The Agency Model is Broken

Let’s face it – most digital marketing agencies suck to work at.

SEO Specialists at agencies are, on a whole, under-trained and over-worked, with more clients than they can handle and little to no time to spend actually learning to get better at SEO. The end result is bad for the industry: there are too many agencies out there selling bad work to people who don’t understand what good SEO should look like, poisoning the well for those of us who are actually good at our jobs. Not only that, it’s bad for agencies, too: shoddy work results in client turnover, and shoddy working conditions result in employee turnover.

In fact, a recent Conductor survey showed that people in the Specialist and Strategist levels in both SEO and Content have an average tenure of 1.5 years or less in their roles. Everyone knows that it’s cheaper to retain employees and clients than it is to constantly get new ones – so why do digital marketing agencies still suck so bad? In this talk, we’ll cover some of the traps and fallacies that digital marketing agencies can fall into when building their businesses that end up costing them money and producing shoddy work – and how to build a successful, profitable business while avoiding them.

This talk will include as many examples as I can find of agencies doing poor work, including examples of deliverables, reports, and employee testimonials. Names will be changed to protect both the innocent (clients) and the incompetent (agencies).

Key Takeaways: How to spot an agency that sucks to work at, before you go work there. How to effect change within your organization to make it a better place to work (that also makes more money). Starter rubrics to use when vetting a new client or drafting a policy on firing abusive clients. How to sell competent SEO to people who currently work with an incompetent agency.