Why you should look at more than just price while hiring an SEO agency?

by Sujeet K. Digital Marketer

If you are planning to take your online marketing to next level but you are totally new and unexperienced in the field of SEO than be careful and select reliable, trustworthy SEO company to begin with. Every time you will look around, you will find new local SEO agency has started up and promising remarkable results in low costing. On the surface this may appear very attractive, but remember like most things, you will only get what you will pay for. So, it is important to know the essential points other than price that should be considered while hiring any SEO agency. Now the question comes, how do you know whom to hire? What red flags should you look for during your research? And why price is not the only criteria to hire any SEO agency?

Check out your goals.

The first thing to understand is your goal. Sit down with your team, with your CEO, your board, and figure out the goals that you're trying to achieve with SEO. What’s the real reason to hire an SEO agency? Then, figure out how to judge success versus failure as well as the areas of online presence that you want to improve. If you’re not sure about the areas to be focused, then get a digital marketing analysis done for the better knowledge. Also, deciding goals are important to target the audience and goals can vary from getting traffic to boost revenue to boost downloads,designing website, free sign-ups or free trials or may be trying to increase the brand awareness.

Remember your strategies should be based on Goals, not on traffic numbers. All your SEO and Internet marketing strategies should start with your business goals for improving branding, sales, traffic etc. If an SEO company doesn’t ask what your goals are than they are not focusing on right things which means their goals and your goals are not on same track. Getting traffic is not the only focus, but what matters is the quality traffic that can generates the revenue or output.

Find an SEO Company that tracks all the data

To find the best solution for your business, you should select an SEO agency that can track and measure all the data of your company. It should include click through rates, phone calls, contact forms, site visits, conversions etc. Don’t pay all your attention to the price while hiring SEO agency, right business strategies are vital, otherwise you will miss out on the results which will otherwise turn out to be a disaster.

Research about company- Reviews, Case Studies & Testimonials

The best way to get an unbiased opinion about SEO agency you are planning to hire is through reviews. There can be agencies with big brand names but with poor reviews and on the other hand there can be a start-up agency but with amazing reviews. In such scenarios, there are chances to get everything by spending a small amount or to get cheated even with the big amount, that’s why reviews are important.

Online reviews are worth, do check them and go through the testimonials. For more information ask for their brief list of current and former clients, a reputed SEO consultant will be open to share the brief list. They will not hesitate in introducing you to the current client so that you can speak with them about their experience and satisfaction level. The client may not share all the specific analytics, but they will surely give you an overview or let you know if they saw any positive impact on their search ranking, and in gaining new audience, as a direct result of consultant's efforts.

Know the tools SEO agencies are using.

Don’t forget to ask the tools they are using because it plays an important role in campaign success. The word tool is not that simple, in context to SEO it describes a wide variety of applications. Tools allows in processing lots of information in short time which can save lots of time and money. There are different tools such as Reporting tools, Link building tools, Technical SEO tools, Research tools etc.

Remember, your SEO partner should be able to articulate the reasons for their preferred tools and the impact of those tools when they are properly utilized. Don’t forget to ask the questions, which tools they are using and why? Because Knowing exactly what tools they use isn’t necessarily important but knowing that they are able to describe the reasons to use those tools is critical.

Ask them- How long it will take to notice the results?

Result matters, effective SEO takes time but that doesn’t restrict an agency to give you a time frame for results, if it’s an experienced firm. Generally, it takes around 6 months to start noticing the results. However, if they promise you the shorter time do ask them how? If they give you logical fact-based answer than ok, otherwise be careful. Either they are lying or using some wrong measures or spams that can lead to penalties. So, this aspect should be dealt with extra care before hiring any SEO agency.

Don’t forget to ask- How you keep yourself updated?

At a minimum you will want an agency who stays up to date on the information posted by Google on its webmaster and google search algorithms. So, you have all the rights to ask them, how you keep yourself updated on industry changes and Google updates? A reputed SEO professional will keep them updated and conduct their own research while monitoring for potential signs of algorithm changes and investigate possible shifts in SEO best practices.

The conclusion is, you should hire an SEO agency if you have enough budge or if your budget is limited you can hire a good individual consultant. But remember, not hire them just based on a promise to get on top or based on pricing. Instead set the goals, do the research, compare, ask questions and then finalize.