Allowing SEO company access to Analytics

[MelissaLB]

Hi there, I searched around and couldn't find another post like this.

We'd like to hear some opinions on allowing an SEO company access to our websites G Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

What is standard these days and is there an amended way to provide these stats to protect our information, such as exporting to excel spreadsheet, allowing only limited access, etc.

We are looking to hear about the potential risks of allowing access to a 3rd party company who has offices in Canada (where we are located), overseas and possibly has partner companies or employees in India.

We do not want to put ourselves at risk of of information simply being farmed and sold so what steps should we take to ensure the safety of our information both during our relationship with an SEO company and if and when we decide to terminate the relationship?

Thank you for any input on this.

[Kendo]

I get all sorts of spam from SEO companies. They are all looking for work but none of them seem to provide a personalized service. In fact most of the emails that we get are from spruikers acting on behalf of what they claim is a large organisation comprised of 100s of SEO experts.

Most of them are not even honest about where they operate from and have limited knowledge about the service they are selling. Would you entrust sensitive information to these people?

How do you know that your SEO team doesn't also serve your competitors?

If they are a large team, the odds that they do serve your competitors is actually quite high. I will never forget the one who contacted us looking for business, and the company that they used as a reference was none other than our main competitor. That sales person, while trying to impress us with a psuedo report on our site, didn't even notice what the site was about.

[mcotten]

You can share your Google Analytics account to another Google account holder with access to reports only. As the administrative account holder you can remove them at any time.

That being said, I would not give that access to a seo consultant that solicited you because most of those are not reputable.

If you contacted an seo company because you did a search and they had the ranking and/or because of a reputable client list then I wouldn't hesitate to provide them access to your Google Analytics as they will need to run their own reports to evaluate your website.