What to Look for When Choosing an SEO Company

With an ever-increasing number of consumers and businesses using Google and other major search engines to find products and services that they are looking to purchase, it is more important than ever to understand how to maximize your website’s presence within the organic results of the search engines for keywords that are most relevant to your business.

While SEO is often misrepresented as some kind of voodoo science, the reality is that it really isn’t that complicated, but it takes an awful lot of time, attention to detail and patience. For even a moderately difficult SEO project, it is necessary to do in-depth keyword research, an analysis of your competitor’s websites, to do a detailed audit of your on-page optimization and implement any necessary changes, and then of course there is link-building. The process of building inbound links to a website is hugely time-consuming, as it requires creating unique, and good quality content for techniques such as blogging or article marketing, or it requires hours and hours of performing repetitive tasks when using techniques such as web directory submission or social bookmarking.

Simply because of the time commitment required to execute an SEO project, many companies look to outsource the project. This can be great investment, but it can also be a big frustration and bigger waste of money if a sub-standard agency is chosen to do the work. With that in mind, here are a few key things to consider when hiring an SEO agency:

Specific Deliverables

If a company is asking you to sign off on a six or twelve month contract (not unusual for an SEO project), then you deserve to have them lay out a detailed and customized strategy for your website before earning your business. A few things that a proposal really out to include are: What specific keywords will be targeted? What landing pages will each keyword be optimized for, and how many pages of the website in total will be worked on? What does on-page optimization include (i.e. page titles, alt tags, analytics set-up, internal linking structure, etc)? What kinds of links will be built, and how many of type of link will be created?

All too often, SEO proposals are of a cookie-cutter variety, with ambiguous references to techniques and methodologies, but very little in the way of concrete deliverables.

Case Studies

Any company that guarantees a specific result is likely a sales organization masquerading as an SEO professional because there are so many variables on a given project that any experienced online marketer would know better than to guarantee any result. That being said, an SEO agency should be able to explain the rationale behind their methodology, and provide a few case studies of how they have employed similar methodology in the past in order to attain a positive result.

Reporting

Ultimately transparency is one of the most critical elements to establishing trust between an SEO vendor and a client. The strategies being employed should never be a secret, or withheld as “proprietary methodology.” A final suggestion would be to ask for samples of the reporting that will be provided throughout the project, and request how often updated reports will be provided. At a minimum, analysis of your website organic rankings, the status of in-bound link-building deliverables being completed, and an analysis of your Google Analytics or other analytics data should be provided on a monthly basis.