How to Hire the Right SEO Agency – For many organizations, the work done on their digital marketing campaigns can make the difference between success or failure for the business as a whole. Search engine optimization is an important element of a well-rounded digital marketing strategy, as millions of people use search engines every day to find answers, information, products, or answers to their questions. There are over 60,000 searches per second on Google, and most users search three to four times a day.
SEO has come a long way in recent years and is growing rapidly. Considering these changes, the competitive landscape, and the impact of new algorithm updates and technology, presents both a challenge and an opportunity for organizations, and it requires dedicated SEO support.
Why Hire an SEO Agency
Once your organization has welcomed the need for SEO (or additional SEO support), you need to decide whether you want to hire someone in-house or work with an SEO agency.
There is a lot of value and benefits to hiring in-house SEO or having an SEO team. However, some organizations do not have the structural or financial support to do this work internally. In these instances, hiring an agency can be a cost-effective solution to a company’s SEO needs.
Meanwhile, organizations that may already have an in-house SEO team face various challenges that can be solved by hiring an SEO agency in Chandigarh. They may be managing a large or complex website, maybe low on bandwidth, or the team may be missing an important piece of expertise.
While it may seem like hiring an in-house SEO is the ideal solution, finding someone who has the required experience level can be challenging. Plus, hiring an agency can bring with it a fresh perspective and new ideas.
How to Identify an Inadequate SEO Agency
The method of finding and choosing an SEO agency can be daunting if you are not familiar with SEO yourself. There are many reputed SEO agencies out there. But there are worse, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the real deal from total fraud. Just as hiring a bad in-house SEO can be very expensive, working with a weak SEO agency can be very costly.
Following are some warning signs and things to do to help you identify an inadequate SEO agency:
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a spammy SEO technique that targets a keyword in excessive amounts in order to gain an unfair rank advantage in search results. You can read more about keyword filling in Google’s Quality Guidelines.
The screenshot below is of an agency’s homepage, which I found on the first page of Google when I searched for “SEO Agency Seattle”. The company used the keyword “SEO Agency” a total of 60 times on its homepage!
If the agency has a page full of keywords, they are a danger to themselves and others and should be avoided. Do you want this quality of work on your website and potentially risk being negatively affected by search engine algorithm updates?
The keyword stuffing technique may work for a month or two, but it is a flawed strategy that will get anyone with a long-term business plan in trouble.
Fee per link
As tempting as $10 per link may sound, they are links generating penalties. Even though the agency charges based on “link quality,” the quality of the link can be difficult to measure, and the link may not be visible for weeks or months. Selling links also means that they are likely to have a link network (which is very bad), or that they are naive. Either way, avoid any agency that charges a per link fee.
Makes promises
If an agency promises a #1 ranking (or anything that sounds too good to be true), run! If they make promises, such as, “We promise 1,000 new visitors to your site next week,” among many others, or they know someone at Google and have insider knowledge of Google algorithms. Don’t work with them. As attractive as it may sound, it will hurt your organic search achievement in the long run. Even though this is a “money-back guarantee”, your site’s recovery from penalties is not guaranteed.
Automated SEO
I’m not 100% sure what agencies mean by offering “automated services”, so I won’t go too far. But anyone claiming any automated techniques for SEO should make you suspicious. While there are a lot of SEO tools out there, none of them can do an SEO analysis or optimize a site as well as a human breathing a living.
Disability
If the SEO agency you’re researching can’t do SEO for itself, it’s the most obvious sign that you’re wasting your money. Just look at the essential on-page SEO elements (title tag, meta description and headings) and check how well optimized they are (if at all).
You can easily view all the on-page elements of any webpage using Portent’s SEO Page Review Chrome extension.
Get Familiar with Black-Hat SEO Strategy
While search engines are getting smarter every year, there are still many black hat and spammy tactics SEO search engines use to trick search engines into ranking a page when the page doesn’t deserve rank.
Take the time to familiarize yourself with black-hat SEO and spam tactics to make sure you are not being sold these strategies, and that your agency is not implementing them on your site. As mentioned earlier, black-hat SEO strategies may work for a while, but they will eventually result in your website being penalized by search engines.
Questions to Ask an SEO Agency Before Hiring
Before you embark on the journey of hiring an SEO agency, you should have a set of questions to ask each agency, so that you can make an accurate comparison of each. You will also want to do your background research to familiarize yourself with each agency before meeting with them.
You can start with standard questions, such as “Have you worked in our industry before?” Most agencies will lie, but that won’t help you make the best decision. Instead, start with these questions to start the conversation.
1. What is your SEO process?
If the agency can explain its SEO process in 60 seconds or less and it makes sense to you, that’s a good sign. If they talk until your ear falls flat, or if they don’t mean anything, it might be best to move on from them.
It should go without saying that it is not safe to work with them if the SEO process seems vague or the agency keeps many of their processes secret.
2. What kind of work will you do on my site?
Make sure the agency includes details on how to provide recommendations about technical issues, improve on-page elements, optimize existing content, create a content strategy, and obtain backlinks. Bonus points if the agency talks about quick wins and long-term growth.
3. Can I see a sample of the recommendation report you have given to customers?
See how the agency provides SEO recommendations to its clients. Is the report easy to understand, actionable, and practical? Or didn’t the agency have any reports to share? If not, it would be best to say goodbye and work with someone who knows how to provide SEO recommendations.
4. How do you get backlinks?
Backlinks are very valuable in SEO, and it takes a lot of hard work to achieve them. As mentioned earlier, it is always a good idea to get high-quality natural backlinks instead of buying links.
Buying backlinks is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in fines if you are caught.
If the agency you’re talking to says they don’t disclose their backlink sources, don’t work with them. Your SEO agency wants to tell you about all the links they found you and where they came from.
Some acceptable strategies for getting backlinks are guest posting, link improvement, content promotion, HARO queries and creating high-quality content.
5. Do you guarantee the result?
As I mentioned earlier if the agency promises that they will rank you #1, run away from them. Even if they promise first-page rankings, that doesn’t mean they’ll have good traffic to page one for those keywords.
Instead, you’re likely to get the well-known SEO response of “it depends”. Which, in this case, is an accepted answer (hopefully with some additional details).