The SEO industry has quite the negative reputation nowadays. There’s lot of people offering and spamming your inboxes with guarantees of page one results for a very low price! If it sounds to good to be true, it normally is!
We receive emails like the one shown above daily, a reputable SEO company would never guarantee 1st page rankings on Google as there’s just too many variables to offer such a thing.
A good SEO company will analyse your website from a technical standpoint and point out any obvious issues before being able to put together a comprehensive proposal.
They should ask you questions such as:
- What’s your budget?
- What keywords do you wish to compete for?
- How much money are you making per 1000 pageviews?
- How quickly do you want want to see an impact?
- Do you have content-marketing capability’s internally?
Also they should be using an Analytics Platform to show how much of an impact they’ve had since they’re services were put in place.
They should make it clear that SEO is a long-term strategy that will not produce results overnight and will pay dividends 6 months to a year from now if maintained and continually worked on, they could also offer PPC services if you would like a marketing strategy that provides immediate results.
They should complete a technical audit if the site is more than six months old and has any glaringly obvious issues.
There’s no magic tricks in SEO (that actually work long-term and don’t get you penalised). Their role should be to ensure your website meets all the current technical guidelines set by the likes of Google to give you the best chance of climbing to the top rankings. They should help you build authority through link building, content marketing and tracking performance to improve your results.
They should provide monthly updates outlining everything they’ve done and the impact it’s had on the previously agreed keywords.
In summary the following should have been carried out:
- A comprehensive technical site audit.
- An in-depth report about key performance indicators & technical fixes that should be implemented, and discussed with you.
- Overseen or advised implementation of the technical issues discovered in the audit.
- Decided upon performance benchmarks and explained them to you.
- Make sure that tracking is correctly implemented, so that results can be analysed.
- Compiled a list of keywords/search terms, which are feasible to get and agreed with yourself.
- Analysed the competition for Keywords.
- They should make sure that your website is configured correctly with Rich Snippets and Schema mark-up.
- Every month they should assist you in creating & publishing high quality content that targets the keywords set (After the first month, this should be where the majority of their time is spent).
- Every month they should come up with lists of new potential keywords & long tail search terms to go after.
- They should be coming up with creative ideas to get your links and content on other sites to build links and authority.
- They should be tracking the progress of the results of the strategies above and provide you with detailed reports every month or custom dashboards for you to see what impact they’ve had and how they’re meeting KPIs set earlier on.
If you’re interested in how SEO can benefit your business or website get a free proposal now! If you’re based in Hull, Yorkshire or Lincolnshire we’ll even pop out to see you!
