How to Choose the Right SEO Agency for Your Business

SEO is tough and outsourcing your SEO to an specified SEO Agency is a very common practice for businesses wanting an online presence.

With tight budgets and competing priorities, some businesses decide to put search engine optimization (SEO) on the back burner when planning their marketing strategy. Unfortunately, not investing in SEO can have major ramifications for your online visibility. With an average traffic share of 53% across industries, organic search “remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic and the largest digital channel,” according to BridghtEdge.

At The Serial Seller we do understand and take into account, not only the cost of SEO work but also the amount of time it takes to create SEO content as well as the time it takes to see results from SEO.

Lets say that you have made up your mind and you are definitely going to look into SEO services. Should you do it in-house or outsource the SEO? What should you look for when outsourcing?

Lets find out below!

Agency vs In-House

Cost

One of the biggest considerations when choosing between in-house and agency is budget. Bringing an employee in-house to work on digital marketing will require a salary and benefits, which can be costly and vary widely depending on your industry, location, and the specific role you’re hiring for.

Agencies, on the other hand, typically bundle their services into packages or bill by the hour. According to Direction, “The majority of SEO campaigns from leading agencies in 2020 cost between $1,500-$10,000/month, with a 6-month contract being the typical agreement.”

Scope of Work

Whether you can justify these costs largely depends on the scope of work. Nowadays, digital marketing has just become marketing – it’s mandatory if you want to stay competitive and expand your reach. If your current marketing team is struggling to keep up with your existing tasks, you likely need to grow your internal team to become more efficient and remain competitive. But not every company has enough work to support a new employee indefinitely. If you need help for a limited period of time or on a certain project, outsourcing may be more cost-efficient.

Specialization

Your final consideration is the level of specialization you require. A good digital marketing specialist will be a valuable addition to your marketing team by helping you with SEO, digital advertising, social media, and more. However, this in-house employee will have to divide their time between multiple marketing tactics and will likely be a “jack of all trades” rather than a SEO expert.

If your website is struggling to generate organic traffic, it can be worthwhile to hire an agency that specializes in SEO. A good agency will do a thorough SEO audit of your website, create a strategy to address their findings, and carry out tasks that will have the biggest impact on your organic visibility. Hiring a specialist is especially important for SEO-heavy projects like website redesigns, where even seemingly small changes to design, architecture, and content can have major ramifications for your rankings and traffic.

How to choose an SEO company

If you’ve been in the market for a SEO audit, you’ve probably read the articles detailing the warning signs of a bad provider: pitches or prices that seem too good to be true, buying links, and guarantees of #1 rankings top the list.

While many red flags are obvious, it can be harder to determine what makes an SEO company great.

• How do you know if they have the skills to meet your particular set of needs?
• What should you be looking for?

To make your decision easier, we have outlined four signs of a good SEO firm.

They demonstrate expertise.

A good SEO company will be able to demonstrate their expertise with a strong online presence.

This includes:

• Positive reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, and social media platforms like Facebook.
• Case studies that clearly outline the work they’ve done and the results they achieved. The work should have been completed in the past couple years, since Google’s algorithm is always changing — strategies that worked ten years ago will likely not work today (or may even get you penalized).
• Customer testimonials. You can find them on the website, or ask to speak to a customer directly.
• Valid industry certifications. Certifications should come from established brands and platforms like Google and Facebook. These companies are industry leaders offering formal training and certification (such as the Google Analytics Individual Qualification and Facebook Blueprint Certification, respectively). Certification from marketing platforms like HubSpot and SEO tools like SEMRush will ensure you are working with an experienced SEO provider.
• Bonus: A company that is a Google Partner. Google Partners have passed certification exams and received a badge from Google that verifies their status. Google Partners can specialize in skills like search advertising and display advertising, and receive benefits from Google like educational and growth opportunities.

They communicate with you.

An experienced SEO team will know how to communicate the work they do (and its impact) to all levels of the organizational structure. This includes formal reporting like presentation decks and dashboards, as well as more frequent or casual communication like emails.

To get a feel for an SEO agency’s level of customer experience, ask:

• How quickly do you typically respond to emails?
• How often do you meet with your clients?
• When and how often would I expect to see reports?
• How many clients do your project managers handle at once?

If a company is unresponsive or overloading themselves with work, it’s best to steer clear. This will also give you an idea of what you can expect when you have questions or need a report pulled. Some agencies might not be able to handle the level of service you require, and it’s best to know that up front.

They’re transparent about their work.

A company that takes the time to understand your goals and has SEO expertise should be able to produce good results and prove it. Look for companies that prepare client reports, provide metrics, and explain it all in a way that makes sense. While a less-trustworthy SEO company may be vague about its progress, an honest one will keep you in the loop and back up what they’re saying.

A good SEO company will also be open and honest about the work they do. There is no “secret” to SEO success, and anyone that insists otherwise is either ignorant or relying on gray and black hat tactics. An honest practitioner with nothing to hide should have no problem explaining their methods and why they work. They should be able to back it up with cold hard data, and won’t be vague about the details.

HubSpot’s Introduction to Black Hat SEO includes many of the tactics you should look out for, including keyword stuffing, low-quality content, private blog networks and paid links. If a company alludes to any of these tactics (or describes practices that sound suspiciously similar), it’s a red flag. Remember, black hat practices can cause Google to penalize your site.

Why you should outsource to the Best SEO Agencies

So, this is the section you tapped on this article for! There are many affordable SEO companies out there that claim to offer the best SEO services to small business marketing needs.

But not all are proficient in order to offer quality SEO services, which lead to poor marketing results and unwanted expenditures. Therefore, hiring the best SEO firms will always be profitable for you and your business in the long run.

The reasons why you should settle for no less than the best SEO Agency are:

1. Higher Ranking and Better Traffic :

As per the statistics are concerned, there are over 5.6 billion searches recorded on Google every single day. Hence, this implies that people are browsing the web relentlessly to look for the things and services they want. If you have started a small business and are willing to get a good base of clients/customers to earn good revenue, then this is a global opportunity to market your business.

When you are not optimizing your website and service platform for the web, then your target audience might not be able to find you. When they can’t see you as a quality service or product provider, they will get your competitor to acquire the solution to their needs. And that is a loss of serious opportunity, which might hinder the growth of a small business.

Hiring the best digital marketing agency will fill this avoidable gap and will offer you reliable SEO services. These services can possibly help your business rank higher on the SERPs and drive the attention of your target audience toward your service/product offerings. The top SEO companies for small businesses have the best specialist and high-end technologies for optimizing your small business for the online world.

They have the best web tactics to please not just the search engine but also the target audience. Therefore, this is one of the most crucial reasons for you to get hold of the best SEO company for your small business.

On a second note, they will help bring attention to quality and genuine traffic to your website. It means that the people who visit your website will be your potential leads. There is a high chance that they would make sales with you if they find your products/services priced reasonably in comparison to the market. So, make sure you are doing what is important!

With perfect keyword utilization, the affordable SEO company will ensure that your website pops up on SERPs anytime someone looks for related service/product keywords. In this way, your target audience will be given awareness of your brand, and the probability of sales will eventually increase.

2. You Are Hiring the Expertise and Experience

Experience is what matters when it comes to scaling the business on a global level over search engines. And experience comes from subject matter expertise, which the best SEO companies are thriving to offer you at all times. Even though you have some knowledge about how SEO works, the professionals have on-field adaptation experience to show you the full potential of it.

With the right expertise and experience, your business marketing solutions will get the best SEO strategies and campaigns that will suit the business needs. In this way, you will realize how you can utilize your marketing budget on the best terms and adapt proficient results. The professionals from the best affordable SEO companies have already worked with many clients and companies of diverse sectors to develop this profound experience.

The agency experts will implement their experience in monitoring the industry news channels, competitors, and forums. They will also keep track of all kinds of algorithm updates and their primary effect on SEO rankings. Not just that, but the professionals will also monitor the health of your website for indexing issues, ranking loss, traffic drops, manual actions, and others.

They carry out the job of diagnosing the issues pinpointing the causes and trying to rectify them in order to avoid those drops in traffic and algorithmic penalties. You will be getting development and guidance for fixing major problems. Moreover, the experts will have immense access to the latest industry platforms and technologies for using them to simplify the affordable SEO strategies of your brand.

With the help of their skills, you can expect your small business to boom to the next level! Hence, this is probably one of the best reasons why you should go ahead and hire the top SEO companies for your business growth on a larger scale over time. Some of the other important inclusions that they would make with their experienced SEO services are:

• They will follow all of the SEO case studies in order to determine the best strategies for your small business SEO needs.
• The job of SEO professionals is to look for ideal keywords, analyze the competition and apply the content that works.
• Moreover, the professionals will be pointing out the audiences and KPIs and will tailor the SEO implementations to meet the necessities.
• Customizable SEO implementation is also available for B2B businesses, Service-based marketing, eCommerce, content publishing, and software businesses.
• There is a deep focus on the ‘search intent’ for targeting conversion-ready and high-value audiences at all stages of the sales funnel.

3. Business Safety

SEO at times can be risky to some extent, which will open the doors for hacking, spamming, and search penalties. And this brings up an evident reason for hiring the best SEO agency to help yourself look into any possible negative repercussions for keeping the website safe. You need to go with the SEO agency, that counts on imposing these safety measures for your brand.

When you are going ahead and hiring affordable SEO firms that assure you offers that are too good to be true, then it might be a red flag for you. It is because inappropriate service implementation might risk your business and its reputation. Therefore, this is where the experts come in with the use of their relevant and reliable tools such as Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and others to look after bigger problems.

Some of the vital errors that can compromise your websites are bad link building, black hat attacks, intentional manual action, and security loopholes. If your SEO agency is not aware of how to react to early complications, then these aspects can become bigger problems in the long run. Therefore, go with the SEO firm that offers business safety with all of its services. They should adopt practices to protect the business from negative publicities, wrong competitive strategies, and the common myths of SEO.

4. Valuable Data & Analytics for Boosting Business Growth

SEO has the potential to help your business drive more sales and experience massive growth. But the most ignored feature of hiring an SEO company is the additional insights that you get for free. You get certain professional data and statistics that you can use for the scaling growth of your business. Most brands make use of this statistical information for understanding the customers and expanding their company.

Even though you have access to Google Analytics or other data analytics tools, a professional SEO company will help you digest that data. They will use the data to prepare your complete online strategy and use it for running a profitable SEO campaign for your brand. With these analytics, the SEO agency in Sydney will define the ideal target customers and will also determine what multi-channel strategies are helping the business grow.

Apart from these aspects, the statistical analysis will also monitor the search traffic click data, click-through rate, and impressions to find the right way to enhance the performance of underperforming pages and also work on multiplying the perks of high-performing web pages. The professionals will take charge of isolating the parts of the website with a higher ‘bounce rate’ and adapting strategies to prevent site exits.

Valuable data and analytics utilization by professionals will help determine what content is accountable for conversions and what is not. Keeping that in mind, the professionals will eliminate or add content to your website. Reading the traffic data is important for a business to boom over search engines when things are not going well for the website. The SEO firm will take concern for fixing the issue before it is too late!

5. Higher Sales and Revenue

It is the most obvious and most accountable reason why you need to hire the best local SEO firm. You need better sales and higher revenue for your small business, and SEO is what can help you with that. The statistical numbers have proved how crucial SEO is for driving sales and revenue for businesses. No serious business can afford to ignore this profitable outcome.

Hiring the best SEO firm will build the foundation of business growth. Therefore, you cannot afford to risk it by hiring the wrong firm. SEO aspects will help bring in more genuine traffic and potential leads in order to generate more sales and ultimately help you generate higher revenue.

The Serial Seller Sign-Off

I hope this helps you make a decision for your SEO journey for your business.

It is a very difficult decision trying to understand where your money is best spent to grow your business.

I personally believe that you should outsource any form of marketing until your business reaches 50+ staff. This is because it allows you to have professionals test the best marketing channels for you and there is most likely only a short contract that doesn’t bind you to staying with the provider.

I would only hire an in-house employee when I am at full capacity and require more dedication to all my digital marketing activities.

If you have any questions about your SEO or need some help with your businesses overall Sales & Marketing Plan, Book A Call With Us Now!