How to Choose the Right SEO Company for Your Business
If you're a small business owner, you've probably heard that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your online presence. But you might not know exactly what SEO is, and whether or not it's worth your time and money. If you're like me when I first started investigating SEO, then you've got questions.
What does SEO mean? What is a good SEO company? What makes one better than another? How much does it cost to hire an SEO agency or company? And how do I choose the right one for my business?
Even if you've been in the business for a while and have some familiarity with these questions, it can still be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff when choosing an agency.
Here are some tips on choosing an agency that will help your site rise through the rankings and improve your bottom line:
How to Choose an SEO Company for Your Business
Define your business goals.
When you're picking an SEO company to work with, it's important to define your business goals. This way, the company you choose will be able to help you achieve these goals by providing services tailored to your needs. First, define what you want to achieve in the next year and the next five years. What are your long-term goals? It might be better for a business with few competitors but large customer bases—like a local pizza shop or car dealership—to focus on increasing their visibility on Google Maps over increasing their rank on search engines like Bing or Google!. A restaurant with several locations would likely benefit more from higher rankings across multiple search engines than they would from being ranked higher in any one particular market (say, New York City).
Once you've defined what kind of long-term strategy makes sense for your company's unique circumstances and goals, it's time to start thinking about specific short-term results that could bring those larger projects closer into reach.
Create a list of prospective agencies.
- Ask the agency for references. Call or email the businesses the agency has worked with and get their feedback on the agency’s performance—whether it’s positive or negative.
- Do your research. If a prospective SEO company is unwilling to provide you with any information about its services, run away as fast as possible! There are many scam artists out there who will take advantage of businesses that don’t know better, so do not hesitate to ask questions until you feel comfortable doing business with an SEO company.
Check to see if they offer an SEO audit.
An SEO audit is the best place to start. An SEO audit is a thorough analysis of your website and its current content. It will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as areas where you need to focus your attention.
An SEO audit can also help identify opportunities for growth, which may include: new business leads, more traffic, higher sales conversions or improved brand awareness.
Look at their portfolio of clients.
When you start looking at SEO company, the first thing you will want to do is look at their portfolio of clients. This is where they have listed all of their past clients and the websites that they have worked on for them.
When you are reviewing these client portfolios, you should look at three things:
- The size of the clients. Look for companies that have a wide range of sizes in their client base—big companies and small businesses alike. This tells you that this company can handle any type of business and isn't just focused on larger companies with deep pockets.
- The type of clients that they work with most often (and/or best). If they only generally work with e-commerce sites or B2C sites, then it's not likely that they can help your business grow because it may be too different than what they are already used to working with day in and day out! You want someone who works with other businesses like yours so there won't be any miscommunications or missed opportunities while working together!
- The results from working on your website (or other projects). Look at how much traffic was gained through SEO efforts or how many conversions were made by improving user experience before deciding whether or not this person would be right for your project needs down the line!
Internal Backlinks.
You can find out if a company is doing this by seeing if they link back to their own site in their blog posts. It's a simple test, and it's something that every SEO company should be doing for their clients. If they are using the same links across multiple sites, then you know that they've been done correctly.
A few years ago I was brought on as an SEO expert at a large B2B marketing agency that had recently opened an office in New York City. The founder of the company asked me to review his website because he didn't understand why he wasn't getting any traffic from Google search results despite spending thousands of dollars per month on advertising campaigns. After spending some time on his website, I noticed that none of its pages were linked back to any other pages on the site (and neither were any off-site links). This meant no one could find anything else if they landed anywhere except for page 1 or 2 - not good!
Content Uniqueness.
The content that you create should be relevant to your business and its audience. This means it must be well-written, engaging, and targeted toward the target market. It should also be updated regularly so it's up-to-date with current trends and developments in your industry. If a company doesn't have time to maintain regular updates on their own site, then they probably won't have the time or resources to do so for yours either!>>>Continue Reading<<<
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