When it comes to buying SEO for your company, it’s important to ask the relevant questions.
After all, as online marketing continuously expands, there are now hundreds of digital marketing companies all claiming they can give your business the boost it needs to succeed.
But what exactly are the questions you need to ask before signing on the dotted line, and how do you know whether SEO is even right for you?
What exactly is SEO?
Before you even consider buying SEO, it’s vital that you know exactly what it entails.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is a method used to generate traffic from organic results from search engines. These can include the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo. It is used to actively improve search engine rankings for businesses in order to amplify brand awareness and to target a wider audience as a result.
Over 200 minor factors add up to good SEO – but for a general understanding the top 3 defining factors that you should be concerned with is:
- Links
- Content
- Technical SEO
If you are really geeky or want a great night sleep feel free to look at the full list of ranking factors here.
The questions you should be asking your potential SEO company & the answers you want in return are:
Links
- What is your link building strategy? A wholesome link building strategy should include an analysis of your competitors backlinks, and outreaching to high quality, niche related websites in hope of a link placement. This should include a range of both do-follow and no-follow links.
- Is this considered to be in line with Google best practice? Obviously, you want the answer to this to be a firm yes!
- Have you ever gotten your client a penalty? The answer to this needs to be no.
- Do you outsource your link building? Depending on who they outsource to, this can be a good or a bad thing – make sure you check who they are diverting the work to and do your research on them also.
- Have you removed a penalty for a client? If this answer is yes your potential company has a good understanding of what not to do and how to fix past mistakes.
- Is my backlink profile healthy or unhealthy? You want to know this from the start because essentially a really unhealthy backlink profile can not be fully fixed. It needs to be scrapped and started again.
Content
- What is your keyword research strategy? A good keyword research strategy should include niche research, traffic predictions, competition levels, CPC ideas and the use of domain authorities to determine how hard a keyword is to rank for. Without these key elements will miss opportunities within the market.
- How do you use KWR in your content development? The answer for this must always be yes as it means your content is written with both search engines and your audience in mind.
- Do you build content with internal linking in mind? Again you are looking for a yes to this question as it is good SEO practice
- Do you outsource your content writing? Similar to link building the answer to this would depend on how good the company they outsource it to. Make sure you always do your research!
- How will content be used to gain ROI? Content should always have a ROI strategy attached to it, traffic generation, lead magnets, sales funnels, micro conversions & conversion rates should definitely come up when discussing a content marketing strategy.
Technical SEO
- Do you have specialist technical staff? Without specialist staff, a company may be unable to provide you with a full SEO audit, meaning it could miss errors within your website.
- Do you have the development capabilities to implement recommendations? This is good to know, because either you or the SEO company will need to source these development skills elsewhere if they don’t. It also means they cannot provide the full SEO service that other agencies can.
- What do you cover in an SEO audit? SEO audits are quite large documents, however, the main issues your SEO company should cover include on-page optimisation, content. duplicate content checks, indexation, website speed, mobile friendly, site architecture & linking.
- How often are audits run? You would want a minimum of one every 6 to 12 months, on top of this whenever any Google update comes out and whenever any major design or content changes are made to the website.
Finding a company that can answer all of these questions is the first step towards driving profit through your website. To find out more about SEO and how increasing organic traffic can benefit your business, contact one of our experts today.
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