The hired SEO agency is only pulling in paid links — help
Context: The brand I'm working with hired an SEO agency to help grow authority.
Now, from what I understand, SEO = organic link building, which means we shouldn't be paying for links. Somehow, this 3rd-party agency is only bringing in paid links ($25, $50, sometimes $150/link) depending on what they and the webmaster they reached out to agreed on.
The agency also tried to provide content suggestions, but they're more tangent topics to what the brand actually provides. From what I understand, Google wants depth on topical authority and rewards it better than breadth/chasing keywords. I've read that Hubspot lost a lot of traffic with the recent updates because they had a lot of breadth-driven campaigns (among other things, of course).
I'm big on giving marketers/SEO an ample budget, but I think there's a need to rethink their efforts if it looks like we're bleeding money. How would you move about this?
Addendum: If it's okay that we also do some paid links, what is a good ratio of paid and unpaid? And am I asking the right questions here?
Thanks crowd,
jr. seo in training