Choosing the right SEO Agency can benefit your business
SEO “search engine optimization” is a marketing strategy that implements continuous, long-term processes in order to boost your website’s quality of organic traffic. It helps you stay competitive; if you're curious about how to find an SEO agency or SEO firm as a small business owner, this is the right article for you! The ranking is important because a search engine like Google receives over 3.5 billion search queries daily. And if you’re within the first page, Having SEO helps your content rank and lets users find it organically, which has a 14.6% conversion rate compared to the 1.7% inbounding. We know that choosing an SEO agency can be difficult, yet our goal here is to inform you by sharing different questions and data to guide your search.
Why should I hire an SEO agency when I can do it myself?
It’s understandable that you’d want to do it yourself because of the surplus of low-quality companies making big claims for low prices alongside being on a tight budget if you’re a small business. Despite these possibilities, finding a quality one will help you focus on customer satisfaction and your business's day-to-day responsibilities. SEO agencies have specialists invested in your company's steady, long-term success alongside years of experience. Dealing with managing a business, keeping up with changing algorithms, customer outreach and dealing with on-page and off-page SEO like link building via social media may cause burnout.
Get clear on what you want and what you don’t want
It’s important to specify goals to achieve them better. For example, if you’re an E-commerce shop that wants help with boosting sales but not necessarily with traffic, it’s important to note so resources aren’t going to non-urgent tasks. You may realize that you have low sales because of inefficient branding and social media outreach. Since you have a smaller budget, it’s important to specify which SEO services would be the best for you. Another thing you could do would be to create a seed list so you can have a specified list of agencies or businesses you’re planning to partner with. You can look at general websites regarding the best SEO agency in your country, but it’s recommended to choose based on your customized needs like proximity, specific services, etc.
Investigate their testimonials and case studies
Investigate their online portfolio and brand thoroughly. First, you should search for client testimonials and look in the “about us” page for it because that shows that they’re dedicated to getting your website ranking to help you succeed because they care about customer satisfaction. You should also visit the “homepage” to check how they present themselves alongside browsing through their blog to see if it has updated, quality information to learn more about them. This means they’re actively working on growing and giving the best service possible to customers.
Book a consultation with them. Consulting with them is the place where you’ll directly talk to the agency and ask important questions that will let you gauge their values alongside their strategies regarding campaigns. These questions should cover communication, success, failures, contracts and more. It should also allow you to have a thorough two-side interview that lets you know how they’ll handle issues dealing with communication, tools and more and understand if you’ll be a fit as you interview the SEO agency.
Questions to ask the SEO agency:
Who is your ideal customer?
You should ask this to find out if your criteria match with what they're best adapted to, like big business to small business, alongside work values for better collaboration.
How many clients do you work with?
It's important to know how many people they're helping so your site has the time and work it needs to develop. The company splitting too many tasks at once can cause lower equality results or elongated success time. They should have less than 15 current clients currently.
How do you stay organized with SEO projects?
Organization and project management are important to ensure you’ll be receiving updates on time and that they don’t forget anything to ensure a quality job was done.
How do you define SEO success?
This is a multifaceted answer as factors like the industry, competition and company goals.
Do you have flexible prices?
Knowing if they have a fixed or flexible structure for the SEO company is important to see if it's a fair deal or competitive when comparing others. Fixed-rate prices are generally frowned upon as they’re not considering the website's competition and modifications by offering a cookie-cutter.
What would you say are the most important metrics to track?
Metrics are straightforward, quantifiable measurements of one specific data. Important ones to measure would be organic traffic, CTR (click-through rate) and domain authority. Asking this will let you know if they’re not going to give large reports that say little about how your site is doing. One misleading metric is conversions, which don’t always translate into revenue. A second possibly misleading metric would be bounce rate, as a visitor can finish reading your page and leave, and that would still count as a bounce; this is alright to use for an individual page but not site-wide as it could mean that your content was irrelevant or you quickly satisfied their inquiries.
How do you stay updated on industry changes?
This is important because SEO is constantly changing; therefore, they need to educate themselves ongoingly through courses, conferences, blog emails and conversing in the field to learn and share ideas.
How fast can I see results?
If they’re legit, they shouldn’t give a number of days or promises of “ranking number one in Google” since no one knows how often or what changes with it.
How would you optimize our content?
You should begin with this to know if you'll be responsible for making content more SEO-friendly, alongside mentioning if they would work with your current landing pages or copy or upgrade them. If the answer is a yes, then they should have experience with writing in your industry, so your success won’t be on a trial-or-not basis alongside the quicker success rate as they would have tried tactics for your specific area.
What are your SEO practices?
Finding an agency with strict white-hat SEO practices is necessary because getting a Google penalty hurts your website. You should ask about link building as it aims to get relevant, reputable sites to link to your pages. But some do this unethically by trying to buy them or leaving ingenuous spam comments on other people's social media.
Could you share a time when you realized your SEO strategy was ineffective?
You should be curious about what they found to be the causes and how they went about problem-solving it afterwards. This answer represents part of their character and if they’ll be able to humble themselves down to reflect on their shortcomings.
The following are very important:
Can we see previous work?
You should expand on this to mention any documents, including keyword research, performance reports and metrics alongside strategy briefs.
Do you work with any of our competitors?
If they answered “yes” to having experience in your industry for example in the law industry, you should know if they’re working with someone you judge as a competitor because whoever pays more can get an advantage as conflicts of interest clash.
What happens after I terminate the contract?
This is important to know and ask about what will happen after you may end the contract because you might have to end the business relationship due to the suggested allocation of new funds, tight budget, unmet expectations, etc. The last thing you’d want is for the links that were built to be on their site and have them either refuse to give it back or coerce you by paying more because they charge for cancelling sooner. Many SEO companies have website ownership clauses in their contracts, so ensure there's a decent out clause for at least a month.
Questions SEO Agencies should ask you:
What are your primary objectives and KPIs when it comes to SEO?
They should ask about your primary objectives and KPIs to see if your goals are achievable. For example, improving organic search results as the first page’s first five organic results account for “60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%”. Once search rank grows, you can achieve other KPIs and objectives like traffic and conversion rate.
What is your Unique Selling Point (USP)?
They should ask about this because your unique selling point is what differentiates you from others because it uniquely connects your audience. One of the best selling points is customer-centric. For example, Domino's Pizza says, “We GUARANTEE – Fresh hot pizza, delivered in 30 minutes or less or it’s FREE” to grab the audience's attention and prioritize prompt service. If you’re unsure, do some market research through surveys to find what they want or need.
Have you worked with an SEO agency before?
They might ask this to gauge if you're someone they'd like to work with. If you worked with many, they might be curious why these arrangements ended and assume you'll be difficult to work with. If you've
Are you willing to share access to Google Analytics, Adwords and Search Console?
They should suggest access to things because they're free. The previous data from website traffic to keyword rankings will help analyze and amplify what was helpful in previous marketing campaigns. For example, Google Analytics records activity like bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration.
Do you have any other domains or websites?
This is to ensure they can be optimized, too, alongside seeing if they're doing any harm to the main domain.
Are you willing to do website design?
This is important because user experience can affect brand success as people are unlikely to stay on aesthetically unpleasing and laggy sites. Statista found that 58.4% of people used mobile devices (excluding tablets) within the first quarter of 2021 for searches which emphasizes the importance of mobile friendliness. You also need speedy load times because Google prioritises websites with fast mobile load times, as many searches are conducted from mobile devices. If you agree and are convinced, how much are you willing to spend to showcase your website and how do you want it to be seen?
Do you have content for your website?
You may have none or a few articles as you've been busy managing responsibilities, therefore, are unable to make the quality that ranks. Overall, getting a quality content writing service eases the burden by redirecting you to more customer-directed tasks.
Has your content been SEO-optimized?
Since you're a small business, you probably have content, but it's important to optimize its ranking by altering images, adding or removing keywords, etc. If you're interested in learning how to write your own SEO-optimized blog posts mainly, you should read this article by our Chief content editor Angela Morgan.
Does your company have any specific brand guides that you would like us to adhere to?
In order to have a successful campaign, you should ensure that there’s consistency all the way around, from visual things like logo and color schemes to a consistent writing style and voice.
Have you ever had a Google penalty?
They should ask this to help damage control if the previous agency or person didn't wasn’t knowledgeable enough or did black-hat SEO.
A few more questions to expect regarding the customer-business relationship
What are your reporting requirements?
The agency should ask if you have specific metrics you'd like to see, how often you'd like them and if you want summaries of what was successful and unsuccessful.
Do you have a public relations team?
They might ask about a PR team as they focus on visibility and image in public relations to leverage attaining backlinks which in turn help SEO. You build authority that helps visitors trust you long-term when you have positive brand recognition.
Do you already keep track of potential customers with customer relationship management (CRM) software?
They should ask this as a good CRM system enables SEO success by using customer segmentation data (e.g. age, gender, location, county, etc) to help create different customer campaigns based on their likes to drive conversion rates.
How did you find out about us?
They might be curious and ask this because they'd like to track performance by keeping a count of their marketing campaigns to benchmark successful strategies if you are contacted through email or telephone.
Book A Consultation
It's essential for clients and businesses to schedule an initial consultation with your SEO company to discuss their specific needs. This is also a great opportunity to learn more about the company and its processes. It will also help them get a feel for the project's overall direction.
Some agencies offer free website audits to help identify problem areas and potential opportunities. They may also share initial keywords and conduct competitive research to better understand the client's online status. That can be extremely helpful in developing an effective SEO strategy, especially if you are yet to conduct any digital marketing research for your company.
If you're a small business or startup looking for affordable SEO services, we'd love to hear from you! We're currently offering you a free business report to help you to retain customers and increase your sales. Ranking well is important for your success, so we offer affordable plans to you.