Hiring an SEO company or agency to improve your rankings in search engines isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. You need to do some research and obtain proposals from a few different agencies before making a decision. You also need to ask questions on what strategies they will be using and if something doesn’t sound right then move on to the next agency.
Here is my top 5 points for you to consider before hiring an SEO Agency:
1. Are they guaranteeing results? SEO agencies can not guarantee a number 1 position or any position in search engine results. Only the search engines can guarantee this. The algorithms and SEO strategies change often and a professional SEO company will be up to date with these changes and will know what strategies work and while they can give examples of what they have achieved for other clients they can not guarantee anything. If an agency is guaranteeing results, run now!!
2. Will they provide full Keyword Research along with an analysis of this research before targeting any keywords? Is the SEO agency going to conduct a full and comprehensive keyword research for your business before starting on any work? You want to make sure that you are going to be ranking for keywords that are going to bring traffic to your website. And as the business owner these keywords along with the research should be disclosed to you. There is no point ranking number 1 for a keyword that no one is searching for – it isn’t going to help your business at all. This then relates back to point 1 above – if they are guaranteeing rankings, are they rankings that don’t count and are super easy to rank for anyway? You want to know, exactly what keywords are being targeted and how many people are using those keywords to search in Google and other search engines every month. This will then give you an idea of what traffic those keywords will bring to your website.
3. Is content marketing included in their strategy? Whether they are doing it for you or they are working with you on content marketing, you should have this included in your strategy. SEO can not be effective if you are not adding regular updated content to your website. And the best way for this to be achieved is by way of blog posts.
4. Is the SEO Agency promising 100’s of backlinks every month? My first question would be how are they obtaining these backlinks? Poor quality and bad backlinks can harm your website very quickly. While backlinks are still beneficial for SEO purposes you want to make sure that the links are only being placed on other reputable and relevant websites. If an Agency is promising 100’s of new backlinks every month then I would be very concerned that they are not good backlinks. If you want to keep an eye on what your SEO Company is doing for you, check your Google Webmaster Tools accounts for details of backlinks or you can use the free site www.opensiteexplorer.org by entering your website URL.
5. Do they have access to the admin section of your website and making changes? Any SEO Agency doing their job correctly will need to make amendments to your website such as fixing broken links, adding in meta tags and updating content on pages. If they don’t have access to your website or aren’t asking you to do these things then they aren’t doing their job effectively.
SEO work can do damage to your website rankings which can either be irreversible or take a long time to correct if it isn’t carried out correctly. Please don’t jeopardise your business. Ensure you are working with a company that is reputable and has a proven track record.
Once you hire an SEO Company you just can’t set and forget either. You need to be checking their reports, checking any backlinks they are creating along with knowing what other tactics they are using to ensure everything is being done to a standard that is acceptable.
Want to learn more about search engine optimisation and the strategies that are currently working? Check out our membership program, the Webonize Inner Circle, where we will teach you all about SEO, along with other online marketing strategies, that we currently use for our clients.
If you think others will find this information useful, please share by clicking on the share buttons below.
Fiona Neumann says
Great blog Jayne. There are so many companies out there at the moment promising this and that, but these are great tips. Thanks
Jayne Day says
Thank you Fiona. Much appreciated.
Alberto Miachell says
Hi Jayne. I really enjoy this article. Choosing an SEO company in recent time has actually become a very difficult and annoying task ahead website owners just because very rare numbers of reliable SEO companies are existed here. They should need to ask these questions to SEO agency before hiring them.
Searchical SEO says
Regarding point 3 – content marketing is a big one, having great content on your website makes the whole task of outreach much easier. The content has to be great though and not any old content that has already been written about a thousand times will do!