5 Tips to Help You Choose the Right SEO Company to Improve Your Rankings
Source – Forbes
It’s one thing to understand that you need to make an investment in SEO in order to improve your rankings, drive traffic to your website, and jumpstart your revenue. But eventually you have to transition from theoretical knowledge to proactivity. In other words, you need to implement a sound SEO strategy.
If you’re like most business owners, you don’t have time for another “thing.” Your plate is already filled with dozens of other responsibilities, especially on the marketing and lead generation front. So, the last thing you want to do is personally develop and execute a comprehensive SEO strategy from the ground up. But there’s good news: You don’t have to!
By hiring an SEO company, you can offload this responsibility onto someone else’s plate and reap all of the rewards. It’s just a matter of finding the right company to work with.
Proceed with Caution
Everyone and their mother think they can start an SEO company. It looks like easy money with low overhead, so it attracts wannabe gurus and inexperienced marketers. But the reality is that SEO is hard, technical work.
The easiest way to differentiate the good from the bad is to study the techniques they use. And based on these findings, you should be able to put most SEO companies into one of two buckets:
There’s certainly some middle ground – typically referred to as gray hat SEO – but most companies will fit into one of these categories. But even if you whittle your options down to white hat SEO companies, there’s still so much competition. How do you choose the perfect fit?
5 Traits and Factors to Consider
Okay, let’s talk specifics. Here’s how you can vet a white hat SEO company to find out if they’re the right fit:
1) Years in Business
Experience isn’t always a perfect measure of skill, but it is a great indicator of their quality of work. Bad businesses get run out of town/off the web fairly quickly. Good SEO companies get repeat business.
2) Referrals and Reputation
Any SEO company can create a nice landing page and advertisement that self-promotes their services. You want an SEO company that also has good referrals and a positive reputation in the industry. Spend time reading third-party reviews and independent testimonials. You can also ask other business owners for recommendations.
3) Dedicated Account Management
The last thing you want is to hire an SEO company and then have serious communication issues that leave you frustrated and uninformed. That’s why it’s recommended that you only pursue options like this Long Island SEO company, which provides dedicated account management. This means you’ll have a direct point of contact to provide updates and answer all questions related to your campaign.
4) Detailed Reporting
Your SEO company should provide you with regular updates and robust reporting. (If they shy away from giving you the analytics behind the campaign, consider why this is.) Don’t expect the numbers to be impressive from day one, but they should steadily improve over time.
5) Good Answers to the Right Questions
Always have a consultation or interview with an SEO company prior to signing on. And in this meeting, ask questions like these:
Listen to their answers and take it all in. If the answers are satisfactory, you may have just found your SEO company. If they leave more to be desired, keep looking.
Make the Right Choice
You’ll notice that price wasn’t a point of discussion at any point in this article – and that’s intentional. If you’re shopping for a budget-friendly SEO company, you won’t have any trouble finding one. The problem is that you get what you pay for. SEO is an investment. If you invest pennies, you’ll get poor results in return. If you pay the going rate, you’ll reap rewards like increased visibility, traffic, and revenue. It’s your call!
