Choosing an SEO company can be a confusing with so many companies claiming to be able to optimise your site. Here are our top 5 tips for choosing a good provider to help your website move forwards.
Getting Results
Don’t believe claims that you are guaranteed #1 on Google – no one can guarantee this for you, although some companies might do this for terms that no one is searching on – getting this kind of #1 ranking is worth nothing to you as it won’t drive traffic to your website
Do listen to companies who tell you they can guarantee improved results on your site – particularly if they are talking about your conversion rate. SEO companies who are looking to drive more targeted traffic to your site and make the site easier to use and navigate are worth talking to.
You site should, ideally, get better with an SEO company working on it, and your site certainly shouldn’t be worse off following the appointment of an SEO company.
Setting clear KPIs for your SEO company and making sure they understand these performance targets is a good start point for a relationship with an SEO company. Keep in mind, when discussing your SEO needs that getting results on search engines is not an overnight thing, you can’t double your traffic in 6 months on SEO alone, SEO is a long term requirement for your site, not a quick fix.
Submissions
If an SEO company is offering a service where you are submitted to thousands of search engines, their service won’t deliver the results you are looking for. Google, Yahoo! And MSN are the major search engines on the web with over 80% of the search market and so other search engines, aren’t as valuable to the promotion of your website as these. Submissions to search engines aren’t always necessary and don’t tell the whole story of getting a good result from your search marketing campaign. The offer of automated submissions are also a bad sign as these submissions don’t get results.
If an SEO agency is selling to you the importance of directory submissions this is all to the good, as these submissions are important. Well put together and submitted directory submissions help your site get listings on the search engines and also with the page rank your site gets from Google as they increase the number of inbound links to the site.
Changes to your site
Be wary of SEO companies claiming that they won’t make any changes to your website. Some of these companies may set up mirrored copies of some of your content on their own sites or on a mini site that will point to your site – these may work for a time but certainly won’t continue once your contact with the SEO provider is ended. Companies offering these services may also add hidden text or links on your pages – these are techniques that may result in your site being banned from search engines or at least penalised. Don’t agree to work with companies who create pages just for search engines, such as software generated keyword rich pages not linked to other pages on your site – these pages are for crawlers only and aren’t very effective.
However, when a search marketing provider presents to you offering a service that will optimise your site for search engines, this is something you can really benefit from. Optimising the content of your site by changing it to be more search engine friendly is an important step in getting a better ranking on the search engines and driving more traffic to your site.
Find out what off page optimisation the company will do on your behalf, such as link building and article submission, as these off page elements are important to the results your website can achieve. If an SEO company is not offering these things, consider what level of results you can achieve when using their services.
Communications
Some SEO companies can be very secretive about what they will do for you, treating search engine optimisation like some kind of black art. This is not a good approach for your relationship with them, as you won’t ever really know what you are paying for. A good agency will offer a clear and transparent view of the work they will do, why it will benefit your site and when results will happen on the site. Knowing what will be done on your behalf also protects you from some of the issues raised above with hidden pages or content.
Make sure the SEO company you choose offers a good level of customer services. Do you have contact information for them? Do they offer regular reports? Are their representatives happy to discuss things with you and give you control over any major changes they make to your site? Remember, that at the end of the day, you are responsible for the content on your site, and as such are responsible for the changes made by your supplier. If your provider doesn’t give you clear visibility of what they are doing and a method of communicating any concerns or questions you have with them your site and it’s traffic levels could suffer.
Good communication is also important in understanding what you are getting for the money you are spending.
Following these tips can help you get the most from your new SEO company and improve the presence of your site on search engines.
