Choosing an SEO company is a lot like getting engaged. Right, you’re not married yet, but it’s a huge investment in time and capital that could be tough to back out on.
I’ve heard horror stories about sketchy SEO firms that have nearly bankrupted a client’s business. On the flip side, I’ve personally experienced unheard of companies becoming real contenders in their industry because of outstanding SEO experts.
Due to the massive positive or negative impact of search engine optimization, learning how to choose an SEO company for your business is vital to your success. The following tips and warnings will help you identify trustworthy SEO companies and avoid the scam artists.
7 Tips for Choosing an SEO Company
The first seven tips are all about building a process to identify good SEO companies during your consideration stage. Much of the process has less to do with the actual integrity and effectiveness of the SEO agency you’re evaluating, and more to do with how you evaluate.
These tips will help you learn what to look for in an SEO company before signing a contract.
1. Define Your SEO Goals
Before you start your search or schedule any consultations, make sure you know what you want to achieve. Once you’ve laid out your criteria, use them to find the agency that best fits your goals.
Who is the best SEO company to use if:
- I can only spend up to $1500 per month.
- I need an agency that can provide me with monthly progress reports.
- I need a firm whose contract doesn’t obligate me to more than three months at a time.
- I need a company that communicates effectively and efficiently
- I need an agency that has delivered success for businesses similar to mine.
- I need a company that is transparent about their SEO strategies.
These are only a few criteria you can use for choosing the best SEO company. The list you come up with should be unique to your business and your personal management style.
2. Define Your Budget
Unless you’re bootstrapping your business and have very little capital, the budget you set aside for an SEO agency should be flexible.
Ecommerce is becoming more and more popular in today’s digital marketplace. As a business owner, it’s nice to know the cost of a product/service and exactly what you get. However, due to the wide range of variables in search engine marketing, pricing is usually more difficult than that.
In the world of search engine optimization, the phrase “you get what you pay for,” holds true in a dramatic way. Trying to find the least expensive SEO firm is never the way to go. You’ll likely have hundreds of private blog network (PBN) links sent to your site, and sub-par SEO techniques could end up hurting you more than it helps.
You can learn how to find a great SEO company by engaging an expert about some high-level projections. Make assumptions about your sales funnel that can give you an idea of what search engine optimization services are worth to your organization. Consider the following example.
- Your main service page receives an average of 300 visits each month.
- Of those 300 visits, an average of 24 (or 3%) fill out your contact form.
- Of those 24 contacts, 12 (or 50%) are qualified and come in for a consultation.
- Of those 12, you end up closing three (or 25%). Your average customer lifetime value (CLTV) is $6,000, so each month 300 visits equate to about $12,000 of business.
You don’t have to share all of your financials, but start a discussion with your potential SEO firms to see what growth you can expect. If those 300 visits are currently coming from organic traffic because of a handful of keywords, SEO companies should be able to use click-through rate estimates to project traffic if you increase the rankings of those keywords.
Use these projections to evaluate costs. You might end up choosing an SEO agency that has case studies indicating they can triple the traffic to your service page, which could result in an additional $24,000 of revenue per month. With this information in mind, walking into negotiations with a low-ball budget would not help you achieve your goals.
3. Find an SEO Firm That Tracks Data and Is Transparent
In step one, you defined the business goals you want to achieve. How will you know if your SEO agency is helping you reach those goals?
Learning how to choose an SEO company requires that you explore how each potential firm tracks data. See if the firm you’re vetting has any standard reports for their clients, and try to get an example if possible.
Does the example report align with the business goals that you’re trying to track? If not, you may want to suggest a custom report, and see if it can reasonably be implemented. Not being able to tie your SEO firm’s reporting to your business goals could result in poor ROI and unanswered questions.
Some common KPIs that search engine optimization firms report on include:
- Target keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
- Non-branded search traffic
- Total backlinks acquired
- Organic conversions
You can decide on metrics that you’d like your SEO company to track based on what’s important to your business. At the end of the day, organic conversions will be the KPI that helps grow your business.
4. Assess Contract and Cancellation Policies
Make sure you understand how each agency’s contract is structured while you’re learning how to choose a good SEO company. Some of the most common contract structures are:
- Single Year Contracts
- Yearly Contracts with an Auto-Renewal Clause
- Six Month Contracts
- Six Month Contracts with an Auto-Renewal Clause
- Ongoing Contracts with a 90 Day Out
- Month-to-Month Contracts
Most of these contract length options are pretty self-explanatory. Auto-renewal clauses in a contract typically require written notice of non-renewal prior to 60 days before the contract’s end.
The 90 day out just means that your contract will continue until you submit a written cancellation notice, at which time you still must pay for the following 90 days.
Beware of month-to-month contracts. It would seem like choosing an SEO company with month-to-month contracts means they are customer-focused. However, a good SEO company won’t immediately be profitable on your account.
A good SEO company will front-load their research and on-page optimization over the first few months to help you succeed. That may require that they lose money in the short term so they can produce results. The 90 day out, or the 6-12 month contracts help the SEO agencies protect themselves so they can help you grow as quickly as possible.
Choosing a search engine optimization company with a month-to-month contract just means that they don’t have enough invested in your account to ever lose money. They are playing it safe and padding their profitability instead of growing your business’s online visibility.
Contracts are a key component of deciding how to choose an SEO firm. Make sure you pick an SEO agency with a good contract structure that will invest in you as you invest in them.
5. Determine Communication Standards
How often does your search engine optimization agency need to communicate with you? How closely involved with your day to day operations will they be? Set these standards before you meet with any candidates, and ask each agency if they already have a standard process of their own.
Part of deciding how to find a good SEO expert is determined by your ability to communicate with the firm. As with part three from above, you’ll want to set a standard for tracking and reporting. Agencies might follow a weekly or monthly schedule for reporting on your SEO progress.
In general, you should only need monthly updates on your SEO progress. Google’s Danny Sullivan recently stated that “Each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our results.” With daily algorithm updates, and daily optimization by your SEO company, you’ll experience a lot of ranking changes.
If you follow rankings and organic traffic too closely, you’ll drive yourself crazy and begin to mistrust your SEO firm. They may still be doing a great job, and they need time to react to and adjust for the industry’s constant changes. Monthly progress reports should be enough for you to understand if your agency is effective without panicking about daily changes.
6. Evaluate Case Studies, Testimonials, and Reviews
Do you know what to look for in an SEO company? Start by taking a look at what potential agencies have done for their previous clients. Case studies, testimonials and reviews will help you learn about how effective a given search engine optimization company is.
Testimonials are great credibility builders, especially if you find one from a person or business you know. It may be someone from your network, or a well-known company that you trust. This is a great sign that the agency is a real expert.
Reviews are a little bit easier to manipulate. Reviews are frequently aggregated together, and you see average ratings with only a sample of good and bad reviews. Agencies can also push for only their best clients to leave positive reviews, and sweeping negative opinions under the rug. However, reviews play a big part of SEO so if an agency is bad at showcasing their own reviews, they may struggle to showcase yours in the future.
Case studies are the best proof for learning how to find the best SEO company. Most case studies will use client names, and detail the process that was used to earn results. You can use third-party tools to research the results for yourself.
For example, if an agency claims that they caused a law firm’s SEO to improve, you could use a tool like SEMrush to verify this fact for yourself.
7. Evaluate 3-5 SEO Companies
Check out at least three agencies while learning how to choose the best SEO company. The digital sales process has evolved, and you no longer have to rely on salespeople to discover the facts.
Meet with 3-5 agencies, gather as much information as you can, then take your time vetting and comparing what you’ve learned. You can research the accuracy of their case studies, analyze their pricing and contracts, and compare everything with your own company’s goals.
You’ll likely be pressured by every firm to enter into a contract during your consultation, especially if it’s in person. Resist the temptation regardless of the incentives offered. A discount or bonus means nothing if the SEO firm can’t deliver and doesn’t communicate well.
Gather your data and do your homework before making a decision — you’ll thank me later.
3 Mistakes to Avoid While Choosing an SEO Agency
Avoid these mistakes while learning how to find a good SEO company. If it sounds too good to be true, there’s a 95% chance it is. These are some of the biggest red flags you should look out for.
1. Don’t Blindly Choose the Highest Ranking Agencies
Selecting a candidate whose own website is ranking well seems obvious while learning how to choose an SEO agency. While there is some merit to that idea, it can be dangerous to choose an SEO company just because they rank well for a handful of keywords.
Every industry presents different search engine optimization challenges. Your firm may have a great understanding of the digital marketing industry, but they could struggle with your niche.
It’s possible that a high-ranking SEO company has invested thousands on their own site, and only needs to lock a handful of new clients in for six month contracts each year to remain profitable. While that makes good business sense on paper, their brand and your business budget could suffer.
Make a point to leverage the seven tips above about how to choose an SEO company so that you don’t jump to conclusions and get burned.
2. Don’t Blindly Trust Top Lists
Top lists are another trap that you could fall victim to. There are companies out there like Upcity, Expertise, Clutch and G2 Crowd that put together “ranked” lists, and then get those lists to rank at the top of the search results for popular terms.
If you’re searching for “SEO companies in [your city]” these lists will appear front and center. The owners of these lists make agencies pay to be included for a fee. In return, unsuspecting business owners like you use the lists to make purchases from the listed companies.
The more money these listing companies make, the better they rank. The better they rank, the more pressure local companies will feel to pay for inclusion since their own websites are now pushed down the list of results.
Just because you see an SEO company listed on the “Top 10 SEO Companies in [Your City]” doesn’t mean they’re actually in the top 10. This just means that they had the budget to be included in the list so they could get your business.
I recommend always using the seven tips above to evaluate SEO firms before signing any contracts.
3. Don’t Fall for Gimmicks, Proprietary Techniques, or Guarantees
Salespeople at SEO companies will make big claims to earn your business. Look out for the following claims and promises:
- Overnight rankings – with so many changing variables and so much competition, real results will take time.
- Doubled traffic – you might see doubled traffic after a few months or years, but be cautious of any claims of guaranteed SEO rankings.
- Instant leads – SEO companies will need time to learn your unique business and start attracting the right visitors to your site.
- Search engine submissions – you don’t need to “submit” things manually to search engines to be included in their results.
- X amount of backlinks – backlinks are a sensitive subject, but they shouldn’t be easily manipulated.
- Press releases – press releases as an SEO tactic aren’t effective and haven’t been for several years.
Conclusions About Learning How to Choose the Best SEO Firm
Choosing the best SEO company for your business is never an obvious choice. Make sure you have a comprehensive process to follow so that you can vet candidates and make a sound investment.
Search Engine Coach is an SEO company Cleveland businesses trust to grow their online visibility and bottom line. Contact us today to schedule a consultation!