Working SEO as a third party company: Because there are a lot of template based services providing sites to certain markets SEO experts are forced to work as third party providers. For example, an insurance franchise may provide all of its franchisees with a website via its template platform. But the Franchisee realizes over time that the franchisor has no ability to provide the most important component of bringing in new business via SEO. Often time the template company attempts to hide and protect crucial information from anyone else other than it development team.
The good news is even though it is challenging, if the franchisee works with the SEO company there is still a lot of successful actions that the SEO can perform and still generate great success for the client.
As the SEO expert here are some of the things you should seek to do:
Try to get access to the google analytics account for the actual site. This is really important to see what is really going on. Albiet, in our experience you may have to really push the template company to release this information. Note, that there are serveral outside / third party websites like semrush.com, majesticseo.com and others that will give you quite a bit of information.
Building a strong set of clean and vetted backlinks is always important. This work can be done outside of the template company and the actual client. This is critical for passing solid juice to the clients website and help to push them up the google list. The downside to this is that the template company because they don't know you are doing can disavow your quality links because they don't know where they are coming from. It is hard to fight against this type of sabotog but you have to work with your customer when you see this happening.
Keep an eye out for sabotage! In one case we had a client who's SEO was doing incredible and one day we saw all of the clients pages drop from the first page. What the hell happened. We check to see if google was penalizing us, nothing there. We analyzed a lot of normal things that could make this happen, still nothing. Then we did a search for a "robot.txt" file and there you go. The template company had placed a "robot.txt" file in the root folder that block everything from being indexed. We immediately alert the client of the sabbatoge and we where the told that the template company was pissed that they did not have the SEO work and had sabbotage us. Their hope was that we would not notice it so quickly and would not be able to see what went wrong. Obviously, the template company was in hot water.
Social Juice is so important and this can be done outside the template company, so make sure you have it.
Finally, keep trying to get access to the site to update the programming the way you need it. Even if you have to have the client request specific things. We have found that it is important to produce the programming snippets and have the client send them to the template company and say implement this and this particulare point on the page. You can then view the source of the page to assure it was done correctly.
Online Services IDM has had a lot of success working on franchise and template based sites over the past 22 years. Contact us today: 786 290 5955More Info on SEO
