The Questions to Ask Your SEO Company
While there is no bad time to hire an SEO company, the best and most efficient time to hire is either when a new site is being started or when you are re-designing an existing site. These starting points will allow the incoming SEO company the opportunity to optimize your site using their own protocols instead of adapting to and/or interpreting pre-existing architecture. Whether you are hiring for work on the fly or starting fresh, hiring the right company for your search engine optimization needs is one of the most important aspects of your website’s success. The following questions, and the answers to them from each prospective company you interview, should be able to clarify which company will be the best to suit your needs, drive targeted traffic to your site, and improve the conversion rates from your site’s visitors.
On experience:
* How long have you been in business? – Hiring a new company carries its share of risks, even if their rates are discounted from the other companies you’re interviewing.
* Can you show me some of your successes? – Front page success is what you’re looking for and if the company has done it with others you’re on the right track. Take it one step further and see if you can talk to the companies which have had successful campaigns run for them.
* Can you tell me about some of the people in your company? – This gives you another experience metric to measure and leads to the next question.
* How many employees do you have? – Avoid one or two man shops whenever possible. The risk here is that, should they get more work than they can handle, your project will end up being outsourced or put on the back burner.
* Have you done search engine optimization for anyone else in my industry? – Industry specific experience may not be critical as most SEO work follows similar paths. This question can be used more as a tie-breaker if all other things are equal between companies.
On the services provided:
* How will you search engine optimize my website? – This answer to this question should help define whether the company is going to use ethical tactics for the optimization of your website. Be wary if the company is offering to do your SEO work at a steep discount to other companies, especially when the discount is combined with an unclear description of optimization techniques. The likely outcome here will be underperformance at best, and major problems such as being removed from search engine indices if the company is employing unethical or black hat techniques.
* Do you provide search engine marketing? – Search engine optimizing on the site is only half the battle. Be sure you’re working with a company that can build in-bound links to your site and create content such as press releases and articles for submission to blogs, news sites, and social media sites.
On the partnership:
* How and how often will we be in communication – Quantifying this answer isn’t as important as determining that communication is both open and welcomed. Run away if you get a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” type of response.
* How will we define success and what’s our timeline? Getting to the front page for defined keywords will be one measure. An experienced and successful SEO company will be able to provide estimates on your timeline but can never guarantee a result. Should the company you’re interviewing respond with a front page guarantee within a certain time, they are simply telling you what you want hear and don’t have your best interests at heart.
Search engine optimization is a process usually conducted in a competitive environment with an ever-changing landscape. The best SEO companies won’t be afraid to convey to that information to you. One such company is The Gervais Group LLC, which has being executing successful SEO campaigns for a variety of clients across multiple industry groups. Call us today at (770) 529 2262 for an honest appraisal on conducting a successful SEO campaign for your company.
