If you want to hire the services of an SEO company, you will quickly find that there are quite literally thousands to choose from. Naturally, not all of them are any good so you need to learn how to recognise those companies that will actually offer you benefits. They must truly understand how the overall optimization process works and they must be upfront and honest about the fact that time and effort will be required and that it is an ongoing process. At the same time, you have to have realistic expectations about what is possible and what is not possible. It is not possible, for instance, to guarantee that you will get the first place in the Google Search results. It is also not possible for you to get to the first page and stay there without ongoing work. But it is possible to get to the first page and maintain your rankings if your SEO company does things right. So what are the 10 things you should look for if you want to find an SEO company that is worth working with?
10 Things an SEO Company Should Offer
- They should perform a full site evaluation. This means they look at what your current rankings and online reputation are and develop a plan to improve this.
- They must have the necessary tools to determine which keywords and keyword phrases are right for you and that do not yet have so much competition that they are impossible to target. A full competitive analysis should be completed.
- They should be able to find high quality backlinks as they are as important as your on-site optimization. The backlinks should come from websites that are related to yours, thereby building your authority.
- They should have an easy to understand and transparent cost structure. Good SEO does not come cheap. However, you should also not face any nasty surprises and hidden fees.
- They should be able to tell you what you can expect and buy when. As said earlier, there are no real guarantees and any SEO company that says they guarantee you will get that first place is either lying or using black hat tactics. However, they should be able to tell you that they will achieve a certain increase in rankings within a certain period of time.
- They must be clear about the SEO techniques and strategies they prefer and employee and they should be able to explain why these are of the greatest benefit.
- They should focus on delivering targeted traffic, and preferably organic traffic. Simply hosting your website in a directory and getting lots of random traffic will not benefit you in the long run.
- They should have clear deliverables and be transparent on this. For instance, they should tell you exactly how many blog posts, how many press releases, and how many social media postings they will write each month and 2 how many websites they will submit those.
- They should provide you with regular updates and reports on progress so that you can see whether their work has been effective.
- They should guarantee their performance. For instance, companies should be able to say that you don’t have to pay until something has been achieved or that you get your money back if a certain result hasn’t been reached.
