Visibility and publicity are vital to a successful website. Better visibility eventually translates to better sales and awareness. You’re non-existent to your potential customers if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of search results on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts are there to get the job done.
It’s OK to admit that not everyone is an expert in optimizing their website for search engines. That’s why many people and businesses hire SEO consultants.
You also might have noticed that some search results come at the top, but they have the “Ad” tag attached to them, which many people don’t usually click. Those are paid results. SEO consultants help your website organically reach the top of search engine results without paying the search engine.
When looking for an SEO agency, you might see some flaunt their success stories and references, but there is a lot more that you should consider. These are some of the crucial considerations you need to keep in mind when looking for the right SEO consultant for your website.
Know some SEO yourself
Before getting on the plan of hiring some SEO agency for optimizing your website, you need to learn some SEO basics yourself. There are some key basics about SEO and keywords that you need to know. For example, having the best keywords in the title, content, and meta descriptions helps your content quite a lot. So identifying and researching the keywords is essential.
Tools
When you hire an SEO agency or an expert, they will inspect your website about what can be done to improve. You can request a search audit of your website. Given the audit, you need to know what tools the SEO experts use. They can use tools such as Moz, Roboauditor, SEMrush, or others. Some SEO agencies have their proprietary software, potentially giving them an edge above other available options.
SEO results can take time, so be wary about seo services that pride themselves on being too overly quick or inexpensive.
What sets them apart?
The tools might be publicly available, and anyone can use them. But what does the SEO agency do that sets them apart from others? You would need them to create a result-oriented plan, depending on your target audience. Their keyword research method and website optimization method would indicate how result-oriented they are. Their intent must show how specifically they can target your audience.
For example, a good SEO specialist will be aware that getting nearby local customers and visitors requires local search results to be optimized. Therefore, when discussing your SEO plan, your potential SEO partner can easily set himself apart by proposing the best uses of local SEO techniques for your website.
Gauging progress
Several indicators can describe how well your website is doing. When asking the SEO agency which key performance indicators (KPIs) they will be using, it doesn’t ideally have to be just one metric. It could rather be a combination of a few.
You probably won’t see progress overnight. However, a good SEO agency will take their time to get your website high on search results. On top of that, they will also work on your organic traffic, bounce rate, session percentage, pages per visit, conversion rate, and revenue generation from your website.
Google Analytics is an easily accessible tool to keep track of your KPIs, and it’s a powerful tool for improving SEO. So it’s a no-brainer to say that any SEO consultant should be experienced and well aware of Google Analytics.
Modern SEO trends
The agency you hire should be up-to-date when it comes to day-to-day SEO trends. They should be aware of the current best practices to rank higher. They should also share their findings and techniques with you.
Google has more than 200 factors for ranking pages, and they occasionally add more factors for better ranking pages according to relevancy. More importantly, Google has an excellent Webmaster Guidelines page and every SEO expert must be aware of the best practices Google recommends. Bing and Yahoo have also posted their guidelines too.
Communication transparency
Reports keep you dependably informed and up-to-date about your website, your business, and also the communication between you and your SEO experts. Depending on the importance of your work, you might request reports weekly, monthly, or quarterly. But having regular reports can help you understand the dynamics of your work.
When hiring an SEO consultant, you can ask how frequently they intend to send reports to customers. Your website might need changes depending on specific situations, so it’s a decent practice to keep customers informed regularly. Neither you nor your customers should ever be kept in the dark about what your business has to offer.
Shady practices
As much as anyone would prefer using best SEO practices, you should be aware of some black hat techniques which you should avoid at all costs. These practices can either destroy your search or, in the worst case, have your website banned from Google. Such techniques can include keyword stuffing, hidden texts, unrelated keyword addition, and page swapping.
In addition, if any SEO agency promises you that they can guarantee your website to be on top of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, or they claim to have some insider connections with any search engine, consider it a huge red flag.
Expiry details
At the time of expiry of a contract, or if at any time you feel the need to terminate the contract, you should still hold the rights to the content that the agency had optimized. While early termination can be costly and the agency might charge some money for that, the contract between you and the SEO agency must detail that they will not be allowed to edit or delete any of the content they worked on. It would be best if you had complete control and ownership of your content.