Questions You Must Ask Before Hiring an SEO Agency
You’ve read the articles, done the research, and seen the absurd return on investment (ROI) that is available with the appropriate SEO business.
What You Should Do Before Hiring an SEO Firm
You probably run a Google search for “SEO Company” or “SEO Services,” narrow it down to a few of organisations, and then reach out to them through email to enquire about their seo services – if you’re like our clients.
75% of them respond and you schedule a session to discuss your company, your goals, and how SEO may help you achieve them.
To avoid being steamrolled by a sales pitch, it’s best to be prepared with questions for your potential SEO partner before heading into the meeting. We have developed a list of the most useful and illuminating questions you can ask any SEO Agency to save you time and effort.
You shouldn’t allow these questions dictate the direction of your session, but it is a good idea to jot down any extra questions you have about your business, SEO history, or aspirations.
Find out who you will be communicating with.
While it’s excellent to impress a potential SEO agency during a consultation, it’s much more important to get along well with the person who will be handling your day-to-day operations.
Many businesses may eventually face the following predicament:
An SEO consultation goes wonderfully; you and the consultant hit it off; you sign on the dotted line, eager to begin implementing the strategies you’ve developed; the SEO consultant vanishes; you learn that they were merely the onboarding specialist; you are assigned a careless account manager who doesn’t give a hoot about your business.
There is a chance that the salesman or account manager who conducted the consultation would vanish without a trace. You may find out that their sole function is customer onboarding and that they have no involvement in day-to-day operations.
At the end of the day, you’re stuck working with someone you don’t get along with or who doesn’t have as much expertise in your field as the initial consultant.
Therefore, before selecting an SEO service, you should meet the individuals who will be working on your campaign and who will serve as your point of contact throughout the process.
Enquire About Their Plan to Get Backlinks.
As of this writing, backlinks are responsible for a considerable portion of a website’s overall search engine ranking. That’s why it’s critical to partner with an SEO firm that use ethical methods of link development that won’t hurt your site in the long run.
You should know how they are getting these links before your SEO consultation.
In your next meeting, keep an eye out for these warning signs related to link building:
We would not know until we started working with you; everyone is different; We have an automated tool that builds links; We have a ‘staff’ of guest post writers that write articles for websites
Our methods for constructing links remain proprietary, therefore we don’t talk about them.
Some encouraging signs to keep an eye out for are:
- We analyse your competitors’ backlinks to learn their strategies.
- We manually go out to sites to request backlinks.
- We exclusively acquire backlinks from authoritative, highly-trafficked sites in your niche.
In actuality, link building is an ongoing process that requires persistent contact, a high tolerance for rejection, and (eventually) a few successful link exchanges with authoritative websites. As such, you should be well-versed in the procedure and have a mental picture of how it plays out.
At the very least, an SEO firm should provide you with a monthly report detailing the progress of your link building efforts. Avoid working with any agency that baulks at giving you access to your own connections.
It’s important to know how much of their staff is dedicated to SEO.
It’s easy to assume that a digital marketing firm with 100 employees has more resources and more expertise than a boutique SEO firm with 10 employees, but that’s not necessarily the case.
When it comes down to it, even at the largest of companies, there may only be three or four SEO experts on staff, with the rest of the team consisting of personnel like salesmen, account managers, business development consultants, etc.
It’s not uncommon for a small, ten-person agency to have a deeper understanding of SEO and a higher level of in-house experience than a large, growth-oriented digital marketing agency, which may have to account for dozens of internal stakeholders.
It’s important to know how many individuals will be working on your SEO campaign before signing a contract with a digital marketing business that offers a wide range of services.
Inquire about their expectations for the time it will take before you start seeing benefits.
The question, “How long until I begin to see benefits from the SEO work?” causes anxiety for most SEO companies.
The truth is that the length of time it takes to see results from your SEO effort depends on a wide variety of factors.
Some of them include the following: the quality of your site’s prior SEO work; the website’s age and general health; the level of competition in your field; your willingness to invest financially in SEO; the geographic region in which you hope to do business; and your overall SEO budget.
The time it takes to see SEO results from your strategy may lengthen or shorten depending on how much weight is given to each of the aforementioned elements. As such, it is expected that an SEO firm would consider the following data points before making an estimate.
Consider:
- Where you are now in terms of search engine results pages (SERPs);
- Your link profile;
- The scope of the effort involved;
- Your current SERP trajectory
If you’ve just launched a website, you may have to wait as long as six months before you see any return on your money. This time span might be significantly shorter for older, more established websites.
Enquire About the SEO Company’s Client Success Metrics.
Increasing the amount of clicks and impressions that an SEO company can create for your business is typically the defining metric of a successful partnership with such a firm. In contrast, return on investment is the statistic that most businesses care about (ROI).
The client, not the SEO company, should decide what metrics are most essential to them. When working with an SEO firm, it’s important to be clear about what you hope to accomplish and what constitutes a job well done. The goals you pursue might be any of the following, depending on your company model:
More sales (obviously), more email subscribers, lower customer acquisition costs (CAC/CPA), more brand exposure and search engine results page (SERP) ranks, higher keyword rankings, and more site visitors than a rival site all add up to increased sales.
Know exactly what you want out of an SEO campaign before you hire a company to do it for you. Some of your aspirations may be overly optimistic, while others may be excessively conservative.
No matter where you fall on this spectrum, an SEO company should be able to discuss with you if they feel they can assist you in reaching your objectives and what a plan might look like based on your specific KPIs.
Inquire as to the frequency and method of reporting.
When asked why they want to switch SEO companies, businesses most commonly say, “We never hear from them, and we don’t know what they’re doing.”
Your first steps in dealing with an SEO company should include establishing the following lines of communication:
How often you may anticipate to be contacted for updates, what information will be included in reports, and how actively you will need to participate in the process (sign off on changes)
The best method to prevent misunderstandings and make sure everything is still on track is to establish a regular contact schedule with your SEO company.
When you pay a monthly retainer, you should expect regular email and phone updates, as well as a monthly report detailing any work that has been accomplished.
Enquire Whether They Are Affiliated with Any of Your Rivals.
It goes without saying that any SEO firm you chat with or hire cannot simultaneously be representing your business’s rivals.
Like you’d never see two football teams use the same coaches or players, neither can your SEO company use information from your campaign or website to boost the rankings of a direct competition.
Inquire about the following details before signing up with an SEO firm:
- Do you have any present ties to any of my rivals with whom you work?
- Can you imagine if one of my rivals approached you about forming a partnership?
Having numerous clients in the same business, in the same geographic region, at the same time, creates a conflict of interest for SEO firms. Don’t give your clients the impression that you care about them by using the information acquired from your SEO campaign.
P1 SEO Company
We are P1 SEO agency with professional SEO services and a strategic understanding of everything you may possibly need to drive organic traffic for your website and a successful SEO campaign. There is no business in this present time that don’t need digital marketing agency, search engine marketing, or SEO agencies support for an effective SEO strategy.
The extensive background of our SEO agency Australia gives us confidence that your website will thrive under our SEO company expert guidance. We can detail a variety of social media strategies that will increase your site’s traffic.
When you’ve decided on a plan for search engine optimisation services, our staff will go to work on it in accordance with the parameters of that plan. More than that, we think creatively about how to address any issues raised by our customers.
We also provide advice on the best SEO cost that suit your budget and local SEO advices on how to organise your website so that it ranks highly in search engine results, including things like link building, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and any other measures you may need to take.
No SEO companies or SEO specialists do it better than we do.