Do You Pick An SEO Agency Or DIY SEO UK SEO Expert Explains All
Do You Pick An SEO Agency Or DIY SEO UK SEO Expert Explains All
With SEO (search engine optimisation) there are basically two choices: a) do it yourself or b) hire a professional.
Doing it yourself can be a very rewarding experience or a very challenging and frustrating one. If the search engine optimisation is for a business, in most cases it is more profitable to hire an SEO professional who will know what they are doing and conduct all the SEO tasks in the correct order in a timely fashion at a reasonable rate.
Doing it yourself can, at best, take considerably longer as you stumble through the learning curve of understanding the methodology and strategy required for SEO, and at worst, you may perform one or several actions that could lead to your website being penalised or even banned from the search engines.
So, how do you pick the right SEO Agency ?
The first place to start is in the search engines themselves. For example, head over to Google.com and type in a term such as "seo agency" and review everyone on page 1. If you think about it, every SEO expert / consultant / company would love to be on page 1 for "seo agency" and due to the nature of this keyword, to achieve a page 1 listing for this term, and beat other SEO experts shows they can at perform well in an extremely competitive keyword arena. This stage alone filters out all those that say they can but simply can't deliver.
Then check over what they offer, their pricing and give them a call. I would suggest you make a little questionnaire and fill in a score for each provider you call so you can review afterwards to aid your decision process. Here are some example questions I would ask...
1. How long have you been getting page 1 results for in the search engines ?
2. What is the highest amount of competing web pages you've beaten ?
3. Do you employ black hat, grey hat or white hat SEO tactics ? NEVER go with a company that does black or grey, whilst you may get slightly faster results in the short term, you could risk being penalised or even banned. If you are unsure about these terms please check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat_seo
4. How long are you tied into the contract and how long would it take to cancel the contract ?
5. Do you do SEO for your customers only or do you have your own online businesses ? This is a great question because if you think about it, if a person or company has the ability to get web pages at the top of page one in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Lycos etc, surely they would take advantage of this skill set, but you would be surprised at how many SEO providers don't. If possible, go with an SEO provider that does use their own SEO services on their own websites as they will also have an extremely valuable addition skill i.e. running SEO to make profit for a business they own and run day to day. This gives them an edge of "regular" SEO Agencies who miss out on the skills of running businesses along side active SEO strategies.
6. What are the costs and are they fixed i.e. X amount per month or can they go up and down ? Preferably go with a fixed cost. I have heard a few horror stories with variable SEO pricing where the customer was stung with a very large bill unexpectedly.
7. What reporting will I get ? You should get reporting, ideally from trusted 3rd party software, that shows you your ranking so you can see how the SEO efforts are rewarding you. Ask to see an example.
These are just some of the questions I would ask. Be sure to add your own questions before you call them and write down what you thought whilst chatting to them.
As well as their services it is important that you "gel" with your SEO provider because a proper SEO strategy is a medium to long term relationship and as the SEO provider should get to know your business inside out to be able to advice on such areas as which keywords to pick, which landing pages to use, edits to your site both code and visually to increase ranking and conversions to name just a few of the tasks, it's vital you can both work together effectively.
Now you should select a budget and pick your provider and run with a 3 month trial. 3 months of SEO is a good amount of time for you to be able to gauge the quality of the service and gain some good results.
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