It has become inevitable for businesses today to hire the services of professional search engine optimization agencies who can help increase the number of visitors to your website and thus make your site rank high in search engines. SEO agencies also assist in providing your site with an improved reputation. An expert SEO agency will offer the most updated services so that you can stand out in the competition. Selecting an agency that is right for you is not an easy task. So we have compiled a list of 10 most important questions who should ask of finding out when you go for selecting an agency for your website
- Can I have a look at the list of your current and past clients?
- What methods you will employ to enhance the ranking of my website?
- Do you abide by the webmaster guidelines on the search engines?
- In what way do you measure your SEO campaign success?
- How experienced you are at improving the local search results?
- What is your way of communicating with your clients and how often?
- How often will you inform me about the changes you make on my website?
- What are your rates and payment terms?
- What if we are not happy and want to terminate the contract?
- Why we should select you over other SEO agencies?
1. Can I have a look at the list of your past and present clients?- Agency will be open to sharing a list of their former and current clients as well as their contact information. Do not expect that they will hand over their complete address book to you but yes they will share the detail of some of their satisfied clients to whom they are giving consistent results. If they are not ready to provide the contact information or give any excuse then it clearly indicates that either they are new in business or are not able to generate results for their clients. Alternatively, check the ranks of their clients on search engines and see if they are able to rank on competitive keywords.
2. What methods you will employ to enhance my rankings in search engines?- Check if the prospective agency explains the methods and strategies they would employ to boost the search engine ranking of your website. An expert agency will not hesitate in giving you a brief outline of the strategy they will follow to bring your website on top. It may include the list of on-page activities like improving URL structure, meta details, etc to make your website more search engine friendly. Based on their methodology and approach you can have an idea about their capability.
3. Do you abide by the webmaster guidelines on search engines?- Hire an agency that abides strictly to the webmaster best practices posted by Google – that bans several common SEO tricks. Provided a candidate fails to follow those guidelines, your site would automatically be relegated to low ranking in search results. What’s more, Google may ban your site from search results altogether.
4. In what way do you measure your SEO campaigns’ success?- If you want to assess the success of the SEO efforts taken, you should track how much traffic your website is generating and from where it is being created. The search engine optimization consultants you are hiring must be well experienced in making use of Google Analytics in order to track the improvement in your website’s search engine rankings, the kind of keywords used by searchers to find your website, the links from other sites that drive traffic to your site, and so much more.
5. How experienced are you at improving the local search results?- It is essential to appear in the local search engine results especially if yours is a small business that is trying to attract local customers. Hire SEO expert services that have experience and expertise in working out local SEO techniques.
6. What is your way of communicating with your clients and how often?- styles and the customer’s service standards of SEO agencies vary in no small measure. You have to find an agency whose approach fulfills your requirements adequately. Find out how they will communicate with you to update you on the status of your project. It is important to know the mode and time of communication. Their communication and reporting should fit to your expectation, the modes should be fixed like phone calls, skype, chat, or via email.
7. How often will you inform me about the changes you make to my website?- It is very important to know about the changes they make on your website. During the SEO process, a number of changes may be required so all the changes should be brought to your knowledge before being done on the website. There are can be copyright issues and create a big issue if not taken seriously.
8. What are your rates and the payment terms?- You have to know as to how much you will be charged on the whole and whether the prospective consultant gets paid on an hourly basis, by project or by retainer. The rates should be competitive but it is seen that cheap SEO does not mean good results. Also, it never means that if you pay a premium price you will get good results.
9. What if we are not happy and want to terminate the contract?- It is important to know that if you terminate the contract with the agency all the rights remain with you. They should not remove any content or link they created on your behalf. Since you paid for the services you need to preserve the SEO work done by them at the end of the termination of the SEO contract.
10. Why should I select you over other SEO Agencies ?- This is a very open-ended question but it is very significant as it will help in ascertaining their confidence level as an agency. Let them tell the Strengths and USPs and competitive advantages and their expertise as an SEO Agency.
