When most people need to buy a product or hire a service provider, they tend to start with an online search. They almost always go with first-page results. In fact, according to Backlinko, less than 1% of Google searchers click on a result from the second page or beyond. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to get your business onto that first page. SEO means building, analyzing, and refining your website so that search engine crawlers will flag it as more authoritative, relevant, and valuable than your competition.

SEO is a competitive environment, so it’s important to find the best SEO services company for your brand.

Relationships Matter

Every SEO services company or agency will have a different approach, both in terms of improving results and working with clients. 

Your SEO agency will be doing a lot on your behalf to boost your search engine ranking, and you want to be able to trust them to do what’s best for you. This entails maintaining an active give-and-take relationship with open communications.

Questions To Ask an SEO Agency

Before you hire an SEO services company or agency, make sure that they are willing and able to answer your questions. Here’s where to start.

1. How Will You Improve Our Ranking?

Ask this question first — it will separate the legitimate SEO agencies from those who just want your money. 

Steer away from companies that guarantee results or focus too much on backlinks. They might engage in shady practices like backlink buying. Such practices not only hurt your results, but could also get you blacklisted.

Look instead for a company that has a methodical approach and covers each of the three key aspects of SEO:

  • Technical SEO: how easy it is for crawlers to navigate your site
  • On-Page SEO: content, keyword optimization, and user experience
  • Off-Page SEO: organic inbound links from other authoritative sites

A good SEO services company should be able to tell you the specific methods it will use to enhance all three of these elements of SEO, and what its techniques are for getting results.

2. Who Else Have You Worked With?

In SEO, results matter more than anything else. 

Ask the SEO services company who they’ve worked for recently and how much they were able to increase those clients’ rankings. Ask to view a portfolio and analyze their most current projects. The latter will shed the most light on how they work in today’s SEO environment. 

3. How Do You Keep up With Best Practices?

Search engine algorithms change frequently. 

Google handles over 70% of all searches and typically revises its algorithm thousands of times per year — this was limited to a few hundred updates back in 2009. You need to be confident that your SEO services company stays up to date.

4. How Do You Measure and Communicate Results?

A good SEO services company will track your site’s performance in order to evaluate how well it’s doing. Identify how it measures this performance and, critically, how the company will communicate to you how your site is doing and what the next steps will be.

Getting Started  

You should feel confident in your SEO services company before you commit to them. Determine what kind of results the company has obtained in the past and how their team will help your site perform at its best. 

Ensure that the company will track the results of its work and, most importantly, how it will use those results to further develop your site.