There are millions of SEO companies all offering the same services, same results, and same promises. You might have even received a few emails from SEO companies trying to get your business. How do you pick the right SEO company? What questions should you ask to see if they are the best fit for your business?
You’re in luck, in this post I am going to go over some things you should look for when looking for a SEO company.
If you are a local Fort Worth business, it makes sense to hire a local SEO company. A SEO firm in a different state or city probably doesn’t know enough about the DFW area to provide accurate tactics to drive organic traffic to your website. Sure, as they build out your SEO campaign they will learn about the different areas and how locals are searching, but it would take longer than someone that is familiar with the DFW area.
Whether you pick a local Fort Worth SEO company or choose to go with a SEO company in a different area, it is important to ask the right questions in order to find the right fit for your business.
Before we get into some tips on how to find a good SEO company, be sure you have read my post on why SEO gets a bad reputation. That post will give you some things to look out for when selecting a SEO company.
Let’s get into it. The first thing I always tell people to ask for is previous results.
Previous Work Examples
The last person you want to do business with is a person who has read a few SEO articles and now thinks they are “SEO Experts”. You should always ask for examples of their previous SEO work. Can they provide examples of successful SEO campaigns they are currently running? If possible, logging into an active Google Analytics account and going over the organic traffic and SEO campaign would be optimal.
For example, I have a video on YouTube that actually opens a couple Google Analytics accounts and shows how important organic traffic is for a couple web properties. You can watch the video below.
It is important to see their previous SEO work. The last thing you want to do is pay someone that has little or no experience when it comes to SEO.
What is their process and method when doing SEO?
This is a good question to ask the SEO company. This will give you an idea on how they go about doing SEO and their strategy. Do they talk about on-page SEO factors? Do they mention link building? What about the importance of content?
If you have read my other posts, you should be pretty knowledgable in these areas. This will help you pick out the guys that know what they are doing versus the fakes!
This is important, you don’t want a penalty on your site from Google because of a bad SEO campaign.
Site Review
Ask the SEO company to do a quick review of your website. This will help you determine if they are familiar with the best practices for on-page SEO. Again, read my post about on-page SEO for more information. You should hear things about:
- site structure
- meta tags
- keyword density
- content length
- internal linking
These are just high level areas, but they are a good start to determine if they are technical enough to optimize your website for search engines.
Link Building
Linking building should be a topic of conversation when talking with any SEO company. Here you want to determine how the SEO company plans to build links to your website. If they say things like, “We have a piece of software that blasts your website to millions of other websites”, “We buy site-wide links for your website”, or “Linking building isn’t important”, you should kindly hang up the phone or leave the meeting..
Here you should hear things about how they are manually going to build links that relate to your website. Review my post on off-page SEO to get familiar with some popular ways SEO companies build backlinks to websites.
Every website and business is different, so there might be creative ways that the SEO company uncovers to build backlinks. This is always good to hear and will help you beat out your competition in the search engines.
Keywords
A simple question along the lines of “What keywords should my business target”, will open discussion around keyword research. You probably won’t get exact keywords that you should target if this is the first time the SEO company is learning about your business, but they should be able to mention core keywords.
You also want to hear the SEO company talk about the “money” keywords. These will be the keywords people are searching for that are interested in purchasing or buying your business product/service.
If you do most of your business locally, there should be a lot of discussion on geographic terms and how they plan to get your business listed for local keywords.
General Questions
After going over the sections mentioned above, you should have a pretty good idea of the knowledge and capabilities of the SEO company in question.
At this point, I would ask them a few easy/trick questions. Things like:
- How long until you can get me to the number one position for a certain keyword?
- How long has your company been doing SEO?
- Why should I pick your company over the other SEO companies?
The first question is a little trick. If they give you a for sure date or timeframe, then don’t do business with this SEO company. No one can provide exact dates and positions for SEO rankings. No one.
The second questions will give you a good idea on how much experience they have with SEO. The SEO landscape has changed a lot over the years. Experienced SEOs have seen dramatic changes that in turn changed a lot of SEO tactics and strategies. This is important to understand in order to do the current best practices when running an SEO campaign.
If you really want to hear how a SEO differentiates itself from the millions of other SEO companies, ask the last question. This question might even uncover some SEO strategies and tactics the company implements that haven’t been discussed until this point.
Overall, SEO is about driving more traffic and potential business to your website. Finding a good SEO company that implements a SEO campaign that follows best practices in order to drive organic traffic to your website is important. Reading the other posts on Fort Worth SEO Services will help you understand SEO and give you the knowledge needed to find a SEO company for your business.
If you have any questions or need help with anything, please feel free to contact me.