Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, has quickly taken over the digital marketing realm and has been doing wonders for businesses.
5 Questions You Must Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company:
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, has quickly taken over the digital marketing realm and has been doing wonders for businesses.
It is understandable why you are thinking about hiring an SEO agency, considering how Google results are heavily influenced by it. You can consider search engine optimization as a hack for getting into the top 10 results of Google search.
You have read time and again how SEO has completely rejuvenated a once dead business or has allowed small businesses or entrepreneurs to make their name and raise their profit margin.
Surely, in order to gather leads and gain customers, you need to make your company know to the world. However, with any big decision, you need to make sure that you are making the right one.
Considering the fact that you are spending a large chunk of money on the whole process you surely want a reasonable payback.
This is why we say that if you want the entire process to be fruitful, and continue to do so in the long term then you will have to build a strong foundation as well. For that, you will have to do some pondering over how you want to go about doing everything and starts with 5 basic questions that you will need to ask yourself.
Here is a checklist of questions you need to ask yourself before you go on to hire an SEO agency
Is SEO a priority for me at the moment?
SEO is important for any business that is trying to further its online visibility. However, SEO might not be a priority for many companies when it comes to marketing.
Either the business is not at that stage, or that they have a limited marketing budget and there are more priority-based things to do rather than allocate it to SEO.
You need to have a proper website setup, and also a couple of high-quality content blogs written up in order to apply SEO practices to them.
If you feel that you have yet to achieve either of those steps then we suggest you halt your SEO plans for a while. Maybe you need to concentrate a little more on your landing pages, website design, and social media campaigns in order to ensure customer loyalty and retention.
Should we hire an SEO agency?
There are some SEO tasks such as keyword optimization, title tags, and link building that an in-house SEO expert can handle all by themselves.
But search engine optimization is so much more than that. The last three factors that we listed are just a small portion of all that SEO entails.
The fact is that good SEO is time-consuming and complex as a process, and it is the one that requires you to have a thorough knowledge of several analytical tools. There are more than 200 factors involved in google ranking that you need to optimize for.
This is both on-site and off-site. This is done in order to rank higher when it comes to the search results and the list seems to constantly be evolving. The SEO agency or expert that you hire will have to keep an eye on all of the latest changes in algorithms within the search engines.
Hiring an SEO agency would mean that you have a team of experts handling different facets of the process for you.
The credibility of the SEO agencies I am considering:
Before you decide to hire the SEO agency you have landed on, make some consistent efforts to do some research on them.
Try not to be fooled by titles like “top SEO agencies in Pakistan”, sure you can take suggestions from them but that does not mean you completely forgo the research process that goes into knowing how credible the company is.
The best is to reach out to them and speak to them about their services. Relay to them your SEO needs, and see how they fulfill them.
You can ask for referrals from your business partners, go to forums like Reddit and Quora, as well as sifting through their social media, and looking through testimonials.
Are their values aligned with mine?
It is extremely important to make sure that the values of SEO are aligned with your company’s. This will make sure that both of you are going down the same path, towards the same objective.
Your SEO agency should be working towards getting you enough organic traffic to allow you to raise your profit margin. If their work ethics match yours then it will be smooth sailing, mostly, however it be quite a conundrum considering you might want a long-term partnership with them.
Are they up to date with SEO trends?
This is an important one. SEO is constantly changing and developing. There is always a new trend to follow, and a new update all of your competitors are taking advantage of.
You want to make sure to observe how on top SEO trends they are and how much time do they take to adopt them along with their implementation. You want to make sure you do not get left behind, and that all the organic traffic you deserve gets taken away by your competitors.