How to choose a web marketing agency, including how to rule us out.

Ask for names, and ask whether those people are in the room. The commonest disappointment in this industry has less to do with incompetence than with being sold by senior people and delivered to by junior ones. Nobody lies about this when asked directly, because the answer is on an org chart.

Redacted is fine. What you are looking for is whether it contains anything that did not work, and whether the numbers are in position bands or averages. A report that only moves in the right direction is a retention document, not a measurement.

Anyone worth hiring has a version of "this channel will not work for you". If nobody can name one, you are buying activity rather than judgment, and you find out which around month nine.

Ad spend, in nearly every case, since that money goes to the platform rather than to the agency. Often photography, video, translation and development past a threshold. The answer "nothing, it is all included" means the scope has not been written yet.

Yours, from the start. Ad accounts, analytics, Search Console and the domain should be your property on day one rather than migrated at the end. An agency holding those has built a reason for you to stay that has nothing to do with results.

Listen for whether impressions or volume alone are the answer. A keyword can carry tens of thousands of impressions and almost no real demand, because the engine buckets variants under one label. An agency that does not screen for that will hand you a target list whose value is overstated by a quarter and nobody will notice for a year.

The good answer is boring: measure, fix the site, get tracking right, buy some demand to learn from. If the first ninety days are mostly content production, ask what the content is aimed at and how they know.

The nerviest question on the list and the most informative. Every agency has clients who left; how they talk about them tells you more than any case study. Ours is a small roster and we will put you in touch with people on it, including ones whose engagements ended.

You work directly with John Wieber and the partners. The roster is deliberately small, there is no account management layer, and the person who answers your question is the person who did the work. This is the whole reason we are not larger.

Web Moves has been publishing on this subject since 2003 and the archive is still up — around seven hundred posts. Several are quoted on this page and across this site, including the ones where the advice has expired, which is the more useful half.

Roughly half a million lines of production code behind us: custom WordPress and Magento modules, e-commerce platforms, CRMs. It means a conversion fix does not go into a queue with another vendor, and it means we can tell you when a problem is the platform rather than the marketing.

The office is at 750 4th Ave S in St. Petersburg, and we work throughout the Tampa Bay area as well as with clients nationally and in the UK and Australia. Local means you can come and sit in the room, which for a considered purchase is worth more than a map pin.

Position bands rather than site averages, branded split from non-branded, cross-checked against Search Console because the third-party tools disagree with each other by up to three times on the same metric. It makes a slow quarter visible, which is the point.

If you need a large team on site, a broadcast or out-of-home campaign, or twenty pages of content a month, we are not it and will say so on the first call. We are also the wrong choice for anyone who wants a guaranteed position, because that is not a thing anyone can sell.

Runs the browser-based channels that bring a business customers — search, content, earned coverage, paid media, email and often the website itself — and is accountable for what each one produces. The useful distinction between agencies is not which of those they list, since they all list the same set, but which they will tell you not to buy.

Media spend goes to the platforms and is yours. The cost of the work is separate. Ours is a flat monthly fee with no long-term contract, and the mix inside it moves with the data rather than with the original scope. We quote against your numbers rather than publishing a table, because the honest figure depends on what you already have.

Most of our clients are, including in the UK and Australia. The St. Petersburg office matters if you want to sit in a room together, which some clients do and many do not. Nothing about the work changes either way.

No, and the 2010 post above lists "companies that promise you a #1 Google ranking" as a warning sign. Nobody controls the result page, and the only way to make that promise honestly is to pick a term nobody searches for. We will tell you what is realistic for your terms before you commit anything.

There is no long-term one. The average client has stayed about seven years, and the reason that figure is worth anything is that none of them were obliged to. A twelve-month notice period is a prediction about month nine.

Then the useful first step is usually a second opinion rather than a switch. Send us the last three reports and the site; we will tell you what we would do differently and what they are doing well. Occasionally the answer is that they are doing fine and the problem is elsewhere, and we would rather say that than win the account.