What to Look for When Choosing an SEO Agency

When choosing a new SEO agency for your business it is important that the SEO company you choose for SEO is both reputable and strategic. Otherwise, the number of visits to your designated site will plummet before your very eyes. A good SEO firm will provide you with an increase in organic traffic, increased Google rankings, more web forum congestion, and an overall increase in revenue for your business. For those of you who are still on the fence about paying for a firm to control your company’s SEO consider the following:

• An SEO agency does more than just SEO. They provide you with content marketing, social media posts, email marketing, etc.
• Using an SEO company allows you to have more time to focus on running your business.
• They improve your rankings on all major web browsers: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

When first searching for a reliable SEO organization it doesn’t take much detective work to see which companies are more reliable than others by looking at reviews and website presentation. Once you filter out some of the bad eggs for SEO firms, take a quick look at these 5 tips and tricks for certifying a perfect pick for SEO.

1. Find an SEO company that tracks your data: To locate the best answers for your one of a kind business, you will need to utilize a SEO firm that can track and measure the majority of your organization information. This incorporates telephone calls, contact frames, site visits, navigate rates, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. To pick the correct business systems for your organization, it’s essential to settle on choices based off of results and not pure instinct.
2. Clearly define your SEO goals: In order to find the right team for the job, you first need to figure out which areas of your online presence you want to improve. You may require a radical new site or you may simply require SEO. In the case that you don’t know which territories you have to enhance, complete a digital marketing analysis. A decent office will have the information expected to demonstrate which zones are most advantageous to center around.
3. Make sure they know your SEO budget: Before you put your resources into an administration you can’t bear, remember to design out your financial plan early. It is a good idea to ask about package deals and price ranges early on to see if the service is in your price range. Most SEO companies will have a variety of monthly packages to choose from, which should make your life easier.
4. Get SEO Company Reviews and Case Studies: A standout amongst other approaches to locate a respectable organization is to peruse their testimonials and online surveys. You will frequently discover these reviews by investigating the organization’s site or by looking for them on destinations like Google, Yelp, or even Glassdoor.
5. Schedule a Consultation: No doubt, the organization will be happy to pull up some examination on your industry and walk you through a few strategies they have utilized on past customers. An interview will enable you to figure out the sort of individuals in their group and their level of enthusiasm and inventiveness for your business.

DON’T MAKE THESE MISTAKES 

Trusting “Top SEO” Lists

Many newcomers make the mistake of visiting a “Top Ten” site for the best SEO organizations without seeing through their lack of prestige. Many reference sites like this will promote a site like bestSEO.com or topSEO.com that doesn’t have any qualifications for operating social media marketing. There are a number of these types of websites that are essentially just aggregators. Their business model is they try and rank for terms like this, and then they sell those listings to SEO firms and companies.

Using the Pay-to-Play Scheme

What do I mean by this? This is essentially agreeing with an SEO firm, before seeing results, that you will pay a certain amount of money to get your website to number 3 on Google and even more money to get to number 1. The pay-to-play scheme is not trustworthy for you as a consumer of SEO companies. You’d never go to a list where the restaurants just paid. That would give you the conglomerates and the people who can afford to spend the most and the worst. Don’t trust those types of lists.

Having the Belief That There is a Secret Solution

If an SEO company boasts about their secret techniques for optimization and ranking on Google, chances are that they don’t know what they are talking about. If you ask, “How do you do it,” and they say, “I’m sorry I can’t tell you, it’s a secret or it’s proprietary,” that is a very, very bad sign. No one has a secret proprietary process. SEO is a very, very open field. It’s well understood. It has origins in a lot of secrecy, but that is not the way it is today and you should never accept that as an answer. Any type of unknown variable is a red flag.

Trusting Google as Your SEO Filter

It seems like high rankings on Google should indicate skill, but unfortunately it usually indicates a poor referral model. What happens is that most of the simplistic, great organizations, the ones that are popular, the ones that do reliably incredible work and get awesome referrals, they don’t really need to rank here. They’re overwhelmed with clients all the time because their clients refer them to people and lots of people in their network refer folks to them. They have a high flow of customers. Lots of individuals are extremely fulfilled. They’re profiting and they’re inconceivably occupied, so they don’t spend that much time advancing their own particular site to get new customers. On some occasions SEO businesses seem to desperately try to get their site to the top of Google when they have no clients. Be weary of these companies.

Promises Made by Weak SEO Firms: 

• Your site’s traffic will double in a month.
• You will see results overnight.
• You will instantly see new leads.
• We will provide you with X number of backlinks.

What questions should I ask a SEO firm to know that they are the right pick for me?

• What is the cancellation process? This is my personal pick for the number one question to ask your SEO firm right before buying. It may seem like a rude thing to ask right off the bat but it is tremendously important. If the firm does not show results after a few months it will not faze you because you already have an escape plan.
• What details should I know regarding my current contract? This question will help surface some underlying information about your new service that you may have not known about before. Re-read your contract before signing off. What all does it encompass?
• Do I have to share the ownership of my website? Since most professional SEO firms have ownership clauses built into client contracts this question is important to consider. If you leave your contract early, you could face the penalty of losing the free websites that company produced for you.
• Have you done SEO work for companies like mine? The answer to this question might surprise you in a horribly unexpected way. Different industries have different SEO requirements, which means you need to find an SEO provider that knows your specific industry backward and forwards.
• How will we communicate? How often will we communicate? Last but not least, remember to stay active with your service members. Schedule meeting dates early so that you are not caught off guard when you find out that meetings might be few and far between.

4 Things to Help You Finally Choose an SEO Firm

1. Referrals: If you read plenty of great referrals then you know that your website will be in good hands. Also, make sure the source is credible before moving ahead with your decision. Reliability is everything when it comes to practically any service.
2. Communication: If your communication style does not match your provider take caution. Even if everything else is good, if you walk away from them feeling a little frustrated, maybe you got the things you needed, but it didn’t flow smoothly, I would suggest that maybe that’s a cultural mismatch and you should look for another provider.
3. Trust: The trust that you form with the company from day one is immensely important. If you have been referred to a specific SEO firm, can you trust the person who gave you the lead? Can you even trust yourself? I might have gone too far, but you get the point.
4. Price: You should expect to pay some upfront payment and then some ongoing monthly fee. There’s usually a time at which the payment will recur and the contract will renew. It’s pretty similar to a lot of other services, consulting types of agreements, so you should expect that. If you’re seeing very non-standard stuff, that can be a bad thing sometimes, but not always. A lot of times SEOs have more creative pricing, and that’s all right.

Pro Tips

• If you think that the SEO company that you are about to be partnered with seems a bit too pricy you can always hire an in-house person, maybe who’s more beginner-level and coach that person.That can work well, again especially if you have that budget to bring that person in-house.
• SEO is a very competitive field considering that page one on Google gets 95% of user clicks on a typical search. If you can’t afford to do SEO or to engage in it seriously, it may not be all that valuable to go from ranking on page five for a lot of your key terms to page two or the bottom of page one. Unless you have the budget and the energy to really commit yourself to SEO, it might be a channel you consider later down the road.
• Do not approach SEO by simply saying that you want more traffic for the sake of having more traffic. If you say, “We want more traffic because we know search traffic converts well for us and here are the statistics on it,” that is perfectly fine. Now it’s a revenue driving goal.

Watch Out for White-Hat Practices

Ask your agency what type of strategies they use and have them explain it to you in terms that you understand. Any strategies that seem manipulative or unethical should pose immediate concern. Ethical companies will have no problem answering your questions and explaining the details of their strategy so that there are no qualms with their practices.

My Picks for SEO:

1. IdealDigital: IdealDigital boasts that they are “a creative digital agency” on their homepage and all of their clients seem to agree. They offer strategies for SEO & lead generation, web & mobile design, and digital strategy for ranking number one on Google.
2. Ignite Visibility: Ignite Visibility is bound to show up when you search Google for the top ten best SEO firms. They divide their services into earned media and paid media where they take a look at different aspects on Google that promote a business appropriately.
3. Directive Consulting: “The Search Marketing Agency” is proclaimed to be a reliable company for SEO. With plenty of case studies available on their sites, Directive Consulting’s prestige is shown through their completed work. They also do vlogs on YouTube for a comprehensive look at plenty of tips to help your business look more official.