You’ve had your company website up for months. You made a plan and everything seemed promising at launch but you haven’t gotten many hits at all. It’s probably because your Google rank is still low.
While you’re great at running your business, you’re not experienced enough with SEO to make your rank go up further than it already is. It may be time for you to bring in the professionals. How do you filter out the professionals from the ones just in it for the money though?
We can help you out with that. Keep reading for all the questions you should be asking when hiring an SEO company.
1. How Can You Increase Our Rankings?
Many companies you ask this question to won’t be able to tell you anything specific such as what websites they’ll get their links from. What they can do is tell you a little about their process. Like how they will get your keywords for example.
While you’re asking about how they’ll increase your rankings you should also find out if they perform website audits. This audit is crucial for finding the strong and weak points in your site. Without one, they won’t be able to increase your online presence as effectively.
There is no secret sauce to SEO. It’s all about quality work and providing a positive user experience.
There is three main pillars to SEO:
- Technical SEO
- On- Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
If your website is technically sound most of the results will come from the ladder two.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is making tweaks to the code or even having a fast server to ensure your websites code is clean, W3 compliant and fast loading.
On-Page SEO
This is the optimization of the content that lives on your website. This means making tweaks to, or writing people first content. Since the Helpful Content update in August of 2022 writing people first content means quality, relevant, and original content. Gone are the days of writing for robots and keyword stuffing.
Off-Page SEO
Google gets to learn about your website from other factors placed around the web. This means placing high-quality links on other, relevant websites that link to your website. Usually the best way to do this is through blogger outreach. Industry experience shows that these editorial style links are the standard when it comes to link building.
2. Tell Us a Little About Your Experience
You need the best so you probably want to hire a company that’s had a few years experience in the SEO field. There is nothing wrong with asking a business this question going in.
For the most part, you wouldn’t go to an establishment without checking out reviews first. That’s why when you’re asking about an SEO company’s experience you should go ahead and try to get information about previous clients.
They most likely won’t give you an entire list but it should be enough to get an idea about the kind of work they’ve done at least.
3. How Will You Inform Us About Website Changes?
For the SEO company to work on your site, you’ll have to give them access to it. Once you do that they’ll be making changes to it regularly. Most companies will give you monthly or even weekly updates.
You’ll need to ask them about the kind of reports they’ll be giving you. There needs to be a constant line of communication so you can get these updates.
If you don’t know what the company is up to you may end up with a broken site that you don’t know how to fix because you don’t know how they broke it.
4. How Can Your Efforts Tie into Our Marketing?
At one time, marketing and SEO was seen as two separate things. Today, they are two sides of the same exact coin. They should blend together to build your online presence.
It’s for this reason that many SEO companies are now branding themselves as marketing specialists. If you see this, don’t rule the company out because their brand says marketing instead of SEO.
Chances are, they have SEO consultants onboard who can help you out. All you have to do is ask about it.
5. Do You Follow Google’s Practices?
Following the rules and practices of search engines (mainly Google) is the best way to ensure that your website is successful. These search engines update their rules and regulations periodically.
You’ll need to hire a company that keeps up with these rules because Google can and will punish you if your website happens to break them. If you are hit with a penalty it can take months before it’s corrected and your site is up and running again.
6. What Tools Do You Use?
There are some tools that can help you and the company you hire save tons of time and money. The problem is that some of these tools are good and some are bad.
For example, technical SEO tools can help a company scan for technical issues. This job would take forever to do manually. On the flip side, it’s not a good idea to use pure link building tools.
They work off thousands of blogs and forums. Not only are these links the weakest ones you can use, but Google will hit you with a penalty for using them.
7. What Kind of Work Do You Do?
Any company that you hire should offer all aspects of SEO work to ensure that you rank. These areas include technical, off-page, and on-page. Technical involves how well search engines can search your site and all its content.
Off-page work focuses on inbound links that appear on your site. As the name suggests, on-site SEO work is in charge of accessing the content that goes on your website.
8. Can You Guarantee Our Website will Rank #1?
If an SEO company tells you that they can get you to rank #1 without a doubt this is a pretty large red flag. More than likely they are telling you the answer you want to hear to make a sale.
No company knows what Google’s algorithms are completely nor do they know how and when they will change. Therefore it’s sort of hard to promise they will get you to the top.
9. What is Your Payment Structure?
You can’t pay a company for their services if you don’t know when you’re supposed to pay them. You’ll need to ask the SEO company you’re hiring what payment structure they use so you can factor it into your budget.
Most companies do it by the project but there are some that want to be paid by the hour. You should also find out when you need to pay them and see if they have an interest rate in the event you have to pay late.
Hiring an SEO Company to Handle Your Business Needs
You’re good at running your business but you’re not an SEO expert. If you’re having problems ranking in Google you should consider using these tips for hiring an SEO company to bring in a professional.
Having problems with finding an SEO company near you? Contact us to learn more about our services?
