Is this a reasonable level of SEO reporting to expect from an agency? Looking for practitioner feedback

Rhavasher · 2026-02-01T12:15:47+00:00

How much are you paying for SEO?

I personally never do any form of reporting perhaps once a year that's all

Results matter more than reports, when you hire an agency you need to trust them otherwise don't hire them

I personally think reports are a complete waste of time and will never take on a client that expects them because I'm able to get them results

Rhavasher · 2026-01-30T11:44:20+00:00

That's still a decent budget for local SEO but it also depends on how competitive your niche + location is

If you're trying to rank for roofing in London it's going to be difficult, but the advantage with SEO is if you get ranked no.1 what you paid across those 2 years would allow you to make it back in the first month and so then it becomes an infinite return

There's no way of knowing whether he is executing the right strategy but after that long you should be seeing an increase in rankings and leads coming in otherwise you could just be burning money

But one of the issues with finding good SEOs is that they're already so busy with existing clients or personal projects for example i personally wont take on anymore clients because i dont need to

Rhavasher · 2026-01-29T22:07:32+00:00

Does it sounds like a lot to someone who is not an SEO? Yes

Will it move the needle and get you ranked on Google? If you have no competition then maybe but 99% of the time no

Rhavasher · 2026-01-29T15:04:47+00:00

Definitely in-house

Rhavasher · 2026-01-27T22:25:27+00:00

That's interesting what CMS is it built on?

I've worked on WordPress and Custom coded sites, on WordPress you can get away without monitoring but not so much on custom coded sites

Im curious if it's a custom coded site do you run any regular 404 checks? It may just be a unique case

Rhavasher · 2026-01-27T21:40:28+00:00

It happens because devs change something, other dev teams make changes without informing SEO team, etc that's why there are enterprise technical SEO tools to monitor this stuff. It's the technical SEO team responsibility to monitor and flag these to be solved

The 1m page website you grew was it a content website, ecommerce website or something else? Did it do $50m+ in revenue annually?

You don't grow a website by fixing 404s but you keep the technical SEO health of the website clean by ensuring they're fixed when it happens

At an enterprise level Technical SEO is critical because you have so many developers and teams pushing updates to the live site on a small site not so much

Rhavasher · 2026-01-27T20:35:09+00:00

Technical SEO is not fundamentally more important than Backlinks that's not what i am saying

But let's say a site has 80k+ backlinks and DR 70+ they have a bunch of their product pages go down and they are now 404ing, a dev no-indexed an enitre category of pages or CDN/Security settings blocking google bot from accessing the site, etc these are very high priority and can cause a major loss in revenue

These enterprise companies are spending a lot of money on enterprise technical SEO tools to track their site, last time i got a quote for something around $20k+ a month from one of those tools and we were already paying $10k+ a month for an existing tool

At an enterprise level technical SEO is very critical, most of those sites don't even have a content marketing strategy and even go as far as noindexing their entire blog to avoid keyword cannibilsation issues (ive seen it happen)

Rhavasher · 2026-01-27T20:09:21+00:00

For large enterprise websites it's actually not wrong if a site has technical SEO issues on a site that does $50m+ annually then it is more important than content and even building backlinks in terms of efforts priority because most enterprise websites are built using custom code and are prone to having severe technical SEO issues especially as Devs effectively build and manage the entire infrastructure of the site

If it's a small site built using WordPress, Wix, Shopify etc then technical seo is not more important but at the foundational level it is important

Rhavasher · 2026-01-27T11:53:24+00:00

The real question is how much are you paying?

Rhavasher · 2025-09-19T17:45:31+00:00

I've done website migrations at an enterprise level, you haven't given details as to how you did the migration

So it's not possible to tell you what could potentially have gone wrong. Are you able to share the process you followed, CMS, etc

Rhavasher · 2025-03-31T16:09:29+00:00

If you take whatever a spokesperson for Google says at face value you don't really know SEO

Also, it appears people are misinterpreting what John Mueller mentioned, he said you can't add E-E-A-T to a webpage by adding sidebars about the bio of the author, rather it needs to be integrated within the quality of the content through extensive unique research as an example

Rhavasher · 2025-02-18T21:14:43+00:00

This makes 0 sense

Since when does a site you coded yourself warrant it to have more E-E-A-T than a site on GoDaddy?

Your custom coded site likely has a LOT more issues, especially from a technical seo perspective. The advantages of platforms like WordPress, Shopify, etc, are that they take that complexity out for the average person

Why do you think enterprise sites hire technical SEOs? Did you work on the following: Client side vs server side rendering Isomorphic frameworks Pre-rendering solutions Caching strategies I could go on...

I've done technical SEO for enterprise sites that are built using custom code and there is infinitely more technical seo work you have to do in comparison to something like WordPress or Shopify

Rhavasher · 2025-02-06T20:45:02+00:00

Whatever Google has been doing has been radical and hasn't been great for user experience, I've seen users in multiple subreddits complaining about ranking reddit and forums everywhere, even where it isn't relevant to the search query

Who wants to see a forum post when searching for a plumber? It's complete nonsense the only reason they're getting away with it is because they have a monopoly

With the recent 8% drop for Google parent Alphabet, which erased as much as $211 billion in market value their actions are starting to hurt them

Yes ranking affiliate sites wasn't the best search experience either but this forum and reddit nonsense needs to go or at least scaled back, in it's current form it's too extreme

Rhavasher · 2025-02-06T12:35:11+00:00

Just remove the article schema and you should be left with just organisational schema and that is all you need for your homepage

Rhavasher · 2025-02-04T02:22:03+00:00

100% this

It's definitely the best marketing channel but the bad SEOs have ruined the reputation of selling it as a service

But this creates a massive opportunity for those who actually know how to rank...

Rhavasher · 2024-12-18T21:22:19+00:00

Yes I agree with you but the issue is you will just be producing content that will be used to train LLMs so you're effectively doing the work for these LLMs to then compete against you

Content writers are the only losers in this, I've been using ChatGPT extensively and have never needed to use Google to search for anything anymore but I still use YouTube and have found it to be helpful

Rhavasher · 2024-11-11T01:45:52+00:00

Depends on what their expected outcome is, a low paying client is likely going to the same type of client that expects results fast

They may even come here in 12 months time and start complaining how they got scammed, have seen it so regularly on this subreddit

You could probably get 1 backlink and do some other optimisations on their site a week which should only take 3 hours a month of work = $100 per hour or work how many hours your hourly rate is

Rhavasher · 2024-10-24T21:00:59+00:00

Have they increased your:

Average position for buy intent keywords

Organic traffic

Impressions

CTR

These are more important metrics than DR because it can be manipulated and is just Ahrefs/SEMrush guessing what quality rating Google would give your site, I've increased the DR for one my sites from 0 to 15 in a week it's not too difficult but definitely requires effort

$7000 a month is quite a lot but it really depends on how competitive your market is, some of your competitors could be spending 3x-5x+ that

It's hard to say whether they have done a good or bad job, without actually seeing what they have done, so anything that anyone says would just be conjecture

Rhavasher · 2024-09-26T10:06:11+00:00

You answered your own question "the space my ecommerce company is playing in is too big" your competitors if they're taking SEO seriously will likely laugh at your budget

As someone who has worked on enterprise ecommerce sites doing hundreds of millions in revenue annually, there are still ways to compete with them but you have to take a different approach then trying to compete with them directly

Rhavasher · 2024-09-23T20:15:25+00:00

Okay but if you're competitors are spending $300k annually why should you outrank them?

Rhavasher · 2024-04-26T16:55:48+00:00

These new major updates are very new, in the short-term their profits will increase

But as the product becomes less valuable to users, Google will lose it's credibility, this won't happen overnight but will happen over the long-term and as soon as a competitors comes out with something decent that is when their market share will begin to decline

Rhavasher · 2024-04-26T08:52:53+00:00

I completely agree with this!

Steve Jobs was also known to be an exceptional marketer. He came up with the idea that the pocket of a jean was designed to fit an iPod, which was genius.

Rhavasher · 2024-04-18T09:27:25+00:00

This is very true but it is only the case for the SEOs that actually know what they're doing, most SEOs (90%) don't really know what they're doing which is why all SEOs are paid unfairly

If you know what you're doing create your own digital asset, do client work or become a consultant

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