How to hire an SEO agency during a pandemic?

With the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, many small businesses functioning through online has gotten a significant drawback in their website traffic. While most of the small business owners who have been taken care of their website by themselves are now struggling to cope with achieving their desirable web traffic for the past 3 months. The variation in the search trends post-pandemic has put businesses down to a larger extent.

An SEO campaign should possess an excellent content strategy that sticks to Google’s guidelines. If your site is not using the right SEO methods or not sticking on to SEO guidelines, your website may miss from Google’s eyesight to rank on the first page. Hence you should hire a professional SEO agency to drive your business in such a crisis. The following are the parameters that help you in hiring the best SEO agency during the Covid-19 crisis.

LIST OF DO’ S

1.    KNOW THE PRICE STRUCTURE

The SEO campaigns are usually done by either Onetime payment method or retainer-based method. The onetime process involves professional technical audit, finding duplicates, and broken links. While the retainer method involves an agency working for your business for several hours, perform regular checks, yet there don’t be regular reporting to the business owner in this payment method.

2.    SEARCH FOR REFERENCES

Before signing an SEO agency, you should ask many numbers of references or previously handled clients by the specific agency. This process is vital because each agency is well versed in one or two specific domains, and in other fields, they might be weak. To counter this issue, you should be aware of the core domains (strength) of the agency you hire; to avoid getting fewer results in the future.

3.    KNOW THE BASICS

Just because you are hiring an SEO agency to increase the web traffic or build your business, it does not mean that you should ignore monitoring SEO. To be more precise, you should know all the basic concepts in SEO like H1 tags, H2 tags, on-page, off-page optimisation and a few others, to monitor how an agency works in the testing period as specified in the agreement. Hence, you will have the provision to cut off the agency in the testing period itself. If they are not up to the mark, you can hire a far better SEO agency.

4.    UNDERSTAND THE ROLE OF SEO

Generating organic traffic through SEO is a slow and steady process. If any agency gives the oath to deliver you the results in a week or a two, you should wake up from the fancy dream and delve into reality. Hence, choose and hire an SEO agency that assures to deliver the organic results only in a span of 3 to 6 months with the help of backlinks, guest post and a few other methods.

LIST OF DONT’ S

1)    AVOID AUTOMATED PACKAGES

An automated package that does SEO for your business might sound a boost to your SEO dream, and it is simple to buy as well. There are plenty of such SEO packages available that can pull data, analyse the SEO and do much more. Yet, none of the SEO automated tools can perform the SEO as a professional SEO agency does & these tools could even bring down the traffic of your website which was well above before using these tools. Hence, hire an SEO agency that follows manual SEO process.

2)    HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR OWN

Agencies generate organic traffic and perform marketing for your business by various modes. In fact, the top brands in India have third party agencies to accomplish the goal they are looking for, yet these agencies own the websites of top-notch brands. It might be suitable for big brands, but not for Start-ups and medium scale businesses. Hence, you should always have control over your website, and you shouldn’t hand over the access of your site to a third-party agency, especially while hiring an SEO agency to generate traffic.

3)    DON’T HESITATE TO SPEND MONEY

Spending money on SEO is similar to gambling. If you invest in on a qualified SEO agency, you can end up receiving the assured level of results more than what you have been expecting for a long time. When such a situation prevails, you should never hesitate to spend money on the certified agencies.

4)    OPEN TO SOURCES

Never be confined to the process of hiring an SEO agency. One of the best things that you can adapt to your SEO marketing strategy is diversifying technique. While google drives 75% of the customers through search engines it does not mean that the other 25% should be left away. So, hire an SEO agency that focuses on all the facets of SEO to drive 100% results to your business.