If you're a small business owner, you've probably heard that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your online presence. But you might not know exactly what SEO is, and whether or not it's worth your time and money. If you're like me when I first started investigating SEO, then you've got questions.
What does SEO mean? What is a good SEO company? What makes one better than another? How much does it cost to hire an SEO agency or company? And how do I choose the right one for my business?
Even if you've been in the business for a while and have some familiarity with these questions, it can still be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff when choosing an agency.
Here are some tips on choosing an agency that will help your site rise through the rankings and improve your bottom line:
When you're picking an SEO company to work with, it's important to define your business goals. This way, the company you choose will be able to help you achieve these goals by providing services tailored to your needs. First, define what you want to achieve in the next year and the next five years. What are your long-term goals? It might be better for a business with few competitors but large customer bases—like a local pizza shop or car dealership—to focus on increasing their visibility on Google Maps over increasing their rank on search engines like Bing or Google!. A restaurant with several locations would likely benefit more from higher rankings across multiple search engines than they would from being ranked higher in any one particular market (say, New York City).
Once you've defined what kind of long-term strategy makes sense for your company's unique circumstances and goals, it's time to start thinking about specific short-term results that could bring those larger projects closer into reach.
An SEO audit is the best place to start. An SEO audit is a thorough analysis of your website and its current content. It will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as areas where you need to focus your attention.
An SEO audit can also help identify opportunities for growth, which may include: new business leads, more traffic, higher sales conversions or improved brand awareness.
When you start looking at SEO company, the first thing you will want to do is look at their portfolio of clients. This is where they have listed all of their past clients and the websites that they have worked on for them.
When you are reviewing these client portfolios, you should look at three things:
You can find out if a company is doing this by seeing if they link back to their own site in their blog posts. It's a simple test, and it's something that every SEO company should be doing for their clients. If they are using the same links across multiple sites, then you know that they've been done correctly.
A few years ago I was brought on as an SEO expert at a large B2B marketing agency that had recently opened an office in New York City. The founder of the company asked me to review his website because he didn't understand why he wasn't getting any traffic from Google search results despite spending thousands of dollars per month on advertising campaigns. After spending some time on his website, I noticed that none of its pages were linked back to any other pages on the site (and neither were any off-site links). This meant no one could find anything else if they landed anywhere except for page 1 or 2 - not good!
The content that you create should be relevant to your business and its audience. This means it must be well-written, engaging, and targeted towards the target market. It should also be updated regularly so it's up-to-date with current trends and developments in your industry. If a company doesn't have time to maintain regular updates on their own site, then they probably won't have the time or resources to do so for yours either!
As you’re interviewing agencies, ask them about their approach to SEO and how they handle content marketing.
The tools you use are important. They can help you optimize your website and make sure it’s delivering the right content to your users. The right tool can also help you improve your social media strategy, promote your website, and even analyze traffic patterns.
The best SEO company will make sure they’re using the most up-to-date technology available, including the latest SEO software applications that allow them to keep track of any changes in Google’s algorithm so they can make sure their clients stay on top of things at all times.
You can also ask about the different pricing models. There are several ways to structure an SEO contract:
Choosing the right SEO company for your business is critical, because it can help you grow your business. You need to know what to look for and consider when finding the right one. Here are some things you should be aware of:
Your business goals - What do you want to achieve with digital marketing? Are there specific goals that are most important to you, such as increasing sales, acquiring new customers or raising brand awareness? An experienced company will be able to pinpoint how they can contribute towards achieving these goals. The best way for them to achieve this is by creating content that attracts potential customers based on their interests and needs.
The agency's portfolio - What kind of work has been done by this agency in the past? Look through their portfolios so that you can see how they have previously helped businesses like yours grow their online reach over time by using SEO techniques such as link building (getting backlinks from other websites) or PPC (pay-per click advertising).
In this post we covered some of the most important factors to consider when selecting an agency such as price, services offered and customer service. Now that you know how to choose the right SEO company for your business, you can get started on your search and find the one that best matches your needs.
We also discussed what makes these companies unique from each other by comparing them based off their client-agency relationships as well as their pricing plans. Finally we gave some examples of agencies who have been successful in the past with a specific feature like content creation or keyword optimization so that you can see firsthand what type of results they deliver for clients before making a decision yourself!
