When you’re looking at SEO for the first time, it’s easy to become confused. There’s a certain level of skill required to implement it on your website. It’s also important to have enough time to spend on putting together a good solid SEO campaign for your company. This is why it’s a good idea to hire a SEO company who understands your website and its special needs. As you search for this company, there are some things you’ll want to remember.
Be Willing to Spend Money
SEO is an investment and you should expect a large ROI. As such, you shouldn’t be afraid to choose a company that charges a bit more money but make sure they’re not going to lock you into a 6 – 12-month contract. Unfortunately, most of these companies will deliver fast results and then forget about you. Some of them even use black hat methods so their work is done fast but this will get you punished by Google while they get away with it.
You can’t expect to know exactly how much it will cost to get the results you desire either. An SEO company can’t even tell you this up front because every website is different. Don’t let this sway you from getting quotes though. You’ll at least know who’s coming in with too low of a bid to prove useful.
Be Willing to Invest Time
Having a timeline is important – especially for the first three months. You’ll need this amount of time to see any results and you’ll also want to know what the SEO company is doing to get these results. Usually this will consist of a standardized process they’ve slightly altered for your website. Besides having this in writing make sure you follow up to make sure there aren’t any issues.
Be Firm About Having Your Needs Met
There are two things you should require of your SEO company:
- Monthly reporting is vital in that they tell you about your tactics’ success. Reports should also be available when you need to see what’s going on in between the monthly reports. In these reports you’ll find the company’s insights and explanations of the results.
- Backlinking is an essential process for off page SEO. While this part of SEO has changed a lot over the years and will continue changing, but the fact remains that your website needs backlinks. There’s no magic number here, but the number should grow each month. This is your opportunity to build relationships with other relevant, high authority websites. Beware of any company who offers you an obscenely high number of backlinks though. They’re probably using black hat SEO tactics and this will get you penalized by the search engine. When this happens you’ll have a whole other set of issues to deal with.
Last year, over 60% of companies outsourced their SEO work to an SEO company like I SEO U. We understand how to implement the correct strategies to get your website listed where it needs to be in the SERPs.