April 26, 2016
If you’re just getting started with building the online component of your business, the vast numbers of digital marketing agencies that exist can make selecting one that’s right for you a daunting task. Well fear not, as today I’m here to give you some pointers on what to look for and when to run for the hills when you’re searching for a good SEO agency.
First and foremost, try and select an agency that actually understands you and what you’re trying to achieve.
There are many indicators of this compatibility but making sure that you get along with the actual real people that you interact with is a good start. It sounds obvious but you really don’t want to spend time working with people you don’t like, especially as a high-quality SEO strategy can be a long term project as your business evolves.
Check out the employees, check out what other projects they’ve done, their specialities and what other customers have said about them. Although customer reviews are useful, don’t put too much emphasis on a few good recommendations from a stranger. Remember that anyone can quote the positive reviews and happily forget to show you the negative ones.
Instead, focus on the real value that the agency has provided by looking at their previous projects. Do those websites rank well? Do they have great content that makes you want to revisit the site?
It’s also a great way to determine whether the agency is a good fit for your project, if they’ve handled similar ones to yours in the past, it’s probably that you’ll be in good hands.
Within SEO there are a variety of techniques that can be utilised. Make sure the agency that you go with has a strong focus on quality over quantity (in particular with link-building, where multiple low quality links can be damaging overall) and only uses “white-hat” SEO. The so called “black hat” techniques that you may have heard of refer to less ethical and more aggressive practices which focus more on manipulating search engines rather than providing value to the humans who use them. They frequently violate the terms of use that search engines enforce, and while in practice these can work in the short term, they can also get your website blacklisted by the search engine company, so that it won’t show up at all. Needless to say, forget the short term gains and avoid agencies that use these at all costs.
Finally, don’t forget to check out the website of the agency itself. Of course if they can’t take care of their own website, how can they take care of yours? You’d be surprised by how often someone advertising their copywriting ability has terrible copy on their site.
However if it has great copy and shows up first in Google when you enter its’ name, then the agency probably knows what it’s doing.
So there you have it, armed with this information you should have no problem finding the right SEO agency that can bring your business online success.
