Search Engine Optimization i.e. SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic visiting your website as it increases the visibility of your web page through organic search engine results. SEO usually refers to the improvement of unpaid results and excludes direct traffic or visitors and the purchase of paid placement.
Too technical to understand?
Let us break the definition for you, so that you can easily relate:
Quantity of Traffic – Attract as many as possible visitors to directly to your website or content through search engine result pages.
Quality of Traffic – Attract as many as possible visitors to your website who are genuinely interested in the products, services and content you offer.
Organic Search – Organic traffic is that traffic that you get without paying for the same as you already know that advertisements make up a significant portion of many search engine result pages.
Hiring a SEO Company ?
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Around the globe, the concept of SEO is constantly evolving.
Initially, it was possible for you to handle your SEO as there weren’t so many competition and techniques available, but with the growth in the same segments, it’ll be quite difficult for you and your in-house SEO team to handle your company’s SEO success.
Learning new techniques will also even take time and that’s why many successful and smart companies prefer hiring a specialised SEO professional Agency or Individual to handle and measure all their SEO related success and tasks.
If you are also smart enough you won’t waste your time in researching about how you could yourself with the help of your in-house SEO team tackle the problem of SEO, that’d get too time-consuming. As time is money, you should prefer spending some penny on hiring a professional SEO personal to tackle all SEO related problems on your behalf.
Importance of Choosing a Good SEO Agency
With the growing competition in the SEO professional business, hiring the best SEO professional for your company becomes quite a tedious task.
But if in case, god forbid, you chose a wrong SEO professional that engages in black hat techniques that gives you a glimpse of success would definitely disappear before the penalties kick in and leaves you with less traffic than ever with months or years worth of clean-up work, and hence it could be the biggest business mistake you ever make for your company.
Remember that any damage caused to your online presence as a result of bad or poor quality SEO could have an long lasting adverse effect on your online assets and your company’s success. Better be cautious about this from start.
For your convenience and ease, about hiring a SEO professional we have listed the much crucial ten questions you need to ask from the SEO professional before you hire them.
Crucial Questions You Need to Ask When Hiring SEO Company
How long have you been doing SEO business?
SEO is such an industry where it is best for you to hire someone with a couple of years of experience as they would from time to time able to tackle the newer techniques and problems along with having a long term approach.
What is your methodology?
While hiring an SEO professional you would wish to know what exactly they will be doing for you and have a clear understanding about the same.
So ask them about their work methodology well in advance and try and know it in depth by further questioning them with: How their clients get ranked? And What SEO techniques they believe would fit for your business? And What SEO techniques they would tend to use?
What is your philosophy of approaching SEO to deliver results?
As you already know that there are three major facets of any SEO, mostly Technical, User Experience i.e. UX and Off-page.
Remember that a highly effective and result oriented SEO professional would consider all three facets simultaneously. As a modern SEO requires a holistic strategy and experienced execution, choose an SEO professional who can perform all the three facets and also have a clear strategy for balancing them.
Technical SEO
It’s a fact that search engines considers code, site structure, site speed and other metrics and they have a high impact on the search traffic. During a technical SEO review, an SEO expert will make sure that search engines can crawl your website and its content, and also will review the 404 errors and will definitely analyse redirects among other tasks.
User experience (UX)
During an on-page SEO review, an SEO expert will analyse user-facing aspects of your site, including content, navigation and keyword optimization, so that you get better results.
Off-page SEO
Off page refers to improving your SEO presence by earning links, strengthening the brand online and improving the popularity of the website and its content. To execute off-page SEO campaigns, an SEO expert will look for opportunities to increase your domain and page authority through incoming links to your website from other high-quality properties.
How long will it be until we can expect to see results?
Because you have already done the basic SEO, you definitely know that a full-fledged and effective SEO would take ample amount of time.
Usually, an expert SEO professional takes around six to eight months to give you a successful results. It can also vary depending on the amount of keywords you’d ask them to target, how hard those keywords are and so on. Remember if an SEO professional promises you quick results, there is something definitely fishy about their results.
What tools do you use?
Knowing what exact tools the SEO professional will use, would describe why and how they would use the tools at your benefit.
Any SEO professional has tons of tools they would use to conduct audits and complete the given tasks and most of those tools would have been tested multiple times to find the best one.
So, the SEO professional should be able to explain to you exactly what and why they use a preferred tool and what impact those tools have when utilized to its perfection. Use the following questions to know about the tool in-depth:
- Which tools do you use to conduct keyword research, and why?
- What do you use to conduct competitor analysis, and why?
- What do you use to monitor rankings, and why?
- Which tool do you use to monitor backlinks, and why?
- How do you measure your client’s success?
- How will you adapt that strategy to our business or industry?
Because knowing the basics of SEO, you know that the same SEO technique cannot be utilized and used in all the industry and hence the SEO professional should have some basic and efficient ideas as to how your business needs a unique approach that caters to the industry that it operates in, the business model it uses and the goals set to be achieved.
Remember that SEO for a normal, small and local business would require a simple approach whereas the SEO for a major company that is big and has a global market would require a complex approach.
In what metrics do you define “success”?
Because what you are ultimately looking is at your business’s success and hence this is the question that is important to be asked as it kind of an artifice question for the SEO professional. When you meet the best SEO professional for the first time they won’t answer your questions directly as the success metrics for experienced and best SEO professionals is derived from what success actually means for your business and you.
A good SEO professional will provide you with success metrics that is ultimately based on your business goals and the end goal is. So a wise SEO professional would turn this question for you to answer your own success metric.
How do you conduct keyword research?
Nowadays, the meaning of keyword research is not the traditional one of Plugging a term into a keyword research tool, populating a list of relevant keywords and developing content with keywords inserted at various places. But now the definition is completely changed, as the modern keyword research requires much more efficiency and with an exercise to understanding user intent so to understand and seek what information a user is looking for when searching a keyword phrase and provides content as per it.
Don’t just be satisfied with the answer related to the user intent, in fact, dig deeper for the tools and methodologies they use to determine keyword intent.
How often and how do you report on progress and what does it look like?
It totally depends on the size of your project and business. If you have a small or medium-sized business, expect monthly updates or otherwise, if your business is large, expect quarterly updates.
You need updates to make sure that the SEO tracking and measuring is working effectively and so before you hire an SEO professional to ask them for a sample report generated and created by them for their existing client so you can ensure that the SEO Company has a valid method of reporting their progress toward the shared goals of their clients.
Even ask for the customized progress reports as per your specific business goals and as per your unique goals and key performance indicators.
How do you price any SEO projects?
It’s important for you to know how does the SEO professional would charge you. Already knowing their pricing method would save time at both ends if the SEO professional is not within your budget. Further, you need to remember that the cheapest is not always the best option neither the expensive is the best option.
You need to consider an area where it is suitable to pay more for the best result because when an SEO professional uses the right techniques that would require a higher cost. Spending on an SEO professional is an investment that can continue to pay off for months and years in your business, so choose wisely.
In addition to the above crucial questions, you can also ask the following additional questions to know about their services in depth.
- How much time will you spend understanding our business? – you need to make sure that the SEO will be successful.
- How do you approach mobile? – mobile is a must device these days.
- How should SEO incorporate with our overall marketing strategy? – for any business SEO goes hand-in-hand with marketing activities for effective link-building.
- How do you approach link-building and influencer marketing? – the traffic conversation focuses more on building quality links over a large number of links.
- How do you stay up-to-date on industry changes and Google updates? – SEO to be successful needs to monitor the recent trends and hence the SEO professional should be able to manage with the potential signs of algorithm changes and investigate possible shifts in SEO best practices.
- What do you need from us to be effective? – for an SEO professional to conduct their work effectively an SEO Company needs detailed information about your audience, industry, goals and key performance indicators to build an SEO plan that will help you achieve long-term success.
- What’s included in my proposal? – you need to understand the current state of your website and a clear SEO strategy the SEO professional plans to implement.
- Can you itemize the services you intend to provide as part of the strategy? – you need to ensure transparency with the SEO professional.
- How will you optimize our content? – you need to know how SEO professional would enhance your content.
- Can we meet the team assigned to our project? – since you need to ensure that you are in safe hands with the professional SEO team.
Conclusion: The very main purpose to ask the question to any SEO professional is to make sure that you don’t choose a black-hat agency. So with the questions above, you feel confident that you are actually dealing with the perfect SEO professional for your business.