Important Factors to Consider When Evaluating an SEO Company

If you have a company that is looking to get additional exposure, you will surely need to focus on your website. There are a lot of factors involved in good marketing, of course, but having a highly-ranking site can be the key to getting your name out effectively.

If you don’t know how to do this, or aren’t sure you can do it well enough yourself, you should start looking around for a company that can help you. There are a number of things you should keep in mind when doing this, which we will describe in this article.

Company Reputation

Just as in any other professional sphere, it pays to look at companies’ histories and assess what other customers have thought of them. There are a number of ways that you can do this:

• Google My Business. Google has a division specifically devoted to professional feedback. Look for reviews of potential companies there.
• Yelp. People think that Yelp is only for restaurants and home repair outfits, but this isn’t true. You can find reviews for any number of businesses, including SEO companies.
• Any other third-party review sites. Just make sure that the sites you look at are truly independent and not simply offshoots of companies’ own sites.
• Others that you might know who have been through the process. It’s always good to talk to people that you know and trust as these can be some of your most reliable resources.

As you’re going about this, you should obviously look for the best possible reviews, but try to do it within reason. If a company has one or two negative reviews, it might not be that bad. Remember, there are always angry people out there that are determined to slam everyone in town. If a company has a majority of positive reviews and gets good marks for customer feedback in particular, they might be a good candidate for you.

Process

Once you’ve found a list of the best SEO companies that you think might be good candidates, you should then look further into how they go about their SEO. You should keep in mind the following questions:

1. Do they conduct a full SEO audit? In order to really understand where your site stands in terms of SEO rankings, it is essential that you get a complete audit. Ask how they go about this process. A good answer would include the following elements:
   1. 1. Running crawlers through your site. Crawlers are the bots that run through the Internet to index different sites. The audit should also address any potential indexability problems.
      2. Figure out what your organic traffic is. That is, the number of people that go to your site by choice, rather than through paid ads
      3. See if there are any duplicates of your site elsewhere on the Internet
      4. Cross-check your site strength on PCs and mobile devices
      5. Determine if you have any bad or broken links, either on your page itself, or backlinks that lead from other sites to yours. Once this determination is made, the audit should aim to fix these issues.
2. Will they conduct an analysis of your keywords and determine their strength? If keyword strength is low, the company should provide you with tools for how to make your keywords more effective. This is one of the essential components of SEO and a significant part of what ranking is based upon.

Determine What the Company Will Need From You

Another thing to keep in mind is that SEO companies cannot simply wave a magic wand and make your site brand new. A lot of what you will end up with in the end is going to require active effort on your part. Companies can advise you, but they can’t make final decisions about your text, content, etc.

Different companies have different standards when it comes to time commitment from their clients. You will likely be expected to put in a certain number of hours per week making adjustments until the process is completed. So this is something to keep in mind when starting out.

Choose Wisely and Keep Going Back

Finding the right company for your SEO is an essential part of keeping your company in the public eye, and letting people know that you are reputable. If you have a properly-functioning site, it not only gives you exposure in general, but shows people that you are organized and know how to run a business effectively.

You should also keep in mind that this is not a one-time process. Many of the factors that go into SEO ranking change frequently. Google makes frequent changes to its algorithms, keywords and keyword phrases that are considered the strongest change on a regular basis, and links can go bad at any time. Therefore, once you land on a good company