SEO is widely considered to be a business essential for just about every business and brand out there nowadays. Unsurprisingly the SEO profession has experienced a lot of growth and become an important service for many businesses to invest in. Hiring a good SEO company can have a big impact on your business, resulting in more traffic, the right customers and an improved reputation. Employing the wrong firm can have disastrous effects on your business though. Poor business practices can do more harm than good and result in your business suffering.
At its best, poor business practices can result in a dip in traffic, and might lead to you firing your SEO agency and starting all over again. At its worst, your website might drop off of the search results altogether, get penalized or see no results. You can avoid stumbling onto the wrong SEO agency by fielding candidates with some well-considered questions.
If you’re looking to hire a new SEO company then make sure you ask them some of these important questions.
How long will it take to rank?
This is a little bit sneaky, but this is actually a trick question. Any SEO company that makes ridiculous, outlandish promises like getting your business to rank within a month isn’t being upfront with you. There are no guarantees when it comes to SEO. There are many things a good SEO agency can do to quickly improve your ranking, but there is no one-size-fits all solution and no way to promise a client that they will definitely achieve a certain result in any set time period. A well-established company will definitely be able to give you an estimate of how long you can expect it to take before you see results, but this is by no means an exact science. The truth is, it takes time and consistency to see results.
What’s your back-linking strategy?
A confident SEO agency especially offering ecommerce SEO services will know all the tricks of the trade and understand the importance of backlinks. A sign of good company is when they have a great back-linking strategy in place. Proactivity and methods of outreach are key to achieving great results when it comes to back links, so ask about whether you can expect them to actively seek out new opportunities for your website.
What onsite optimization will they do?
Providing a good on page experience for your users is essential to getting good search engine results. On page metrics will tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not. If your starting from a poor place, such as with high bounce rates then it’s important for your chosen SEO agency to have a good track record with improvising on page optimization. Their approach to optimization cannot be all about smaller technical fixes, what will they do to better optimize your content or prevent people from spending on a few seconds on your page?
What reporting can you expect to see?
SEO can be a considerable investment, so it’s understandable that you’d want to see some tangible results. Get your agency to run you through their reporting plan. A robust reporting plan that uses a lot of data, analytics and is well presented and easily understood is so important for your own peace of mind and monitoring how well your agency is performing.
Ask them about how often you can expect reports, it’s fairly standard to have monthly updates in place. This will give you a good idea of how well things are progressing, and help both you and your chosen agency to identify when things go wrong.
