6 Factors To Consider Before Hiring An SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of making a website more visible to search engines. Most small businesses, don’t do it, do it wrong, or hire someone to do it for them. Either way, SEO is an essential marketing practice for any business that wants to have it’s products and services found online.
Competition is fierce both online and off. There are more than 4 billion websites online all competing for limited online real estate. It’s difficult for a website to be found even in the first few pages of search results without solid SEO strategy in place.
You cannot expect instant results when starting your SEO journey. With steady and consistent work, your website’s search engine rankings will improve over time. In the early days of the internet, websites didn’t require SEO for search engines to find them. A robot, also known as a spider, was capable of traversing all the sites on the internet in a matter of hours. Today, there is far more content for with nearly all being crawled and only the best being indexed.
Search Engine Optimization refers to establishing the necessary components that allow a website to crawled and indexed within search results. The optimization process starts with each page having a well thought out title and description. This involves researching keywords and selecting the ones that are most relevant to the site’s content. The next step is to submit the site’s content to the search engines for crawling and indexing.
Consider This Before Hiring An SEO
- Can the company provide cases studies to support their SEO experience?
- How well is their own website ranked on search engines? What are their chances of success with your site if they can’t rank their own?
- What strategy does the company have to increase visibility? Although most SEO Agencies won’t give you exact details, they should be able to explain a clear direction.
- Is the SEO Company going to use automation tools or is their work done manually? Automation tools are great, but should not be used exclusively. Here are a few examples:
- You could be distributing duplicate written content.
- Be sure you’re not being linked to link farms or private blog networks.
- Check to see if your content is linked with low-quality or spam related websites.
- Search Engine results can be quantified in approximately 3 months. With indexing becoming more and more difficult, it’s more likely that results can be seen within 6-8 months.
- Beware of agencies that make claims of guaranteed top search engine ranking results.
- Even paid ad placement or PPC campaigns do not come with a guarantee. While PPC is a great way to gain almost immediate traction, it can be costly and not as effective as good SEO practices.
- Think of SEO as the long game and PPC as the short game.
Hiring the wrong SEO agency can do more harm than good for your website’s rankings. Choose your SEO agency wisely and be patient until the search engines reward your efforts.
