If you need to change your SEO company, you want to make sure it’s as painless and straightforward as possible. In the first two articles in this series, we looked at how to choose a new SEO provider, covering the steps you need to take to make sure that you’re not going to end up in a worse situation; and then we looked at what information and resources you want to get for your new agency in order for them to start turning things round as quickly as possible.
In this final part of the series, we’re going to look at tying up all the loose ends, and also what part you and your business can play in making sure the new partnership is more successful than the last one.
Housekeeping
When you’ve finally parted company with your old SEO company, and your new provider has everything they need and has got to work on your new SEO project, you might think that the you’ve done everything you need to and it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for your rankings to go up. The truth is, there’s probably still a bit of housekeeping you need to take care of, now you’ve made the switch from your old SEO company.
We’re not for a second suggesting that your old provider will do anything underhand with the access they were given to your site, and/or the login details for the various other services you provided them with so they could do their job, but for the security of your website and the other, related accounts, here are some of the loose ends you’ll want to tie off:
Website logins – Your website might be based on WordPress or another popular Content Management System, and your previous SEO company were more than likely given a login for the platform, so they were able to complete the various on-page optimisation tasks as part of your SEO project. As they no longer need this access, to avoid any security issues in the future, you should look at deleting the user account you set up for them, or changing the main admin password, if this was shared with them
Google Analytics – Any good SEO provider will have requested access to the Google Analytics account for your website, they may even have set this up for you if you didn’t already have it. In most cases, where you simply added them as a user with permission to analyse and/or edit your Analytics setup, you can simply remove them as a user. If you shared or gave them access to a single Google account that was used for your Analytics, you’ll need to make sure you log into the account and change the password. Be aware, this will change the login password for all the services linked to that Google account.
Google Webmaster Tools – Similar to Analytics, Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to add users who are able to access and make changes to the account for your website. This is also something that most SEO companies will request access to, so if you added your old provider you’ll need to go in and remove them. Again, if you simply shared the login details with them, you’ll need to update the password to the Google account to restrict their access.
FTP accounts – You may have created an FTP account for your SEO provider, or given them access to your main FTP account, so they were able to upload things like your XML sitemaps, or other web files. Once you’ve checked there’s no information in their FTP folder that you want to keep, you should delete the account. If you gave them the login details for the main FTP account, then make sure you change the password so they will no longer have access.
As we’ve already mentioned, if your old SEO company still has access to any of the above resources, it’s highly unlikely that they would intentionally or otherwise cause a security issue that threatens your website or your data, but some simple housekeeping means that this is something you never have to worry about.
Good SEO is a Partnership
Once you’ve finally done everything required to transition over to your new SEO company, you can start to look forward to what will hopefully be a much more successful relationship. To ensure that’s the case, it might be worth taking a bit of time to honestly reflect on why it didn’t work out with your last SEO company.
Any SEO project has a much better chance of success if the client and the SEO company treat it as a partnership. So it might be worth thinking about whether there is anything more you could have done, or things you could have done differently, which might have made the SEO more effective. For the best results, expect to be more involved with your new SEO provider, and work with them to make sure your SEO project is a success this time.
We hope you’ve found this three-part series on changing SEO companies useful. If you’re looking for a new SEO provider and would like to find out more about our services, fill out the enquiry form and we’d be happy to get back in touch and discuss your requirements in more detail.