When it comes to hiring the best SEO agency for your business, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. SEO expert Rand Fishkin shares his tips on what to know about SEO agency before you hire one.
We get to know about the pitfalls that we can avoid and advice that we can apply in choosing the best SEO agency for your business.
These are the mistakes that you should avoid in choosing an SEO company, consultant or agency.
High rankings in Google searches should not be your basis for choosing your SEO company. Logically, this may sound like a good idea, but in reality, the great SEO companies don’t need to rank high in search results.
These companies have so much on their plate, they get a ton of referrals from satisfied clients all the time and they are just overwhelmed by the work that they need to finish. They have a high retention rate and many are satisfied which gives them no time to focus on doing SEO for their website. This will result in getting a lower rank in the search results compared to their competitors who focus on their SEO.
This means that those who rank high in search results are not necessarily the best companies around. It’s possible that these are the agencies that don’t have that many clients so that they focus on SEO to get new ones.
You should also be wary of Top SEO lists. There are companies who are just aggregators. Their style is to rank high for terms like best SEO or best SEO companies and then they sell their listings to SEO firms. There are some SEO companies who buy the ranking from these aggregators. You can’t trust companies who bought their way to the top.
You should also avoid companies who claim that they have a secret technique that they use that only they can do. This is a red flag because SEO is a very transparent field of expertise and there is no secret sauce.
Before you choose your SEO agency the first thing that you need to establish are the goals you want to achieve with SEO. You should discuss things with your team, board, and owners if you need to and come up with specific targets. This will help you know if you are successful or not with your SEO efforts.
One good goal to strive for is to get traffic from a particular group of consumers. You can also use SEO in order to boost sales and revenue. You may also want to boost downloads or promote free trials.
Doing SEO in order to get more traffic is not a good goal. Traffic does not mean conversions which is why traffic from a specific type of audience should be the right goal.
Same is true for ranking, doing SEO just for the sake of high ranking does not always mean conversions to sales. Beating out a competitor for keywords is not a great goal as well, this does not also translate to revenue directly.
There are good questions that you can ask an SEO company before hiring them. You can inquire about the process that they use to accomplish the goals that you lay out for them.
Dig deeper by asking why they chose those steps compared to other tactics. Ask about their reporting and communication procedures.
It is also important to know what they work and resources they expect from your company in order to accomplish your SEO goals. There are important resources that you need to have like content creation bandwidth or visual tools that you should prepare when the SEO agency needs it. It is best to discuss this before you hire them so that you know what to expect from one another
