How to hire an SEO expert for your business ?
This article is intended to share advice and useful insights to help you choose the right SEO company for your organisation and avoid the bad ones where you might end up spending a fortune without seeing any notable positive impact. Even worst can happen if you end up with agencies that practice shady activities which may lead to ranking demotions .
At first let’s get a clear understanding of what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. To many its the magic pill that you take once to get a lots and lots of traffic to your site for FREE !!!I'm sorry to say … It is not the case. There is no “get rich quick” method in SEO. It is highly unlikely that you will rank on the first page over night no matter how much money you spend.
SEO is a long term thing built over the time by implementing best practices required by the major search engines. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithm to make sure that the best and the most relevant content is presented to their users. If you want to rely solely on just SEO for the success of your business than it will be a mistake as SEO will only complement the other activities that your business is undertaking. Your SEO potential is as much as the quality of your website or business or content. A successful SEO will help you have your best chance to rank accordingly. A good SEO specialist will recommend best practices for a search friendly website. From basic things like descriptive page title to more complex schema markups.
It takes at least 4 to 12 months to see any significant improvement in your search engine ranking after implementing SEO. So choosing the right SEO optimisation agency is absolutely crucial for your marketing success. But how do I know which ones are good and which ones are not?
There are few things that you should be focusing on when evaluating an SEO specialist.
Request Information
Ask for a detailed evaluation of your website’s current condition and what actions should be taken or issues to deal with for the improvement in search ranking, including supporting information and statement reference behind the idea. If you have to pay a small fee to get it done, I recommend you pay the fee and get an initial full report. This will greatly reduce the risk of hiring a bad SEO who might otherwise convince you to do useless stuff like adding more keywords to the meta tag when google clearly states that it won’t help. SEO is a collective sets of actions that work together to achieve optimisation like, links hidden within code on sites improves your seo performance, backlinks (links from other sites) works like a vote from others that help improve SEO, blog posts and many more.
Cost consideration
It is s a good idea to Get couple of quotes from different SEO specialists and compare them. Get a quote from you web developer as well if they provide SEO services. Staying with the same digital agency greatly reduces complexity and hassle.
When comparing the quotes it’s a good idea to find a sweet spot with the price, cheapest price might not be the optimum solution and surely you won’t find top SEO companies providing cheapest quotes. A quote with affordable SEO services from a good company is what you need to look for.
Reference Check
Try to know more about the company you’re about to hire. See if they have existing clients and good feedbacks. Check who are behind the company, are they trustworthy? Website SEO company which has a proven track record of success will be more likely to give you the best results, however as I mentioned earlier that quality service will reasonably cost bit higher.
Local SEO company
Give priority to your local companies even if they are charging bit more, the reason behind this is that good local companies are more likely to understand your local circumstances and culture. Mind that you will be giving access to your important and sensitive accounts to the SEO company therefore a local company is better because they can be held accountable under your local laws and regulations if needed.
Future Scalability
It is often difficult to switch SEO companies as different SEO companies have different strategies to achieve results. Therefore it’s a good idea to plan for the future. As your business grow you might need additional services like digital marketing, social media management, marketing content creation etc. See if the company you are considering are offering these type of additional services so that you don’t need to hire another company for doing those things fo you.
Finally choose the best SEO company who would genuinely want to help you to grow and are keen to know about your value proposition, your products or services so that they can best serve you.
