There are a lot of factors to consider when hiring an SEO company, so before you make your decision, ask these questions. They’ll help you figure out if the service is worth your time and money. Isn’t it terrifying? Hiring SEO assistance may make or ruin your business. A good SEO will put you on the road to earning tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, whereas a poor SEO will suffocate any current search engine traffic. Therefore, it’s critical to make informed decisions, and I’ll teach you how to do so today. If you’re considering hiring an SEO firm, I’ve compiled a list of 17 questions to assist you in making the best decision. These are the kinds of questions you should ask before employing someone, so you know precisely what to anticipate. Finally, you don’t have to ask all of these questions, but I’ll explain why they’re essential so you can evaluate whether or not they apply to your circumstance.
Types of SEO assistance
I’d want to go through the various sorts of SEOs before we get into the questions:
- Individual SEO consultants are self-employed individuals that provide SEO services.
- SEO firms/agencies – these firms, for the most part, have SEO teams and established SEO practices. They usually work with medium-sized enterprises (with budgets of at least a few thousand dollars per month for SEO).
- In-house SEOs — if your company is enormous or developing quickly, recruiting an in-house SEO team may benefit you. You may do it yourself or engage an SEO specialist to assist you with setting things up and creating an initial approach.
The questions in this essay are primarily directed at the first two sorts of SEOs. There is a wide range of freelancers and SEO firms to choose from. Some are fantastic, while others are atrocious. I can tell that a good SEO would never charge a cheap fee. If you’re looking for a bargain, you’re likely to choose an SEO that takes shortcuts and harms your site in the long term. However, a high price does not always imply excellent quality work. Many organizations would exorbitantly mark up the cost of simple work. Because most website owners have no idea how to assess SEO work, these SEO firms may get away with a lot. Fortunately, you’re not your typical webmaster. By reading this post, you’ve shown that you’re taking the time to screen out terrible SEOs properly. You should be able to locate an SEO who has a good influence on your company if you ask the appropriate questions and pay attention to the answers (I’ll show you how immediately). Ready? Let’s get started…
1. What strategies will you use to boost our search engine rankings?
Without a solid SEO plan, you won’t see any meaningful results. If you randomly target keywords or establish links, you could get occasional effects, but you’ll never see continuous traffic growth. This implies that all competent SEOs, whether they work freelance or for an agency, have a system in place. “We’re going to obtain links from X, Y, and Z websites,” they probably won’t be able to tell you. They can tell you that “we’ll start with an on-site technical SEO analysis to discover any opportunities for rapid gains.” Then we’ll figure out which keywords to target.” Inquire about the hyperlinks: Backlinks have long been an essential aspect of search engine algorithms and will continue to be so in the future. To increase ranks, all SEOs will “create” connections to your website. Not all backlinks are made equal, as you may know. A single high-quality backlink is worth hundreds of low-quality backlinks. Low-quality backlinks may be automated, often utilized in spam link creation. Consider the standard Fiverr jobs where you can purchase hundreds or thousands of high-quality links for $5-10.
A single decent link will set you back at least $20 in the best-case scenario. A link from an agency will usually charge you more than $100 per link. If someone promises you many connections for $1 or less per link, you should run the other way.
2. How will you keep me up to date on any changes to our website?
A competent SEO firm will offer you information regularly. The most frequent frequency is once a month (usually towards the Conclusion), although some companies may also give you weekly updates. An SEO firm will first require access to your website (at least part of it). This is one of the primary reasons you should use a reputable SEO firm. You may reduce risks by having an in-house developer make all website adjustments if you like. Changes will be delayed as a result, and you’ll need to make sure your developer and SEO business is communicating openly and often. Some SEO gurus will not request any website adjustments. It’s still another red signal if this occurs. While off-site SEO is crucial, on-site SEO is sometimes more vital, particularly initially. Changes must be recorded: You must ensure that any website improvements made by your SEO business are made with care. If anything goes wrong, you must be able to pinpoint the specific reason.
It’s not good enough if an SEO firm claims to follow changes inside. Consider what would happen if your SEO freelancer or agency went down (yes, it happens) and you were left with a broken or damaged website. You or an emergency specialist will need to discover what caused your SEO to decline in the first place to rectify the issue. Any reputable SEO firm will gladly offer you a thorough report on any website adjustments they make.
3. Could you tell me about some of your previous customers and their outcomes?
Buying for an SEO firm is similar to shopping for any other item. You’ll want to look at reviews, testimonials, case studies, and a list of their previous clientele.
Although you shouldn’t expect an SEO firm to provide their complete customer list, most will be delighted to give instances of 2-3 well-known clients. They should also be able to readily present their findings (ideally over a long period). If they can’t provide you with any examples of clientele who are actual firms, that’s a red flag. Either they haven’t been able to produce for large customers in the past, or they lack the necessary SEO knowledge. Then inquire as to who their longest-standing customer is: One of the significant issues with dodgy SEO agencies, as I’ve previously indicated, is that they adopt unsafe short-term strategies. They don’t care if they’re doing anything that puts the site in jeopardy in the future; they just want to offer customers immediate results. It’s a red signal if you’re interviewing an SEO firm operating for a while, and their oldest active customer has only been with them for a year. The value of an excellent SEO consultant or team is immeasurable. SEO alone may increase a company’s revenue by 5-15 percent every month. And I’m not just talking about once a year; I’m talking about year after year.
Unless they decide to develop an in-house SEO team or the SEO business chooses to stop things, no reasonable customer will leave an SEO agency that generates fantastic results.
4. Do you adhere to Google’s best practices at all times?
Following Google’s best practices (and, to a lesser degree, Bing’s and Yahoo’s) is critical for long-term traffic development. Google adjusts its algorithm around 500 times each year. These changes have one goal: to improve search results for users. The guidelines are the “golden principles” of user search that each search engine publishes. Of course, Google isn’t pleased when you break the rules. As a result, it has produced algorithms that have punished many manipulative websites. Off-page infractions are penalized by updates like Penguin, while on-page violations are penalized by algorithms like Panda. When one of them strikes, your traffic will be severely harmed.
The main issue is that recovering from a penalty may take months or even years (depending on how skilled your next SEO is). You’ll lose tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales during this period, so it’s usually advisable to focus on long-term SEO outcomes.
5. What tools do you employ?
While many people believe that all SEOs that utilize tools are “blackhat” SEOs, this isn’t the case. The term “tool” usually refers to a broad range of SEO applications. Tools enable you to process a large volume of data in a short period. This may help you save a lot of time and money, which is beneficial to everyone.
However, there are a variety of tools available:
- Tools for reporting – While manual reports are possible, creating a bespoke piece that incorporates analytics, ranking of keywords, and other SEO information is much simpler. The majority of the report may be automated, saving you time and ensuring that you know what to anticipate as a customer.
- Link creation tools – With a few proxies and a button click, you can generate hundreds or thousands of links (more on these below).
- Screaming Frog and other technical SEO tools enable SEOs to search huge sites for technical problems swiftly. However, manually doing this task would take a long time, and you may discover significant issues that need to be addressed.
- Research tools – You can now use programs like BuzzStream to acquire contact information for a considerable number of individuals in minutes. In general, these tools assist you in gathering leads and doing keyword research.
The majority of these tools are helpful. They assist you in adhering to Google’s SEO standards. Pure link-building techniques, on the other hand, are ineffective… It’s terrible. (Did I mention they’re awful?) These programs are intended to leave comments on hundreds or thousands of blogs, forums, and web 2.0 sites (think Blogger, Weebly, etc.). These are the lowest-quality connections you can create, and they will almost certainly result in fines. Stay wary of SEO companies touting technologies like Xrumer, SE Nuke, or Bookmarking Demon. Scrapebox is one more tool I’d like to mention. Scrapebox may be used to post spam comments on blogs, but it can also be used for severe research and reporting. If your SEO business says Scrapebox directly, inquire about how they utilize it.
6. What kind of SEO work do you plan to undertake?
This may come up when you ask other questions on the list, but if it hasn’t already, be sure to bring it up. Once you employ a business, you should have at least a basic technical SEO audit done. They’re probably not excellent SEOs if this isn’t part of their procedure. All of the background parts of SEO that search engines still care about are included in technical SEO. Basic technical SEO includes finding and fixing web crawler mistakes, 404 pages, redirect issues, and analyzing site navigation.
7. Can you promise our website will be ranked number one for a critical search term?
This is the simplest method to distinguish between SEO salespeople and real SEOs. If an SEO freelancer or organization is only attempting to make a sale, they’ll usually declare they guarantee #1 rankings (in Google).
But here’s the thing: no one can promise #1 rankings all of the time, much alone throughout a particular length of time. So here are some of the reasons behind this:
- No SEO has a complete understanding of the Google algorithm — In the first three months of 2015, Google made $17.3 billion in revenue. Google’s search engine is responsible for the majority of this income. To put it mildly, they keep the specific algorithm behind lock and key. Anyone who claims to know the precise algorithm is lying. (If you understood the system, you might earn much more than the ordinary SEO expert.)
- No one knows how Google’s algorithm will evolve; on average, the company makes more than one algorithm modification every day. Unless you work at Google, you have no way of knowing when or how the company may evolve in the future. You may make educated guesses, but often be prepared to be proven incorrect.
- Penalties may appear out of nowhere – they can be algorithmic (like Panda or Penguin) or manual. Google seldom announces when specific algorithms will be executed. The next Penguin might be released in a week, a month, or a year. Manual evaluations and penalties may also be initiated at any time.
All of this implies that, although SEOs should be able to boost your search engine traffic over time continuously, they cannot guarantee precise keyword ranks. If that’s their significant promise, turn around. However, there is one crucial caveat: certain SEOs may inquire which keyword you are targeting or may even recommend one. They could provide a guarantee if you’re targeting a straightforward term. It’s important to note that making a guarantee and ensuring a #1 position is not the same. If they provide a warranty, they usually anticipate you to rank #1 for a simple keyword, but they’ll give you a refund if they can’t assist you. This assurance is OK, but you should be cautious since it may encourage them to be too pushy to get quick results, which might be harmful.
8. How frequently and in what format will you report on your work?
We discussed how SEO firms should report on any website adjustments they make, but they should also report on their activities and outcomes.
I’d recommend looking for a monthly report—entirely it’s normal. However, most SEOs will attempt to accommodate you if you desire a different reporting frequency.
A few items should be included in every SEO report:
- summary of activities should contain information on email outreach initiatives, content creation, and the number of new links added to the site.
- A rise in search engine traffic is one of the most crucial development indicators. Therefore, a report should display your monthly search engine traffic and the percentage change from the previous month and year (the same month).
- Each report should provide a brief update on your search rankings if you’re targeting any significant keywords.
- Conversions – The most crucial of all: how many search visitors are progressing through your sales funnel to the following step(s)? There is no return on investment if there is no conversion, regardless of search engine traffic.
This question won’t usually teach you how to discern a good SEO from a terrible one, but it will tell you what to anticipate if you employ them. Having clear expectations from the outset will reduce future disappointments for both parties.
9. How do you handle payments?
Various SEO businesses use different payment arrangements. It’s crucial to know how much you’ll have to pay and when you’ll have to pay it to plan accordingly. Many SEO firms will charge for the project since SEO may be done differently. According to a Moz study, 70.1 percent of SEOs charge on a project basis. You can locate someone who does this if it’s something you’re interested in. You should expect to spend anything from $1,000 to $7,500. According to the report, retainers vary from under $500 to $2,501 to $5,000. A retainer is a monthly fee that effectively reserves an SEO’s time to work on your website.
Another alternative is to pay by the hour, which is common when working with freelancers (although agencies also offer it). Expect to spend between $76 and $200 per hour for a skilled SEO. Finally, choose when you must make your payments. Freelancers like to get paid as quickly as possible, but settling an invoice 30, 60, or 90 days later isn’t uncommon. Check to see whether there is a penalty for late payments.
10. How will we get in touch with you?
In contrast to other services, you will seldom need to contact your SEO business more than a few times each month with SEO. However, if anything goes wrong or you need to talk about something essential, you’ll want to be able to contact them as quickly as possible. Find out the communication channels they favor, and inform them about yours (they should ask you at some point anyway). Inquire about how to contact them in the event of an emergency (for example, if the site goes down or search engine traffic drops substantially).
11. How will your work be integrated with the rest of our marketing efforts?
SEO and marketing should no longer be separated; instead, they should be integrated into one system. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but it’s the aim. As a result, several SEO companies and consultants have rebranded as digital marketing or inbound marketing experts.
While they’re similar, here’s a short rundown of what they mean:
- Inbound marketing focuses on providing a variety of material that draws links, which may lead to increased search engine traffic.
- Digital marketing encompasses all aspects of internet marketing, including inbound marketing. They will most likely have prior expertise with PPC, email marketing, SEO, and other marketing disciplines.
So, while searching for an SEO firm, don’t throw out organizations that mainly advertise themselves as marketing consultants. They may still have SEO experts on staff, but they may also offer other essential services.
12. What happens if the contract is not renewed?
This is for your own safety’s sake. It’s critical to understand what you’re signing up for. Most SEOs, understandably, want you to commit for at least a year (usually at least a few months). It takes time for SEOs to make improvements and even longer for those changes to provide noticeable benefits. At the same time, you should be aware of your choices if your firm has a crisis and finds itself unable to pay for SEO services. (It’s an uncommon occurrence, but it does happen.) There are various reasons why you would desire to break the contract. Perhaps you’re dissatisfied with the SEO’s job, or maybe your marketing department wishes to concentrate resources on a new traffic source. In any case, see whether any early termination costs are incorporated into the contract. If necessary, get them altered.
13. Have you ever dealt with sites that have been penalized? If that’s the case, how did you get them fixed?
Penalties were not a common element of the SEO environment until recently. For example, Google used to degrade backlinks instead of punishing sites for breaking specific standards, such as creating backlinks. However, Google began penalizing sites after correctly determining which areas utilized spam strategies (like Penguin).
Both manual and automated punishments have increased dramatically since around 2011. If your SEO has been doing their job for a while, they’ve certainly worked with a penalized site. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to recoup a penalty after being imposed. Good SEOs, on the other hand, may still have a high success rate. Find out how effective your prospective SEO has been in pulling sites back from the edge of being penalized and how they plan to avoid penalties in the future (to your site).
14. Are you aware of the most recent algorithm updates?
While I previously said that Google makes roughly 500 algorithm adjustments each year, not all of them are noteworthy. The majority of them have a negligible influence on any given website. There are, nevertheless, a small number of algorithm improvements that are noteworthy enough to be labeled. All of these should be recognizable to all SEOs.
At Search Engine Land, you may find an up-to-date list of algorithms:
Request that your SEO defines a handful of them, and then browse through the links to ensure that they know what they’re talking about. You’re aiming to weed out unskilled SEOs or those interested in making fast cash without any knowledge of the area. I’m not sure if it has to be stated, but ask these questions via Skype/phone or in-person, so they don’t have to Google an answer and send it back. You also want an SEO who keeps up with the latest SEO news. They should ideally participate in forums and other SEO communities. Asking them to list a handful of the most recent key algorithm improvements is one approach to evaluate this rapidly. Moz maintains an up-to-date list of all essential algorithm adjustments, which you may use to double-check:
It’s not critical that they know the precise date of an update, but if they can say something like, “There was a Panda update in July and a Quality upgrade a few months before that,” they know what they’re talking about.
15. How will your company’s approach be adjusted to fit my industry?
Most small to medium-sized company owners, in my experience, are reluctant to engage in SEO because they are unsure whether it will work for their sector. You aren’t necessarily incorrect; specific SEO methods and approaches will not work in your field. An intelligent SEO/marketer, on the other hand, understands how to modify an SEO approach to work in nearly any business. Therefore, they should be able to resolve your worries if you ask them this question.
16. How do you know if you’ve succeeded?
You’ll be disappointed if your expectations aren’t satisfied. However, the more you know about what to anticipate from your SEO, and the more they know about what you need from them, the less frustrated you’ll be.
This inquiry is meant to provide some information on how your prospective SEOs judge whether or not their efforts have been fruitful.
- Is it their goal to boost traffic by X% in Y months?
- Do they seek a percentage X gain in a particular metric?
- If a primary keyword ranks on the first page, do they consider themselves successful? What are the top three rankings? What is number one?
Whatever their response is, it will assist you in deciding if a good outcome on their end will warrant the investment you’re about to make. “Which metrics do you track?” you should also inquire. If this wasn’t brought up when you asked about reporting, do so now. This is a simple technique to differentiate between effective, seasoned SEOs and others.
Almost every SEO strategy will involve the following:
- ranking of keywords
- search engine traffic
- Metrics found on the page (bounce rate, time on page, etc.)
Only solid organizations and freelancers, on the other hand, will cite one of two things: return on investment (ROI) or conversions, or potentially both. So although the ranking keywords and traffic increases are excellent, they don’t mean anything. You want traffic that builds your business.
Such indicators usually go hand in hand, but as experienced SEOs and marketers know, they don’t always, so ROI and conversions need extra attention.
17. What makes you stand out from other SEOs?
This is, without a doubt, a broad issue. There is no correct answer.
You’re hoping for a few red flag responses. If they react with something along the lines of:
- We are less expensive than other solutions.
- More backlinks may be built for you by us (instead of better quality)
- We have no idea.
- We can provide you with quicker results.
Then you must continue with caution. It will not be inexpensive to hire a good SEO company. Why? Because, as I previously said, proper SEO work may boost your bottom line by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is an investment that will provide significant benefits after at least a few months. It’s better to move on to the next candidate if the SEO you’re interviewing advises you to cut shortcuts or be too aggressive with link development. When you ask this question, they should ideally react by referring to their track record, including previous triumphs, current, and former pleased customers, and the industry’s respect for their name and brand enjoy.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term commitment. It will take months for the effects, or lack thereof, to become evident. One of the main reasons unethical SEO businesses are still in business is that they aren’t discovered for months. Many of the 17 questions I’ve posed in this piece are intended to assist you in sorting out the dodgy SEO firms and people. The other questions will assist you in determining whether or not a specific SEO firm is worth engaging for your organization. Use as many or as few of these questions as you need to discover reliable SEO assistance. It may be inconvenient, but believe me when I say that a solid SEO team is critical to growing a firm to 7 figures or above.
Frequently Asked Questions
What questions should I ask an SEO agency?
A: To help you get started, here are some questions to ask your prospective SEO agency. These questions will give you an idea of their work and how well it fits into what you’re looking for.
What are some things to look into before hiring an SEO expert for my website?
A: Before you hire an SEO expert, some things should be considered.
What should I know before using SEO?
A: SEO is an extensive term, and there are so many different ways to use it. However, it’s all about marketing your website in the simplest terms. When you have an SEO strategy implemented on your site or blog, you can get more targeted traffic from search engines like Google, presenting that information back as relevant ads on their platform.
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