How And When To Hire In A Professional SEO Agency

If you run a business, one of your primary goals will be to maximise the sales of your company’s products or services. To do this, you need to make the most of very resource you have at your fingertips. And one of your key tools for raising your visibility among new customers and building trust with existing ones is your website. However, it’s often hard to give such marketing tools the attention they need to truly make a difference. Hiring an SEO agency to do this is often the right move. But when is the right time; what should you be looking for in such an agency; and what should you avoid? Here, we look at each of these factors in turn.

The Ideal Time To Hire An Agency For SEO

There are three main scenarios you may face during the course of running your business. If any of these apply in your case, it may be a good time to consider outsourcing your SEO to the experts.

1. You have insufficient time to dedicate to this marketing strategy

As an entrepreneur, you are bound to have a lot on your plate, and it never seems to let up. Learning how to effectively market your business online might be one of your lowest priorities on a day-to-day basis. What’s more, SEO can be an extremely difficult and time-consuming process. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can learn and implement in one sitting. Good SEO involves extensive and continuing research, so opting for an agency that offers professional SEO services could be a timesaver while also enhancing your visibility and appeal to potential customers.

2. You lack the resources to hire an in-house SEO team

Of course, you can consider hiring an in-house team to carry out your SEO marketing for your company, but that could be more of a liability than an investment. You don’t need just one person: you really need an SEO consultant, content writers and other SEO specialists. Then, you may have to pay for their training and any tools they will use. Add to that all the usual expenses involved with taking people on, from recruitment costs to ongoing wages and employee benefits, and hiring an outside SEO company can be a cost saving. If you aren’t yet ready to take on more employees or don’t have the financial resources, an external agency can do the job for a fraction of the cost.

3. You want results first time, every time

In this competitive market, you want to get ahead of your competitors the quickest way with the help of SEO experts, you’ll have peace of mind that you you’ll be accessing SEO strategies that have been tried and tested and that have worked for a lot of their past clients. Good agencies will have everything in place to set up and run SEO marketing campaigns with a minimum of delay. Just communicate with them on what your business is all about and where you want to be, and they’ll do the rest.

Find An SEO Agency That’s Right For Your Requirements

Once you’ve decided that using a professional SEO agency is the right way to go, it’s time to set about finding the right one for your business. There are literally hundreds of thousands of SEO experts out there, from one-person concerns to huge companies offering their services to multi-national businesses. To find the right one for you, be sure to check as many options out in depth as you can. Never simply opt for the cheapest. Look in more detail at their track records and find out what their past clients have had to say about the services they offer.

Here are a few of the essential questions you should ask any SEO consultants or experts you’re thinking of using before signing that contract:

1. What is your SEO plan and how do you measure success in SEO campaigns?

Make sure the consultant you propose to use can outline to you where your company is currently falling down in terms of its SEO strategy. A good SEO digital agency will carry out a website audit at the outset, so they have an idea of the baseline from which they’re working. They should then offer you proposals on what they intend to do to improve your online status. They should also be able to clearly define the metrics by which they’ll measure the success of their strategies and state how they’ll track improvements using analytics software.

2. Can you guarantee results?

While every search engine optimisation consultant and company strive to attain a favourable ranking for its clients, knowing precisely what results they will achieve in terms of where your webpages will appear in the SERPs is usually impossible. However, a genuine technical SEO agency will be able to give you a broad idea based on your budget, competition and strategy.

3. When will I start seeing tangible results?

Typically, it takes around three to six months for any SEO efforts to produce results. The level of competition in your business niche is often a critical factor in this. A company that promises you instant results or impressive results in an unrealistic timeframe, like two weeks, should be avoided at all costs. While the right strategies will pay dividends on an ongoing basis, it’s simply not possible to get to the top of the search engine rankings in such a short timescale without using bad practices. And these will only ensure your rankings plummet over the longer term, as Google frowns on that.

4. Will you periodically update me on any changes you make on my site?

Depending on how involved you want to be, you are likely to want to know what changes and adjustments are being made to your website. If there are any access restrictions on your website, you may prefer your SEO optimisation company to brief you before altering any code on your site.

5. What are your charges and payment terms?

For budgeting purposes, you need to know how much the entire project is likely to cost you, and at what milestones you’ll be expected to make payments to the company. A professional SEO agency should be willing to clarify whether it will bill per hour, by project or based on some kind of retainer.

Taking on a financial commitment like hiring a search engine optimisation agency can be intimidating. But if you ensure you ask all the right questions before starting your relationship, you’re more likely to benefit from a successful campaign that will increase your company’s sales and therefore profitability. Make certain you listen carefully when talking to any prospective SEO outreach agency, and please do ask for clarification if you aren’t sure about any aspect. Until you are comfortable with the answers given and understand what this company will achieve on your behalf, you should never feel pushed into signing a contract for SEO services in haste.

What Scenarios The Best SEO Agencies Will Avoid

Perhaps you’re already working with a particular consultant or agency. How do you know if it’s working out well for the investment you’re putting in?

When you place your company’s marketing strategy in the hands of the best technology SEO agency your budget can support, you’re taking a risk. You’re trusting them to turn your hard-earned money into actual profits for your business by improving your website’s visibility to new and prospective customers.

You are also expecting them to enhance your conversion figures, turning more browsers into paying clients. Make sure you look for these four danger signs that your trust isn’t going to be misplaced.

Firstly, look for consistency in approach and a long-term view. As intimated above, good SEO takes time to achieve and there are tasks that need to be carried out routinely and over a long period of time to keep your website rising up the rankings. You should start to worry if the SEO firm you’re proposing to work with offers you instant results from one-off SEO services. This could make a difference immediately, but the results will not continue to improve and you could end up plummeting back down the rankings in the months to come if the work isn’t sustained.

The next warning sign should come if the agency isn’t communicating with you on a regular basis about what they’re doing to promote your web presence. Of course, there are some weeks where it may seem like little is happening, because changes are being made behind the scenes. Your SEO consultant might be checking for and removing duplicate content, for instance, or carrying out technical work to improve the speed at which your webpages load up. That work might not have immediate, tangible outcomes, but the best SEO agency will be constantly updating you on what they’re doing on your behalf, so you know action is being taken.

And that leads neatly into the third scenario. Do you feel in the dark about where your money’s being spent and what it’s achieving? You shouldn’t do. Good, professional SEO services are measurable: in other words, they get demonstrable results. You might not see a huge hike in your position on Google straight away, but you should certainly start to see results within a few months. If the company is using white hat techniques, you should expect your website’s rise up the rankings to be slow and steady. Some months, it may even drop a little, but for best results, it’s important to hold your nerve. As mentioned above, the best changes take time to bed in, but with an experienced and professional SEO company, you’ll definitely experience improvements over time.

Finally, remember that a really good SEO expert agency won’t just agree with everything you say! They will guide you towards successful strategies. Of course, you may have ideas of your own, and you’re the authority on your own industry. But you should expect a leading expert in SEO to be open and unafraid about telling you from time to time that, based on their experience, a particular idea won’t work. They should then present you with one that will achieve the desired outcome instead.

In short, you’re paying your SEO company for the results they can deliver for your company. The best SEO agency won’t pay lip service to this, but will develop a constructive, two-way relationship with you, the client, that makes the best of both yours and their expertise. Their strategy will be constantly evolving and measurable to deliver results you can both be proud of and happy with.

In today’s difficult economy and competitive marketing environment, being visible online is an absolute must if you want to secure a top spot in the search engine results and increased volumes of website traffic. However, visibility is not the only factor you should focus on. There are a whole host of SEO strategies a good mobile SEO agency can apply to ensure your web presence is reaching as many potential customers as possible. Ensuring your content is seen by as many people as possible increases your chances of converting visitors to sales, and hence increases your profitability.

To help boost online visits to your site, increase brand awareness and improve your bottom line, there’s no doubt that the services of an experienced search engine optimisation agency are indispensable. You need Position1SEO. Here, we start by auditing your website and overall web presence so we can identify what’s currently going well and what could be improved. We then draw up a transparent strategy, based on your requirements and tailored to your budget, to get you to where you want to be. And at every step of the way, we keep you informed on what we’re doing on your behalf and what results we’ve achieved for you.

To find out more about our affordable SEO agency, or for sample case studies of our past work for our clients, call us today on 0141 404 7515 or use the contact form on our website at https://position1seo.co.uk/contact/.