SEO Agencies Comparison

Hot take (but one we need to talk about): It’s not clients. It’s not platforms. It’s not budgets. It’s us. Agencies and professionals in content marketing + SEO are the very ones quietly hampering each other’s growth. Let me guess, you've: → Struggled to explain the value of these two functions? → Hit walls when it comes to getting realistic budgets? → Found yourself staring blankly when someone asks how success is being measured? You're not alone. But here's why that’s still happening - even while companies like Mailchimp, Slack, Semrush, Yotpo, Hootsuite, and Grammarly continue to double down on content + SEO. → Because someone out there promised 10x leads in 10 days with ChatGPT-written blogs → Because writing ≠ marketing (and no, it doesn’t become SEO just because you bolded the keyword 7 times) → Because a backlink blast to random directories still gets sold as “off-page SEO” → Because video content is being sold as a 'viral' strategy w/o analysing resources available → Because we keep seeing those shiny 1000% growth results - with no context → Because vanity wins are being paraded, while impact metrics are buried And if you're one of the brands currently cutting or "reallocating" budgets in the name of saving costs or doing more with less - here’s your reminder: → Find the right folks to work with. Talk to them in depth - don’t just scratch the surface. → Know the difference between shiny hacks and sustainable practices. → Learn to tell apart temporary trends and long-term growth strategies. → Ask for accountability - not just activity. → Invest in people and partners who tie their work to your actual business goals. → Remember that real growth takes consistency, context, and compounding effort - not just another batch of keyword-stuffed content. ✨ Content marketing and SEO aren’t optional line items - they’re your organic engine. They can work while you sleep, scale, and sustain. But only if you do them right. Let’s do better. Together. For the ones creating these problems, I see you 👀 (coming for you). For those who want to find long-term solutions, my DMs are open. #b2bsaas #b2bcontent #marketingagency #seostrategy #contentmarketing

SEO will never die, but the SEO agency might. Frequently, I am asked: "Do you know a good SEO agency?" In the last year, I know fewer than I used to. Not because SEO is dying: it's not and never will. Search will always exist in some form. However, the current agency model is on shaky ground. Many agencies are racing to stay relevant by adding new services, bundling AI, reducing headcount, and dropping prices to keep up. But this kind of pivoting is not strategic; it's desperate. This is an agency death spiral: Lower pricing leads to lower margins. Lower margins lead to overworked teams. Overworked teams lead to poor results. Poor results lead to client churn. The cycle continues. Worse, in an environment of decreasing traffic, the SEO teams who hired the agencies are under more scrutiny than ever, and the agencies need to show results FAST. Sending pretty dashboards of AI visibility is not going to cut it. Of course, there are great SEO agencies out there, but they're becoming harder to find because they're not posting jargony LinkedIn fluff about how they are "GEO" experts and AI-first. They have teams that understand users and search best practices and consistently drive results for their clients, even when the whole world of search has changed. If you're looking for that kind of partner, I'm happy to make intros.

I once watched an agency switch their client from $185 quality links to $80 "marketplace" links to pocket the difference. Within 90 days, their rankings tanked. Client fired them. Don't get me wrong... I love saving money. But some shortcuts destroy your entire business. Here are 7 consistency mistakes that kill SEO results (and what to do instead): 1. Premature Budget Cuts Rankings improve, agencies slash link spending from 50% to 10%. They pocket the difference until rankings crash and client fires them. Instead: Maintain the investment that got you there. If 50 links/month achieved page 1, keep building 50 links. 2. Switching to "Cheaper" Links Switch to $80 marketplace links to pocket the $105 difference. Those links disappear within 30 days. Client loses rankings AND trust. Instead: Stick with links scoring 3/3: domain relevance, content relevance, 1,000+ traffic. 3. The "Technical Tweaks Will Save Us" Pivot When agencies cut link budgets, they suddenly obsess over Core Web Vitals and meta descriptions. Meanwhile, competitors building consistent links steal all your rankings. We've seen sites with outdated technical SEO dominate purely through link consistency. Instead: Technical SEO is table stakes. Links drive rankings. Maintain both, but never sacrifice links for technical busy work. 4. Burst Campaign Syndrome One shoe brand went 0 to 24k traffic in 130 days with consistent building. Another built 100 links month 1, nothing for months, panic-built again. Guess which one kept their rankings? Instead: Natural velocity means gradual scaling. Start 20/month, scale to 50-60, maintain 30-40 long-term. 5. The "All Content, No Links" Fantasy Agencies blow $6,000/month on content with $300 on links. One client wasted $6k/month on bad links, switched to quality, grew 614% in 12 months. Instead: Allocate 40-70% of budget to quality links. 6. The "Set It and Forget It" Fantasy One SEO agency client stuck at 10-15k visitors for 2 years despite spending $5k/month. Why? Ineffective link building after the initial push. Instead: Links need constant attention. Competitors build daily. Link decay is real. Maintain momentum or lose everything. 7. Algorithm Update Panic Mode Agencies using "shortcuts" scramble with every Google update. Meanwhile, sites with consistent quality links are "relatively impervious." Updates expose spam - they reward fundamentals. Instead: Build quality consistently. Never worry about updates again. —— Link building is NOT a place for maximizing margins. We know we won't retain clients by cutting corners. Rankings maintain when quality link building is maintained. If done wrong, one quarter of margin grab destroys years of client value. The difference is your focus: Quarterly earnings or client success. Choose wisely.

🤯 2 of our clients cut their projects in half within two weeks - almost 40% of our "reliable" agency revenue suddenly wasn't reliable anymore. Many agencies faced this moment: talented developers immediately on the bench with salaries to pay. For us, it happened in 2021. It wasn't the first time this happened. I knew the reason: our main acquisition channel - Word-of-mouth - wasn't a reliable way to scale our agency. The best clients (80% of them) came in this way. A friend from my last job referred someone who started a large project. A happy client referred us to their network. Our WordPress products eventually brought in some enterprise work. Referral clients usually trusted us immediately, signed for 6-12+ months contracts for full teams, and made decisions quickly. But there was a "ceiling" we quickly hit relying only on the referrals/WoM. And when you're beyond a few clients, churn eventually kicks in (project scales down or finishes, etc.). So you can't avoid building a pipeline, it's not only a scaling but a "survival" factor. Referrals weren't consistent enough to fuel our growth. Occasional "cold" prospects who found us would ask for something like "2 React developers for 2 months" — impossible to build a sustainable business around. We needed a systematic approach, so we experimented with everything. Sharing our findings of that time: - SEO/Content marketing took more than a year to ramp up but brought in several solid clients. Definitely makes sense. - Paid search ads burned through the budget with absolute zero results. Too many competitors bid on the same keywords, and looks like people don't look for agencies through Google/FB ads. Or we did it wrong. - Startup conference circuit (Slush, Noah, Heureka, etc.) - can definitely work, we had a decent number of interesting leads but either couldn't convert them after 5-6 follow-ups (didn't have resources for more), or their requests were impossible (senior developers for half-cost). - Freelance project platforms worked in the very early days, but once we grew beyond 10 people, the economics no longer made sense. - As much as I wanted to find a "magic pill", the channel that worked best, in the end, was the most boring one - lead generation + cold outreach. It started delivering results when we: * Clearly identified our ideal client profile and prepared all sales materials. * Built messaging addressing their specific challenges. * Maintained discipline and consistency - ideally when the activities are handled by separate specialists (lead generation, outreach, meetings). No more than ~2% of potential clients are actively looking right now - so build forecasts based on that. It wasn't ideal (it never can be), and it didn't bring in the same average quality of clients with WoM, but it brought reliability. Today we don't run agency services anymore, but work a lot WITH agencies, and understanding their pains really helps. How do you build your acquisition?

$40,000 a month. 40 blog posts. 12 links. Zero results. Read that again. That is not a hypothetical. That is a real client conversation I had recently. They were paying an SEO agency $40K every single month for a perfectly itemized plan. Exactly 40 blog posts. Exactly 12 links. A long, impressive laundry list of activities delivered like clockwork. On paper, it looked flawless. In reality, their traffic was flat. Some pages were actively losing rankings. When they compared that to our SEO proposal, the reaction was immediate. "Why is yours less specific?" So we did something simple. We asked ChatGPT and Gemini a very direct question for their exact niche, territory, and competitive landscape: Is publishing 40 blog posts per month a good strategy here? Both answers were blunt. It would 100% cause keyword cannibalization and dilute authority. The thing they were paying for was not neutral. It was actively hurting them. This is the uncomfortable truth about SEO, and honestly about most growth disciplines. SEO does not work like a factory. Algorithms change. Search intent shifts. Competitors move. One update can flip priorities overnight. When you lock yourself into a rigid monthly checklist, you are betting that reality will stay polite and predictable. It never does. The outcome is predictable though. Teams focus on hitting contractual outputs instead of solving the real problem. They publish content that should not exist yet. They build links to pages that should not be prioritized. They miss the real opportunities because they are too busy checking boxes. The real value in SEO and AEO nowadays is not the number of deliverables. It is having a team that can research deeply, identify the lowest hanging fruit, build long term infrastructure when things are calm, and react fast when everything changes. That flexibility is not vagueness. It is the strategy. If someone is selling you certainty in a system that changes every month, what they are really selling is comfort. Not results. And comfort is expensive. #SEO #DigitalMarketing #GrowthStrategy #MarketingLeadership #ContentStrategy #SearchMarketing #AgencyLife #B2BMarketing #Founders #CMO #MarketingReality

A proposal with 20 blogs a quarter looks better than a proposal with 2. So that's what agencies are now selling. Over the last 5 years, SEO buyers are smarter. They started asking what the actual deliverables were instead of just believing the forecast. Reasonable thing to ask. Agencies responded by loading up the deliverables section. Number of keywords targeted. Number of pages produced. Number of blogs. Number of links. Then AI made it cheap to inflate every one of those numbers. 20 blogs costs the agency about the same as 2 used to. So the proposal goes out with 20. The client picks the proposal with the biggest deliverables list. They feel like they're getting more value. The problem is the result. More content with no original thought ranks worse than less content with real thinking behind it. The site gets bloated with thin pages. Topical relevance gets diluted. AI engines stop citing it because there's nothing worth citing. It's like exercising more but doing the wrong exercise. You don't get fitter. You get injured. When you're evaluating an SEO proposal, look past the deliverables count. Ask what's going into each piece. Who's doing the thinking. What original angle the agency brings to your industry. 2 pieces of content built on real strategy will outperform 20 pieces of content built with a copy/pasted prompt.

"We got a new marketing director...let's fire the SEO agency." That's how the convo starts far too often. A firm brings me in, assuming their marketing problems begin and end with their agency. But if the first assignment for a fCMO, legal marketing strategist, or in-house marketing director is to 'clean house' and start replacing current vendors...we're probably asking the wrong questions. Here's why... 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺. Lack of strategy, internal misalignment, poor intake, or unrealistic expectations could be driving poor performance. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻'𝘁 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱. Without a clear picture of the firm's business goals, internal capabilities, and actual constraints, judging agency performance becomes guesswork. 𝗡𝗼 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝘅𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗲. A new marketing hire needs space to assess, learn, and develop a plan. Rushing them to 'find someone better' is like handing them a scapegoat, not a strategy. 𝗡𝗼 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗞𝗣𝗜𝘀 𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗲𝘁. If success was never clearly defined, then no agency could reasonably be expected to hit the mark. Vague goals = vague results. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗮 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. If a firm expects top-tier results on a shoestring budget, even the best agency will struggle. Underfunded strategies don't magically overdeliver. Now, please don't get me wrong. There are absolutely times when a new agency is the right move. But hiring someone just to swap vendors...without fixing the underlying issues? It's often just a reset on the countdown to the next round of frustration. Start with the 𝘸𝘩𝘺, not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰. 🦉

A company reached out to me this week about SEO. They also reached out to me a year ago. Last year, they chose a different agency based on cost. This year, they came back. And now the investment is 25% higher than what I quoted them before. Here are the 3 reasons: 1. The investment is higher because GEO matters more than ever. A year ago, GEO was not as major of a factor in SEO engagements as it is today. Now it matters. Which means more work. More strategy. More execution. So part of the increase is simple: The scope is bigger because the search landscape is bigger. 2. The website they got “included” in their SEO retainer actually made their SEO worse. The cheaper SEO company built them a new website. And that website hurt them. Important local and regional pages are gone. The information architecture is scrambled. The site structure is full of nonsense. So now we are not starting from where they were a year ago. We are starting from a worse position. And fixing damage costs more than avoiding it in the first place. 3. Their SEO company did not build pages or acquire links while competitors kept moving. Over the last year, their competitors kept investing. They kept building content. They kept strengthening their websites. They kept acquiring authority. Meanwhile, this company did not add the right pages. They did not gain the right links. So now the moat around the competition is larger than ever. And the gap to catch up is bigger than it was a year ago. That is why the investment is higher now. Not because SEO got magically more expensive... Because the workload got bigger. The cleanup got larger. And the distance to catch up got longer. The workload went up because the market moved, their website got worse, and their competitors kept building while they fell behind. Rob Timmermann

I talked to 3 law firms that worked with the same SEO agency this month. All 3 saw results early on. All 3 trusted the process. And all 3 started losing cases from organic search at nearly the same time. The agency’s recommendation? Keep going. Publish more content. Add more pages. These firms were still operating on an SEO strategy built for a version of Google that no longer exists. One site had over 1,000 indexed pages. Another had decade old blog content. Another was publishing news posts and long-form articles every month while their highest value keywords slipped further down the page. And every helpful content update made the problem worse. Because Google was no longer rewarding them for having “more.” Their sites had become bloated. Old informational articles were competing against revenue-driving pages. Crawl efficiency dropped. Conversion-focused pages lost visibility. One firm was failing Google’s performance benchmarks entirely. Another had hundreds of outdated blogs indexed while high-intent searches declined. Even as rankings dropped, the recommendation stayed the same: keep producing content, double down. That’s a dangerous place for law firms to be right now. The firms winning in search today are doing the opposite. Cleaner sites. Sharper practice area pages. Stronger local relevance. Better entity signals. Content written to answer a specific question clearly and immediately. The old SEO playbook rewarded volume. The current one rewards precision. Way too many firms are still paying agencies to solve 2026 problems with 2020 tactics.

A lot of marketing agency owners we talk to are beginning to panic. Their clients' organic traffic are dropping by 15-30% and they are unsure on how to act. The client goes from asking strategic questions to nitpicking campaigns. Ultimately, it’s a sign you’ve been downgraded from trusted advisor to task executor. It’s a pattern we’re seeing across almost every vertical and the drift starts subtly: - Clients questioning every line item - Requesting more reports than recommendations - Bypassing your expertise to chase the latest LinkedIn guru's tactics - Measuring activity instead of outcomes Soon you're reacting, not advising. And reactive agencies get replaced by cheaper alternatives or internal hires. But guess what's accelerating this trend in 2025: AI search invisibility. Your clients' organic traffic is declining 15-30% because their competitors are showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews while they remain invisible. They don't understand why their traditional SEO spend isn't working anymore. They blame you. That's why smart agencies are productizing GEO strategy. Not by pretending to be AI engineers or building tools from scratch. By giving clients what they desperately need: clarity on where they stand in the AI search era. Here's why adding GEO services strengthens your agency positioning: 1️⃣ You become the translator between old and new search Clients need someone who understands both traditional SEO and AI search optimization. You already speak their language. 2️⃣ GEO results are immediately visible: Show a client how they appear in ChatGPT searches versus competitors. The proof is instant and undeniable. 3️⃣ You're solving their biggest fear: 68% of companies worry about AI search but have no strategy. Be the agency that removes that anxiety. 4️⃣ Outcome-based pricing protects margins: Stop selling hours. Start selling AI search visibility increases. Measure share-of-voice across AI platforms. 5️⃣ You get ahead of the commodity trap: While 24 GEO vendors fight over visibility dashboards, agencies with strategic GEO offerings become indispensable partners. The agencies crushing it right now aren't the ones with the biggest SEO tool stack. They're the ones helping clients navigate what comes next. That's Visto's focus: giving marketing agencies the GEO platform and community intelligence to become their clients' AI search guides. Want to see how your agency clients currently appear across AI platforms? Book a 15-minute audit with my team https://lnkd.in/gQbDKgqF