While it was once considered a questionable marketing strategy, SEO has become a big consideration from small companies to fortune 500 corporations. Some companies now rely almost completely on organic traffic to sustain their businesses.
If done properly SEO can increase traffic to your website, drive sales, increase your brand awareness and give you a great return on investment. Problem is, if you’re not experienced in SEO where do you start?
One option is to find an SEO company that complements your business. If you find the right agency or consultant they can do wonders and consistently increase revenue (and profit). Here are five steps I’d take to ensure that you get the most out of hiring an SEO company:
1. Get some basic knowledge of SEO
Having a foundation of knowledge on SEO is vital in order for you to pick and work with the right company. It helps you know what questions to ask, what needs to be done in order to succeed, and helps to make sure you don’t get ripped off. By understanding the basics of SEO you may also find that you can do some of the tasks in-house and can save your company money down the road.
To get started, go through this list of SEO tutorials and do some reading. With a few days of effort you can get a decent grasp on SEO. The basics are actually quite simple: do keyword research, ensure the website is search engine friendly and build links to the website. Don’t believe any SEO companies who have “secrets” that they won’t divulge, you’re going to get burned.
Make sure you understand the difference between white and black hat link building. Anybody who offers quick rankings or guarantees is most likely dabbling in black hat link building. This can get your site penalized and ruin your reputation online. SEO is a long term marketing strategy that builds over time and is best done with clever pieces of content that drive links naturally.
2. Determine what services you need
Not every business needs the whole “shebang” in terms of SEO. Once you have a foundation of SEO you may find that you need some services over others. SEO services may include (but are not limited to):
On-page optimization: if your website is over 5 years old and you haven’t optimized anything there’s a good chance you’ll need some on-page optimization done. Proper on-page SEO can make a huge impact over a short amount of time if your website has some flaws. On the other hand, if you’re using a modern CMS like WordPress or Shopify, there may not be much work to be done for on-page optimization. These are built to be SEO friendly from the get-go.
Keyword research: doing proper keyword research is vital for any SEO campaign. Good research will give you a number of profitable keywords your website can actually rank for. It determines what landing pages need to be make, what blog posts should be written and what alterations need to be made to the current website. Getting a one-off keyword research report may be all your business needs.
Local SEO: if your business has brick and mortar locations or services a specific area, local SEO may be a beneficial service. It optimizes your listings for geo-specific searches and for Google Maps listings. Although it sounds similar, it’s a completely different service from on-page SEO. Local SEO can be a one-off charge to optimize Google My Business, citations and reviews or ongoing.
Link building/content marketing: I bunch these two together because they go hand-in-hand at this point. While there are some link building methods that aren’t content driven (resource pages, getting links from suppliers, etc.), most ongoing will need linkable assets.
3. Set benchmarks for success
SEO work should be treated like any other marketing channel, where success should be based on solid metrics. When signing up with an SEO company there should be benchmarks set for key dates (ex. 3 months, 6 months, 1 year). The metrics used vary by company but can include:
- Revenue from organic traffic
- Conversions
- Phone call leads
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Keyword rankings
- Traffic (organic & referral)
- Bounce rate
- Average time on site
To see a more comprehensive list, visit Quick Sprout’s guide to 14 SEO success metrics.
These should not be arbitrary, you can do some calculations to figure out what your benchmarks. Do the math to figure out how many conversions you’ll need to break even or turn a profit vs. what the company will be charging you for their services.
4. Get everybody in the conversation
Any decent SEO campaign has many moving parts and in most cases can’t just be left in the hands of an SEO company. Does your company have graphic designers, writers, PR, social media managers, PPC managers? Every relevant person should be brought in to the SEO conversation.
You can multiply your efforts by having everybody work together. For example: if your SEO company has picked out a profitable keyword that could be basis for an info graphic, you could have your designer create it, your writer include it in a blog post, have a PR professional get the word out and your social media manager to syndicate it. Read this piece on how PR and SEO work together.
5. Get references from a number of companies
A final important piece of the puzzle to hiring an SEO company is are getting references. Client turnover in the SEO industry is high since there’s no certification system, anybody can claim to be an SEO… even if they haven’t ranked a site in their life. Many SEO companies are much better at making the sale than doing the actual SEO work.
Ask a number of SEO companies for a few of their longest serving clients, what their results have been and see if you can get in contact with those clients. If they’ve done good work their clients will most likely give them a glowing review. On the other hand, if the SEO company can’t give you a short list of good clients that’s a big red flag. Also don’t trust testimonials on websites as they can easily be faked; do some digging yourself.
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