Companies that once kept their SEO in-house are finding it more complicated to create measurable SEO success. Creating effective backlinks now requires engaging content, influencer marketing, and at least a little bit of PR savvy. Accordingly, a modern keyword strategy needs user intent research, content marketing experience, and a working knowledge of Google’s ranking priorities. It might require more than one or two SEO experts in a marketing team, which is why some brands are choosing to partner with top SEO Company in India.
What is Your Philosophy Of Approaching SEO To Deliver Results?
There are three major facets of SEO, and the most effective SEO companies consider all three as components of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
- Technical SEO considers code, site structure, site speed, and other metrics that could impact your search traffic. During a technical SEO review, an SEO company will make sure that search engines can crawl your site and its content, review 404 errors, and analyze redirects, among other tasks.
- User experience (UX) is the optimization of the content of your digital properties. During an on-page SEO review, an SEO expert will analyze user-facing aspects of your site, including content, navigation, and keyword optimization.
- Off-page SEO means improving your SEO presence by earning links, strengthening the brand online, and improving the popularity of the site and content. To execute off-page SEO campaigns, an SEO agency will look for opportunities to increase your domain and page authority through incoming links to your site from other high-quality properties.
Many SEO agencies operate in one of two ways:
- They will offer only one facet of SEO (such as link-building).
- They will do all the research and strategy without being able to effectively implement any of it.
Modern SEO requires a holistic strategy and experienced execution. Make sure the SEO Company you are evaluating can do all three (technical, UX, off-page), and that they have a clear strategy for balancing them.
How will you Adapt That Strategy To Our Brand?
SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and your SEO partner should have some ideas as to how your business needs a unique approach that caters to your industry, business model, and goals. SEO for a local business interested in attracting customers from a dozen zip codes requires a very different approach than SEO for a major corporation with a global market.
Experience in your industry is a plus, but it’s not necessarily a requirement. More important is the SEO agency’s ability to articulate how they will adapt the general approach to cater specifically to your niche. Make sure that the company can highlight specific places where the general approach will vary.
What Metrics Define “Success” For You?
This is kind of a trick question. While SEO companies may come to the meeting with certain, general goals in mind, their success metrics should stem from what success means for you. No SEO company can guarantee page-one rankings, and those who make these types of promises are likely using black-hat techniques.
Legitimate SEO professionals will build their plans around your goals. If you’re looking for increased traffic, they may prioritize keyword optimization or content creation.
How Long Will It Be Until We Can Expect To See Results?
Effective SEO takes time, but that shouldn’t prevent an experienced agency from giving you a time frame for results. In general, you should expect to see results from legitimate SEO techniques within six months of getting started.
The possibility of seeing results earlier depends on the health of your site. For instance, correcting technical errors and oversights can net some legitimate SEO gains in a short period.
How Do You Approach Mobile?
Ideally, mobile should be part of the conversation when you discuss the general strategy. Google announced last year that they were in the process of moving to a mobile-first index, making mobile optimization more important than ever. Look for companies that have a process for conducting a mobile audit of your site, and ensure your SEO agency can convincingly articulate why mobile is an important SEO consideration.
How Should SEO Be Incorporated into Our Overall Marketing Strategy?
The most successful SEO initiatives are part of an overall marketing plan, so avoid companies that expect to perform their tasks in isolation. SEO goes hand-in-hand with content marketing, and public relations and social media marketing activities can be used for effective link-building. Your SEO partner should be very open to collaborating with your other marketing teams—as well as other teams as needed, such as your web development and sales teams—and should have a basic plan for integrating their efforts with your existing marketing initiatives.
How Do You Conduct Keyword Research?
In the past, keyword research meant plugging a term into a keyword research tool, populating a list of relevant keywords, and developing content with keywords inserted at various places. However, modern keyword research requires much more effort—it’s an exercise in understanding user intent. It seeks to understand what information a user is looking for when searching a keyword phrase and provides content catered to the intent behind the search.
How Do You Stay Up-to-Date On Industry Changes and Google Updates?
At a minimum, you’ll want someone who stays up to date with the information posted by Google on its Webmaster Central Blog—Google’s outlet for news on how to best position a site for its search algorithms. Better, is someone who follows popular industry blogs and participates in SEO forums and conversations. The best SEO professionals will do all of the former as well as conduct their research. They monitor the properties they manage for potential signs of algorithm changes and investigate possible shifts in SEO best practices.
Hire An SEO Company That Delivers
SEO is a complex field. Ever since Google introduced its machine learning program, IndeedSEO, the search engine has been continuously updating and improving—24/7/365. Effective SEO companies stay up to date on key changes and adjust their plans and practices accordingly. Additionally, the ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide quality results to searchers, so effective SEOs should be more concerned with quality for users than with ranking factors and quantity of links.
