A Guide to Choosing Your SEO Partner

You’ve got a challenge!  You’re ready  to start incorporating SEO into your digital marketing strategy and you’ve been tasked with hiring an SEO firm to provide online marketing services, Finding the right SEO partner is important to making your venture productive. Your problem: Considering the vast number of companies offering SEO and  related services, , how will you be able to find one you can truly rely on to help grow your business?  Note that bad SEO practices employed by dubious firms can send you far down the search engine rankings. Yet! Some can deliver while others can’t. 

Here’s what you need to do  when choosing an SEO agency :

Investigate its background. Do not base your judgment only on what is presented before you. A nice-looking website does not a good SEO agency make. Ask for a list of projects they’ve done for present and past clients. If possible, interview some of these clients to know about their partnership with the agency. Hint:  that some may give biased feedbacks,  if most of the clients you interview say the same things, take that as a red flag.

Decide what you need. Once you know what you want, sit down with an SEO firm that seems reasonably qualified and ask them to help you figure out what you need to do. Most SEO firms will gladly offer a free consultation because they know by doing so they have a chance to impress you. Request a high level background report of your present website. 

Inquire about their methods. A reliable SEO company must be able to soundly explain  to you how they plan to carry out the task. If they won’t, then it’s likely that they don’t know what they’re doing or they may have something to hide. You should also learn about their communication platform. When should you expect a performance report? How can you monitor their output?

Setting clear goals, examining predictors of the future, and listening to stories–that’s how you ensure you’ll hire the right SEO firm. Are there exceptions? Sure. At our firm we’re terrible at producing previous formal case studies. We’re busy doing the work that produces results for our current clients, and although we know we should have the case studies, somehow they don’t make it to the highest priority.