How To Choose An SEO Company?
Picking the right SEO company is a difficult task yet can be a differentiating factor for your business and can help outrank your competitors. Finding a trustworthy full-service SEO agency is often a long and complex process as selecting the wrong one would do more harm than good.
Since there are an infinite number of agencies, selecting the best SEO company that helps you achieve your business goals relies on several factors. In this article, we’ll get right into how to choose an SEO company to help you make an informed decision.
Further, we’ll delve into the benefits and the mistakes you should avoid while choosing an SEO company. That said, let’s first understand what SEO agencies do:
What Do SEO Agencies Do?
An SEO company helps with the search engine optimisation part of digital marketing where they improve the visibility of brands like yours in organic searches. They use ethical practices, SEO tools, and strategies to build a comprehensive SEO plan that helps you rank higher.
Search engine optimisation today requires a multi-faceted approach such as content marketing, link-building, on-page & technical SEO, and others. Most SEO companies usually have an in-house team of specialists to carry out these optimisation tasks.
Often they work together and coordinate accordingly to achieve a single common goal i.e. to help increase your organic reach in Google SERP. The process begins with conducting thorough keyword research to know what potential customers are searching for online.
Extensive keyword research also provides you with ideas to create content to best meet your searchers’ needs and intent. The SEO agency then puts all this research and other SEO tactics together to boost ranking by raising the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of your brand.
Further, they help optimise your website’s user experience, page load speed, content and do many more such things. Additionally, they analyse what’s holding you back and provide you with custom solutions to help boost your rankings.
What Are the Benefits of Choosing an SEO Agency?
When searching for how to choose an SEO company for your business, it is better to know what benefits they offer. While a lot of resources are available online to learn the fundamentals of search engine optimisation, the process is a little deep-rooted and sensitive.
You’d need to stay on top of every algorithm update and make necessary changes to comply with them. An adept SEO agency can aptly handle all these aspects while offering you the following benefits:
Saves You Time and Money
SEO is a time and resource-intensive task that requires continuous research, updates, and optimisation to upkeep your site. An SEO agency can save you time and money by handling complex and time-consuming tasks swiftly.
An experienced agency will have profound expertise and resources to effectively execute the necessary SEO tasks on a regular basis. Further, hiring an SEO agency is cost-effective as you won’t have to invest in hiring and training employees in-house to do the same work.
Additionally, an agency can provide valuable insights and strategies for improving your search engine rankings, which can result in increased traffic and revenue for your business. According to FirstPageSage, SEO offers an average of 748% ROI (return on investment).
Thus, not only does it help you save on hiring costs but also brings in valuable sales and revenue for your business.
Leverage the Expertise of SEO Specialists
SEO agencies have a team of diverse experts spanned across various departments to handle your SEO requirements with care. They have content marketing experts, SEO specialists, graphics/UI&UX designers, and others equipped with knowledge in their areas of expertise.
Moreover, they are well-versed in the latest search engine algorithms, trends, and best practices. They help identify the specific tactics and strategies that will work best for your business and attract the right target audience.
For example, an SEO agency can conduct a thorough analysis of your Shopify or Magento website and identify any technical issues that may be preventing it from ranking high. They then implement the necessary solutions to help fix those bottlenecks and improve your SEO performance.
Proven Record of Working with Brands Like Yours
SEO agencies have worked with many clients and helped brands just like yours achieve greater results with their helpful SEO tactics. They’ve gone through a long and rigorous process of helping a multitude of brands from diverse industries such as SaaS or others.
This proven record adorns them with ample experience and knowledge to become the best in their field. Since they’ve helped other brands rise to the top of the search engine results pages (SERP), they can do the same for your brand and outrank others in the SEO landscape.
Thus, it makes sense to hire an SEO agency that has a demonstrable portfolio for all your search engine optimisation needs.
Efficient and Best Outcomes
Practice makes perfect, and SEO agencies have practised implementing customised SEO strategies numerous times in the past. Indeed, they can efficiently do the needful again to help achieve your business goals in as little time as possible.
Regardless of how good research you do, you simply won’t reach the level of efficiency and effectiveness of an SEO agency. They can quickly evaluate your website, make changes for SEO improvement, and update you so you get the best possible outcomes.
5 Tips on How to Choose an SEO Company for Your Business
Now that you know the benefits of choosing an SEO agency, let’s glance over a few tips to keep in mind when selecting one:
1. Choose an Agency that Understands Your Business Goals
Before you do anything, make sure you have SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals in place for your business to achieve. However, your goal shouldn’t just be to increase traffic to your website.
A boost in traffic does not necessarily mean a boost in sales and an increase in revenue, it simply means one of the tactics has worked to bring the audience. But is the audience relevant to your business?
Clearly communicate your goals with your SEO agency beforehand and ensure they understand what’s at stack. But first, create tailored goals according to the industry you belong to that may include a boost in rank for certain keywords or reducing bounce rates.
Regardless of the fact that how to choose the best SEO company, you should have clarity on where your business is headed, what SMART SEO goals you can create, and how hiring an agency can help you achieve those. If you are in Singapore have a look at SEOCopilot for your SEO needs.
2. Scrutinise the Work Portfolio to Find Best-Fit Agency
Before you finalise and pick any SEO agency, make sure to go through the past projects and work portfolios. Do they’ve successfully optimised the sites of their client? Do their clients show up in specific keyword searches?
Going through their portfolio and work they have done previously or are working on currently proves they have the necessary skills and experience required to carry out your project. Further, it helps understand their SEO process, and what actions they’ve taken to help their clients.
Getting a third-party view of the potential SEO agencies before you jump into the financial partnership with them helps you choose the best-fit agency. Also, you can check if any of the SEO agencies have relevant experience in serving clients in the same industry as yours.
3. Go Through their Reviews to See What Others Are Saying
Reviews are an important consideration when making crucial decisions such as how to choose an SEO company. Check the client testimonials and reviews about the agency you want to finalise.
Doing so provides you with a more comprehensive view of others' perspectives about SEO vendors. Go beyond just the testimonials on their website and look for reviews on online spaces such as Google Profile, Trust Pilot, and others.
Also, check out their social media profile and scroll through the comments section to see how they interact online and gauge their expertise to get a better feel of their work culture.
4. Choose an Ethical & Transparent Agency
Don’t fall for secret sauce and all the other buttery things SEO agencies say to your face. You want to steer clear of the firms that are secretive about their methods and don’t reveal much of what they are doing.
Also, look for the signs or red flags before or during the initial days of your partnership with the agency. Understand that SEO might be complex but it isn’t rocket science per se and nor does it involve nuclear codes.
Thus, it shouldn't be a secret and the SEO company should be willing to answer all your questions with full clarity. They should explain what they are doing and why they are doing it the certain way with all transparency.
5. Choose an SEO Agency to Improve Metrics that Work for Your Business
One of the important things how to choose a good SEO company is to be on the same page about what metrics you want to improve. In other words, you need to define the end goal of ranking for specific keywords and how it’ll benefit your business.
You need to define important KPIs or metrics that you want to improve and how your SEO agency helps you with that apart from ranking you high. KPIs can mean a lot of different things within the SEO realm and tracking the wrong ones could lead to a loss in potential revenue.
Thus, choose an SEO agency that understands the importance of tracking and improving the key KPIs such as organic sessions, conversion rate, keyword ranking, page load time, etc. for your business.
4 ❌ Mistakes to Avoid While Choosing an SEO Agency
It’s important to know what things to look for while deciding how to choose an SEO company, but it’s also vital to know what things to avoid. Here are a few mistakes most organisations make while choosing an SEO agency.
1. Partnering with Cheap & Non-experienced Agencies
Remember cheap things are cheap for a reason, especially when it comes to important services like SEO. Set a realistic budget for marketing spends such as outsourcing SEO services to an agency and then find ones within that budget.
Even then, many businesses make the mistake of setting unrealistic budgets and want things to be done as affordably as possible. But often SEO companies working at ultra-low amounts, underdeliver things they promised.
Thus, educate yourself and your team about SEO pricing and not make the mistake of choosing cheap and non-experienced agencies.
2. Choosing an Agency that Uses Unethical and Black-Hat Tactics
It’s understandable that you want quick results but ethical and white-hat SEO tactics do not deliver results quickly. It takes at least three to six months to see any noticeable results or improvements.
This may lead to frustrations and may tempt you to turn to unethical and black-hat tactics for quick results. These tactics may deliver results immediately, however, the results may not last forever.
Further, you can get penalised by search engines like Google and even get blacklisted from appearing in the SERP rankings. Thus, such hefty repercussions do not make black hat worth trying, so choose an SEO agency that only provides white-hat services.
3. Failing to Do Research More Thoroughly
Research is important when you are wondering how to choose the right SEO company that can deliver the best results using ethical and white-hat practices. But often businesses fail to extensively research the SEO market and choose the next-door agency they find online.
As mentioned above, go through past projects, read through the reviews and comments, and find genuine pieces of information that help you reach your decision. Choosing an agency after putting in a thorough research effort will pay off in the long run.
4. Considering Only Local SEO Agencies
While we are not against local SEO agencies, finding a good agency locally has slim chances. The location of the SEO agency you choose shouldn’t be your top factor as you should focus more on performance, experience, client satisfaction, and other factors first.
However, you don’t want to limit your search area by a city or state. You want to expand your search radius so that you can tap into many such experienced agencies that help you with achieving your business goals.
Even if your SEO company isn’t from your surrounding area, they’ll know how to bridge the gap with numerous communication and conferencing tools. Thus, don’t make the mistake of considering only local SEO agencies.
Final Words
Well, that’s the end of it. As explained in this article, businesses need to address the above points for how to choose an SEO company. Apart from that, interview the potential agencies, ask as many questions as possible, and clear all your doubts beforehand.
Since SEO is a long-term game, partner with an agency that stays with you for the longest and helps you achieve your business goals. Besides, if you want to achieve all the benefits listed above without going through the hassle of researching and making any mistake, then an SEO agency like Supple is the right choice.
Contact our team of SEOs with all your business goals and metrics to improve and start your digital growth journey right away.
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