Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial if you want to have visibility online. In a digital age where online presence is valued, and various platforms are saturated, it’s highly beneficial for your business to be seen in any related and appropriate search, rather than merely being present.
If you don’t have the skills to do this, it might be time to hire an SEO company. In addition, hiring one can give you more time to focus on other business aspects while they take care of improving your search rankings, website, and user experience.
Selecting the right SEO company can be challenging, so here are five considerations in choosing an SEO company to hire for your business:
1. Your goals vs. their services
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Before you start looking for an SEO company, you need to know what your goals are in terms of SEO. It’s critical that you know what you want to achieve, so that you can evaluate if their services match what you need.
Your goals also need to be measurable metrics to track the progress of your site easily and a reliable company will work with you to personalize their services to meet what you’re aiming for.
Here are examples of SEO goals:
- Ranking. If you want to improve your ranking, specify if you’re going to develop it on a local, national, or international scale.
- Traffic. Determine what kind of increase in traffic do you want to achieve at a certain period.
- Conversion. Simply having traffic on your site won’t help your business unless you can persuade your audience to take action. Set goals for how many newsletter sign-ups or product purchases you’d like to get for a specific timeframe.
2. Link-building strategy
Linking plays a significant role in search results, and you should ask SEO companies about their link building techniques before you decide to hire one.
Consider a Link Building Service compared to dodgy methods that could be using black-hat backlinking because you don’t want Google and other search engines to penalize you for playing dirty.
Some questions to ask SEO companies are:
- What kind of links do you build?
- How do you build those links?
- How many links do you include in an article or content?
3. Communication
Communication plays a crucial role in any successful project. When choosing the right SEO partner, you have to observe how they communicate with you – the details, the frequency, and the sense of urgency – because this could either save you from frustrations or create them.
Here are some ways to identify how an SEO communicates:
- Check the reviews about their company, not only on their own websites but also on other platforms.
- When you send an inquiry, notice how soon they can respond to you and how their replies are constructed.
- Observe if the company is willing to disclose exactly how they perform their services rather than giving vague answers all the time.
- Besides email, check if they have other communication methods that you can use in case you don’t receive any email response.
- Ask how often you can have meetings with their team.
4. Experience
There are so many digital agencies and individuals who claim that they are SEO experts and can help your business like no other. Remember to do some research about a company’s experience with SEO because you might put this complex task in the wrong hands and won’t get any results.
Here are some tips to check their experience:
- Look at how well they rank on search results. If they appear on the last of search engine results pages (SERPs), you might want to think twice with their claims. As an SEO company, you’d think that they’d do well in search engines themselves.
- Look at how they perform their SEO through their website – the user experience and the content, for example.
- Request for case studies from previous clients they’ve had.
- Inquire about services they’ve done for your competitors. If they’ve worked with your competition, it’s highly possible that they have experience in your industry.
- Look at what other companies they work with. SEO companies usually have a portfolio or their clients’ logo on their websites.
5. Cost of the Service
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Hiring the right SEO company can cause you to spend less in the long run compared to dealing with it alone without the expertise. You want to ensure that you get quality services at a reasonable amount.
A higher price doesn’t necessarily equate to better results when it comes to digital marketing, and very low prices could mean inexperience or incompetence. Compare SEO cost across agencies before hiring one.
Final thoughts
Choosing the right SEO to hire is essential, not only to improve your online presence but also to ensure that your investment doesn’t go to waste. You have to know what you want and how they can help you, do a lot of research to understand how they do things, and pay attention to things that will matter most when you do hire them, like open communication, affordability, and their expertise.