Having spent a lot of time doing your own SEO in-house, have you found that your website does not rank as highly as you hoped? Are you devoting a lot of time trying to optimize your website for search engines meaning that other tasks are being delayed?
Hiring a search engine optimisation company can improve your overall website, increase traffic and save you time which is better spent on your business services. Choosing the right SEO Company is essential to maximise rankings, traffic and optimising search engine indexes. When approaching an SEO company it is essential that you ask all of the relevant questions, which are tailored to your specific needs. Be sure to know what you want to achieve, this is the first step in choosing the right SEO web agency and will minimise the risk of picking a poor or dishonest partner.
Some useful services they may provide are…
- Site Review : This may include updating images, copy changes and the overall look and feel of the website.
- Site Structure : They may advise that the layout needs to change, menus/items need to be deleted or added, and additional pages may need consideration with internal linking structures changed.
- Technical Advice : changing hosting, redirecting, server errors, broken links, javascript advice, iframes, load speed, xml sitemaps and more.
- Content development : having the ability to enhance and increase your website content on a regular basis keeps your site fresh, increases website size and appeal and also gives you opportunities to target multiple long tail keywords.
- Keyword research : the research of keywords can help improve traffic and ensures sure you are targeting keywords that are being used to search. It is important not to second guess, with the right research you can accurately determine what potential visitors are actually searching for. Give your SEO company a list and they should provide you with a more comprehensive list of related keywords that are regularly being searched for.
- SEO training : User training is very useful. By ensuring that your website administrators have some knowledge of SEO and its’ requirements, you can reduce costs paid to a third party and improve the efficiency of your SEO program by performing SEO tasks as updates are being made.
The best time to hire an SEO company
While learning about SEO is an essential business process, sometimes it is often best to hire an SEO company, freeing up your time to focus on other key areas of your business and making use of the specialist skills and experience that a dedicated agency offers. If you are launching a new website or having a website re-designed then it is advisable to involve an SEO company before you hire a web design company, or even better, find a company that will do both. It is much easier to build a website around SEO than trying to restructure an already built website.
Whether you are experienced with SEO or not, there is an opportunity cost in doing in-house maintenance. What other jobs are being neglected in order for your website to be up to date? Hiring an SEO company should save you time, increase your traffic and provide a strong return for your investment.
Frequently asked questions
- Do you follow Google’s Guidelines?
- Do you offer advice and training to complement your services?
- Am I provided any reports?
- How long have you been doing this?
- What clients have you worked with/Am I able to get a reference from your clients?
What SEO companies should I be wary of?
Email Spam : receiving spam emails from a free email account out of the blue that promise the world.
We will get you to number 1 in Google : No one can guarantee a number 1 ranking position!
20 minute proposals : All professional SEO experts will have a rough idea of the cost implementation for an SEO campaign. To have a proper proposal, your website has to be scanned, reviewed, the backlink profiles checked on your current website and those of your competitors, initial keyword research preformed and then analysed in order to quote an accurate monthly fee. If you ask for an SEO proposal and have it in your inbox within 20 minutes and it looks like a standard document, then be wary.
What is the ranking of the keywords for their site? – If they are not able to rank their own company very highly, how are they going to be able to rank yours?
Approach – There is no one way to approach SEO, nor is there an incorrect method, anyone who tells you their method is the best or that they have a secret method is probably being untruthful .
What other checks can be done?
Alexa
Alexa gives every website a ranking. Check the ranking of your intended SEO Company to determine the traffic they attract themselves. Websites that rank under 5 million are likely to be receiving very little traffic. If they are receiving no traffic then it is unlikely they will be able to help you.
Note: On occasion it is possible that the website of a new SEO Company may not rank well, simply because it is very new. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
Pagerank
Pagerank is used by Google to determine a page’s relevance. The most important pages receive a higher ranking and appear at the top of a page. It is measured between 0-10 and is based on backlinks. It is important to initially check the pagerank of the SEO company- this is a feature that can be easily attached to most Google browsers.
If the company has very low, zero or n/a pagerank then they are unlikely to be able to help you sufficiently.
Site Search
Enter “site:thedomainname.co.uk” into Google search, this will return how many pages they have in Google’s index. Sites with no or very few pages in Google’s index indicate that the site owners do not fully understand the value of content. Failure to consider the priority of genuine content could restrict your online growth.
Contracts
SEO is an ongoing process and if you want your company to continue to rank well then consistency is essential. It is better to hire an SEO company that will include post-optimization maintenance than a company that does the initial work and then leaves a site to flounder and disappear.
There are many different options to consider when you are looking to SEO. Good SEO companies should always offer flexible contract choices that suit the client’s needs and budget. Being tied in to a long and inflexible arrangement is rarely a good position for a client. As a customer you should be free to determine the success of your SEO program and alter or indeed terminate your agreement accordingly.
At Dynamics we strongly believe in empowering our customers by offering the most flexible terms, we are happy to be judged by the success of your SEO program.