No doubt people struggle to find the right SEO company or agency. Below are our tips on how to choose the right SEO company for you.
But if your potential SEO company is not asking you the right questions, then that in our opinion is a red flag.
Selecting the right agency is difficult. It can definitely be confusing, to say the least. I want this article to help you ask the right questions and get the right information to ensure you make the best possible decision. Money is at stake. A lot of money to be quite honest and every business who is about to engage with an SEO Agency should know what to ask and even follow up questions.
Hopefully, these SEO focused questions help you:
- How do you decide on the right monthly spend for my business? What is it based on?
- What should I expect to see in 12 months’ time? What ROI is feasible?
- How much work do I need to do each month? How involved should I be?
- Are you going to make website changes to my website? Do I need a website developer?
- Increasing traffic is important. But how are we measuring and improving User Experience?
- How can I continually improve my website’s conversion rate? Will you be providing recommendations on how I can achieve this?
- What SEO tools do you use when assessing my website each month?
- Do you provide content marketing suggestions? How often should I post each month?
- Are you performing regular competitor analysis each month? I need to know what my competitors are doing?
- How much experience will the team or professional have who will be responsible to HELP ME grow my business?
How do you decide on the right monthly spend for my business? What is it based on?
Working out what the right spend is crucially important. This should be based on your goals and objectives, competitor analysis and how difficult it is to rank in Google’s top 3 positions (not just the first page). Even though we offer SEO Packages on our website, we like to assess how much work is required to get you in the top 3 positions for major keywords and work out how much work is required to create you a comprehensive content marketing strategy. In addition, measure how many links your major competitors have VS your current backlink profile.
What should I expect to see in 12 months’ time? What ROI is feasible?
ROI is fundamental for all marketing spend and SEO is no different. A clear path for the first 12 months is critical to breaking up the SEO process into a 12-month campaign block as this would be your first major milestone. There is no debate among the SEO community that SEO is a long term strategy, but there should always be a set expectation of return in the first 12 months. Agreeing on a feasible 12 month ROI is both critical for the SEO Agency and the client so there are no surprises. Working towards a common objective is the goal for all parties and stakeholders involved.
How much work do I need to do each month? How involved should I be?
This is key because you may need to know how many additional hours of work is required from your end or your company’s end each month. Helping your SEO Agency to grow YOUR BUSINESS in our 13-year experience is essential. No business owner or owners should ever have the mindset or expectation that success is one hundred percent of the responsibility of the SEO agency. We have found that an entrepreneur or leadership team’s involvement in the SEO campaign to be crucial in providing feedback and a unique perspective they only can. Not to mention, their ability (as the client) to run the business, scale and close leads to be unquestionably important.
Are you going to make website changes to my website? Do I need a website developer?
This is a great opportunity to work whether your SEO provider has a web developer than can make SEO changes or if you prefer to use your own developer who most likely built your website. I would recommend all clients to use their own web developer first who built their website. They should know it inside and out.
Increasing traffic is important. But how are we measuring and improving User Experience?
User experience is fundamental to improving your conversion rate and providing your customers with a better website experience (in particular on MOBILE) than your competitors. Using tools like HotJar and referring to UX Checklists like this guide will go along way to maximising your SEO traffic growth and turn a higher percentage of visitors into customers. Clicks and impressions are important, but for clients, the most important metric is enquiries/leads.
How can I continually improve my website’s conversion rate? Will you be providing recommendations on how I can achieve this?
As mentioned above, measuring your current performance is the key to improving your performance in the future. Setting the right goals in your Google Analytics is also extremely important. What are you measuring and what is a true measure of success in 12 months. Is it contact form enquiries, sales in your online store or phone calls? Whatever it is, this needs to be measured before it can improve. How to go about improving your conversion rate could require extensive analysis such as A/B testing, multivariant analysis, and other tools mentioned by optimizely.
What SEO tools do you use when assessing my website each month?
Tools your SEO team uses can help with making important decisions that will inevitably make or break an SEO campaign. Like anything, tools are used to help reach an objective. Whether it is a hammer or my favourite SEO Tool, ahrefs.com, tools are necessary. SEO is no different. There are many SEO tools on the market and SEO’s will favour some over others. A list of our favourite tools are ahrefs, Google Search Console, Analytics, Screaming Frog, Google search results (I know, watch this video), Advance Web Ranking and a few others.
Do you provide content marketing suggestions? How often should I post each month?
Content marketing is such a highly important SEO strategy that by not doing it, can be quite detrimental to your business growth on Google & Bing. Building blog content is not enough. Keyword research is first critical to understanding WHAT YOUR TARGET MARKET is searching for before creating any blog content. It is also our recommendation to create 2-3 articles per month to the highest possible standard vs creating more content that is far lower in quality.
With so much content on the web, creating content for the sake of it and churning it out doesn’t make sense. We would recommend building content in your blog and embed YouTube videos from your YouTube channel into your articles. See point 3 in this article as to why this is an important strategy.
[ctt template=”1″ link=”UqK_4″ via=”no” ]SEO is not a quantity game as much as it is a QUALITY game. ~Andrew P Glyntzos [/ctt]
Are you performing regular competitor analysis each month? I need to know what my competitors are doing?
If your SEO agency or professional does not know what your competitors are doing each month, is a massive detriment to your long term progress. How many links are they generating? What content are they creating (is it generating buzz with your target market), what keywords are they ranking for? And many others. Make sure they are reporting this data into your monthly SEO reports so you can determine what strategies you should be focusing on going forward.
How much experience will the team or professional have who will be responsible to HELP ME grow my business?
Another, unfortunately, infrequent question. Who is responsible for your growth is massively important. How many years of SEO experience does he or she have? Are they working on any of your online competitors or have experience getting results for similar websites to yours? Knowing who is working on your campaign and their professional BIO is vastly critical. Not everyone can have 13 years experience in SEO, but difficult campaigns in highly competitive industries should have a team with a substantial amount of experience. 3 years or more.
Final thoughts:
SEO is tough. Getting results is tougher. You want to make sure you have a highly competent SEO team working on your website that will have the necessary tools, experience and resources to get the growth your business needs to not only survive but thrive.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email (andrew @ omegadigital.com.au) or contact us today.
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