You know you have a successful SEO Strategy in place when you begin to see the following:
Increased Rankings = Increased Organic Traffic
Increased Organic Traffic = Increased Calls and/or Web Forms Completed
Increased Calls and/or Web Forms = Increased Sales
Increased Sales = Increased Profits
Your success in SEO depends on the SEO agency you hire. If you hire an inexperienced SEO company, you may fail to see any results in the search engine rankings for a good two years or more. How can you tell if an SEO company is reliable and unreliable?
It is all about research. You need to perform extensive research on various SEO agencies before you settle on one. When you hire the right SEO Melbourne Agency to perform an SEO Audit and keyword research, you will reap in the benefits.
While the SEO company occupies itself in improving your online presence, you will have more time to build and run your business, have an improved website, increase user experience, and improve rankings on search engines such as Google.
You will receive all these benefits if you hire the right SEO company for your business. Follow these tips to hire the right SEO Company to help you improve the SEO of your website:
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Have Experience in Helping Businesses Similar to Yours
Experience in helping businesses similar to yours goes a long way, as the SEO Company is already familiar with several aspects of your business. The more experience they have working in the SEO industry, the more of a likelihood there is that they will deliver results for a business like yours. If they have more than 10 years of experience, that too is a positive sign.
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See Testimonials of Previous Clients
You need to look through the SEO company’s website and social media pages to find out what their previous clients had to say about them. By reading the various reviews, it will let you know the number of happy and satisfied clients the SEO company has.
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See SEO Case Studies
SEO case studies can reveal a lot about an SEO company. If the SEO company has case studies on their website of different clients they have worked with over the past, read them thoroughly to get an idea on how they work.
An SEO case study will reveal the challenge the SEO company faced when they took a particular business as their client, the solutions they came up with to overcome it, and the outcomes of the solutions.
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Perform Work In-house or Outsource
You want to work with an SEO Melbourne agency that does not outsource their SEO work but has a team of their own experienced and skilled SEO specialists who will be assigned to you. SEO companies that outsource most of their SEO work will be less accountable for the results and will have less control over the agency.
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Have Contact with the SEO Specialist
Communication gaps between you and your SEO Agency can cause a big dent in your business. If you have little to no knowledge on what is happening with your SEO marketing campaign performance, this should be of a concern. You want to remain in at least a once a month performance campaign contact with your SEO company. You should also be reachable and remain in contact with them on any changes your business is going through, so they can implement it in your SEO strategy.
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The Process of SEO Keyword Research
You need to understand the process they follow to perform keyword research. They will provide you with a broad range of commonly used words and phrases that your target market types in Google to find a company offering an exact type of service or product they want to purchase.
An SEO company that offers an extremely consultative and collaborative SEO keyword research promise is a company you want to consider hiring to handle the SEO aspect of your business. This process of keyword discovery helps the two parties find and agree on the right words and phrases to incorporate into an existing SEO marketing campaign.
In doing so, it will allow them to deliver to a direct tangible and commercial ROI to your business. It is better to consider an SEO Agency that does not rush the process, as it can cause your business to lose sales and revenue. If the right words and phrases were incorporated into the SEO marketing campaign in a timely manner, it would be saving your business several months of receiving no results.
Red Flags: On to the Next One
SEO companies often make promises and claims that are too good to be true. Whenever they do, this should raise a red flag. If you see any of the following signs, it is a red flag and you should find another SEO agency for your business:
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Overpriced or Underpriced Services
If the SEO company provides you with a low quote, there is a high chance that you will receive low quality work. If the SEO company provides you with a high quote, they may not be a commercially aware agency. For this reason, you need to consider an SEO Melbourne agency that has a strong reputation for giving results and more than 10 years of experience in the SEO industry. Their service offering should be broader and also entail SEO Audit, keyword research, SEO Copywriting, among other services to a wide variety of businesses.
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Makes a Promise to Index Your Website in 2 Days
If an SEO company promises to index your website in two days, they have most likely not visited your website or performed a detailed analysis of your website.
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Guarantees Top Page Ranking in One Week or 90 Days
An SEO company that promises to rank your website in one week or even 90 days clearly does not have a good understanding of how SEO works. Be sure to see the fine print of such guarantees and specifically which phrases they are guaranteeing their performance against. Especially with competitive broader phrases – with Google there is no way to speed up the entire process. A website needs to earn the trust over and authority over time.
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Several Search Engine Submissions
Several search engine submissions is a waste of time. If the SEO company has optimised your website for SEO properly, there is no need to submit to various search engines. Google along with Yahoo and Microsoft advise against submitting a website several times to search engines, as that will only drag you down in the search engine rankings, which is the complete opposite of what you want to do.
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Thousands of Links to Your Website
The search engines will penalise or blacklist your website if they catch you building links very quickly. Instead, you need to hire a SEO company that will work to build high quality inbound links to your website overtime, and not just in one go.
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Copyright Requests for Metadata and SEO
You should not contract the services of an SEO company that wants to retain copyright to any metadata that they have created, edited, and analysed for you. If they do, it will leave your website vulnerable and restrict you from using any such data.
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We Know Someone at Google and Google Partners
Now, this is the biggest red flag of all. Often many SEO Companies or individuals claim to ‘know’ a key person at Google who can help your website rank. Others leverage off their Google Partnership icons for Google Ads Certification to mislead prospective customers that this is the case for SEO Campaigns too. Google employees sign a confidentiality agreement, meaning that they cannot help an SEO company get their client to rank on the search engine. Furthermore Google’s organisation is multi faceted that there may not be one key person that knows all signals for ranking high within one business unit.
An SEO company needs to create their own reputation through hard work instead of saying that they know someone at Google who can help with search engine ranking. If this is the first thing you hear out of their mouth, it is time to exit.
Some Questions to Ask Them
You need to ask the SEO company the following questions:
- What is my current contract? What does it include and exclude? When does it end?
- What is the process to cancel?
- How will they communicate and how many times?
- Will I own my website?
- Will I have complete access to my analytics and AdWords accounts and website?
- Will you offer a performance guarantee?
- Have you done work with similar companies like mine?
- What budgets, options, and contracts are available?
- What fee and payment options they offer?
It is important for your business to find and engage the right SEO Agency for your business. Getting it right the first time presents a time advantage over your industry competitors and your own business growth.
