Below are samples of the most interesting things we heard through our research:

About Search Agencies:

I don’t know what my Search Agency is doing on a day-to-day basis – Australian high street bank

We don’t understand why the fees we are charged should increase when we spend more on search media – multiple sources including Australian health insurance provider, a high-street mortgage lending firm, several online retailers

When I tried to cancel my service, the search agency told us the campaign belonged to them and was their intellectual property – I lost all that information about my business – Importer and manufacturer of intimate apparel, running several websites under different brands

I don’t get to speak to the person who works on my campaign, just an account manager that doesn’t know the detail I need – leading Australian recruitment website

Our search agency didn’t want us to do any of the work, they wanted to take control away from us and it left us feeling uncomfortable – publicly funded not-for-profit organisation

After we were sold the service, we didn’t hear from the people that sold it to us – Online adventure travel company

A lot of fees we pay go toward some technology, and we don’t understand what it does or if we need it – Publicly owned Australian high-street Insurance brand

We don’t understand what we get for our money when we pay our search agency – Sydney-based Law firm

We don’t understand the terminology they use, it’s not explained to us – Australian national clothing and fashion distributor

They guaranteed us certain rankings, but we didn’t know what they were doing to get us there.  Six months after ending their service we are back at the start – online retailer, Australia,

We didn’t understand what our search agency was doing for us.  They told us each time we asked “we’re optimizing keywords, and doing bid management”.  When we were shown how to check the admin log in Google Adwords by a 3^rd party, we could see exactly what they were doing – over 3 months, they had added 23 keywords generating a grand total of an additional 83 impressions, and 1 click, costing 28c.  Over this time we had paid them $2,000 / month for their services.  – national Australian franchise business

We were told the technology they used was ‘magic’ and ‘just worked’ and had a complicated algorithm that had been invented on Wall Street.  We didn’t understand this as it could never be fully explained.  We also weren’t happy with the service so we eventually changed service provider.  Within weeks our performance improved significantly – specialist national recruitment service

We asked repeatedly for access to Google adwords.  We knew it existed, but we were not allowed permission for ‘security’ reasons of some sort.  Eventually, they allowed us access and we wanted to make some simple changes.  We weren’t allowed to, and it was so hard to get the agency to do the changes in the time we wanted, we ended up taking search inhouse. – top 5 Neilson-rated jobs site, Australia

Isn’t SEO all about content?  This is what we were led to believe by our web development firm that provided “SEO services”.  That was until we did some research and found out the importance of link-building, PR and Social media.  Now we have a more comprehensive program, our rankings, traffic and customers are building month-on-month. – Telecommunications reseller, Australia.

We did an audit on our account and found the results to improve literally overnight with the changes they made – how could we be losing this much money for so long relying on services that agencies provide?  We’ve since taken the campaign inhouse, we simply can’t afford the opportunity cost and that was the only lesson we needed – National Carrier Airline, Asia-Pac region

We conducted an audit, and found we were spending $70,000 per year on technology that we didn’t know was there, didn’t know what it actually does, and we don’t have access to.  Anyone running a search marketing campaign needs a second opinion – get it! – Leading high-street insurance provider

We thought our media agency had told us everything we needed to know about Google adwords – that was until we spoke to some specialist search agencies! – international brand

We thought our performance on search was fantastic, then we found so many spending discrepencies to what the performance reports said – Asia-pac wide online travel brand

We were making requests to make many simple changes to our search campaign.  Everything took so long – what should have been a few minutes could take days!  Eventually our search agency explained how keyword and URL encoding worked through the technology they were using. – International airline brand

I asked my Chief Marketing Officer what we were doing about Search, Google, and all that.  Apparently we have technology from Wall Street with an algorithm, so all is “OK”. As a test, I searched on Google for one of our key branches and several of our competition came up first – we were half-way down the page.  I’m not exactly sure what the Wall Street technology does for us, but the reason I asked the question in the first-place was that the numbers from marketing were missing target.  I’m not an expert in Google, but I could see evidence of something going wrong already. – Senior Financial Manager – Top Four Bank, Australia

Apparently, the search firm we have hired has added so many keywords, I can search for ‘broom’, ‘my name’, or pretty much anything out of the dictionary and we’re there buying the keyword.  I can see the problem with relevance, but why are we paying over $40,000/month in fees for this service? - Top brand auto site, Australia

We paid a fee for SEO link-building, I think around $200 – we got 1,000 links inside a week and within about a month our ranking for some keywords starting increasing.  After 12 months, the ranks started dropping.  We can’t get our ranking higher again for these keywords, it’s like Google has blocked us in some way – marketing agency, Australia

About Search consultants or employees:

They left the business, and we didn’t understand enough about what they were doing – we are totally in the dark – National Mobile / Telco provider

We believed our campaign manager was fantastic. That was until we hired an agency and they improved the performance several-fold.  It was difficult to answer questions about the lost opportunity. – Australian-based not-for-profit organization

I just wish we had some best-practice, it’s like we’re paying the team to learn what many of our competition and search agencies know already.  We’re not a search marketing firm, we need to use one – Foreign Exchange business, Australian owned

We had a consultant come in for one day and make a few changes to our PPC campaign – it improved 20% in ROI the NEXT DAY.  We couldn’t believe the improvement and asked why – apparently there was something they had learnt from a business operating in an industry that couldn’t be more remotely related to ours. – OEM, owned overseas, operating in Australia

Our business has multiple brands, we need to operate a strategy that covers many keywords across multiple brand names.  We had our inhouse team try and produce the results we wanted.  After 18 months of limited success we went to pitch to a number of agencies.  Apparently there is a best-practice strategy for such a situation.  We bought it.  Within another 6 months, we were beginning to own the search engine results page with a number of our terms on highly competitive terms.  With an inhouse team we would never have got there – Leading vehicle rental business, Australia and New Zealand.