-worth examples?

Why has your SEO stopped working?

Have you started noticing that a lot of your efforts to push your site up the search engine results pages (SERPs) are now not having as much of an effect as they used to?

If so, then there is a good chance that your website has been penalised by Google’s algorithm updates.

Google's Panda and Penguin updates over the last 9 months have heavily targeted content and link spam.
Therefore these "less than white hat" tactics which used to work in the past (e.g. content farming, link networks, etc.) aren’t so effective anymore and in fact are much riskier now. This effect on your site could well be because Google has significantly changed it's ranking algorithm to penalise websites that breach their best practice guidelines. In fact, Google is known for making around 300 changes a year to this algorithm, which has over 200 factors (or 'signals') that affect it.

The Panda updates were meant to affect sites that depended on poor or duplicate content. It therefore hit sites that pulled or 'scraped' content from others.The Penguin updates that came a little later then affected sites that purchased links from other sites, rather than building them up correctly over time.

Now, the very work that has previously made your website rank well, may be having the opposite effect.

Note: I've been told by a few people recently things such as "we like your blog, but sometimes it gets too technical. Can't you write something a little less complex?". This posting is in response to that feedback and therefore I'd appreciate any further comments about its content.