
Questions to Ask Your SEO Company Before You Hire
The online marketing and SEO industry is a highly competitive arena. Businesses from all niches vie for the top spot to place their products and services before a target audience doing search. With their techno savvy, competitors could easily swallow you up. If you’re running a business that operates only online, you need to master effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Time is probably not on your side, especially if you don’t have the necessary resources to run a team of Internet marketing specialists. If that’s the case, you would probably benefit from professional SEO services. Hiring an SEO agency will save you time and money, and will ensure you compete well in the cutthroat world of digital marketing. This is definitely a time to proceed with caution, however. Plenty of entities out there claim to be “experts in the field” of digital marketing or SEO. With hundreds of SEO companies on the market, how do you choose the right one? To simplify your search for the right SEO service, you need to ask the right questions. That will enable you to zero in on the company that can help you achieve your marketing goals — without bogging you down in the details and possibly breaking the bank. But first: What is SEO? SEO is the process of improving the online visibility of a website in a search engine’s organic section. It costs nothing to get listed, but to get to the top requires a thorough understanding of the process. SEO requires significant chunks of time and consistent labor to achieve first-page ranking on Google. With the rise of Social SEO — the inclusion of Social Media Signals in SEO calculations — there’s even more work to do now, just to be able to compete in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing. Can companies simply ignore SEO? Certainly not! Tests have shown that users pretty much depend only on the information that appears on the first page of Google and Bing searches. The rest usually go unregarded. So if web searchers don’t see you on Google’s first page, they’ll go to your competitors instead. That’s why you need to hire the right SEO company. Let’s look at some of the key questions you need to ask an SEO provider before you choose to hire them. What marketing services do you offer? Some SEO agencies have a bench that is both deep and wide. Some do not. It is best to determine if the agency even has the chops to do the work internally. And, if they are outsourcing any of the SEO, they should explicitly let you know which pieces are not being done in house. Many SEO agencies rely on partnerships for things like white label link building services and general white label SEO, but there are a whole host of other services to consider when hiring a full-service digital marketing agency: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services (on-page vs. off-page) Keyword research Content creation and optimization Landing page optimization Web design & development Conversion rate optimization Link building strategy development Social media marketing Content creation Community management SEM/PPC management Reporting or analytics for campaigns White Hat SEO compliance Understanding first what the agency can do, will help you determine whether you can rely on them for all your marketing needs or just a few select niche requirements for your site. Does your SEO experience extend to my industry? via GIPHY It’s crucial to learn not only how much experience a prospective SEO firm has; it’s at least as important to determine the depth of their experience in your particular industry. In addition, try to determine their rate of success in achieving their clients’ goals. How will you measure the success of my campaign? What are my KPIs (key performance indicators) and how can I trust you to provide campaign guidance on things like return on investment (ROI)? The success of an SEO campaign can be measured in a number of ways. The most important metrics to consider include website traffic, organic visibility in search engines, keyword rankings, conversions on the website and (most importantly) revenue driven and directly attributable to SEO efforts. Website traffic can be measured by looking at the number of visits and the duration of time spent on the website. It is important to look at both the number of visits, as well as the quality and origin of these visits to ensure that they are actually coming from organic search sources. Organic search visibility should be tracked to monitor how often the website appears on SERPs (search engine result pages) for relevant searches. Tracking keyword rankings is an important metric because it helps identify which keywords are driving traffic to the website. Website conversions can be measured by tracking the total number of conversions, as well as the conversion rate (the ratio between visitors and those who actually completed an action). Website revenue attributable to search should give you a clear indication of whether or not the SEO strategy is working. Keep in mind, not all organic traffic is good traffic. Make sure the metrics you use are not simply vanity metrics and that they actually drive real results. How do you build links to improve SEO? Building links for improving SEO is a critical component of any successful search engine optimization strategy. Links from other websites are one of the most important factors in determining how well your website performs in organic search results. By creating quality content and building relationships with other websites and high-profile online publishers, you should be able obtain highly relevant and authoritative links to your website which will help improve your links and rankings in the SERPs. But not all SEO companies have the right level of quality and quantity to do link building at scale. You should ask your SEO agency what link building strategies they use and how they will go about obtaining high-quality links from other websites, particularly those within your niche. Ask for examples of successful link