Are you looking to hire an SEO agency to help your business get more leads?
There are many SEO providers out there and some are definitely better than others. That is why knowing the right questions to ask is critical and can help to save you from choosing the wrong provider.
Ask these 7 questions to your SEO agency to be sure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
1. Do you help us get more links back to our site? How?
The answer to this question helps to show you where the mindset of the company is at. If someone doesn’t have a linking strategy or just dodges the linking strategy side of SEO, then there’s a good chance they don’t know the best way’s to find you more leads.
Most linking strategies will require link building activities. But sometimes, if you’re an enterprise-sized company, you may not need these link building activities.
When it comes to small to mid-sized businesses, many of these have not done nearly enough activity when it comes to their link building practices.
2. How are you identifying keyword phrases to target?
When it comes to identifying keywords, you want to hear that there is some sort of research that is going into what you are writing. Anyone can come up with a title that sounds nice, which is cool, but that’s not going to be the thing to get you your leads, no matter how cool the title is.
What you need to have is a keyword that has high search volume and low difficulty to rank for. That is the key to a good blog title.
When you have high search volume, it means that a higher amount of people are looking for that specific keyword. That’s how you get seen. By putting out content that people are actually searching for.
Keyword difficulty is another thing you need to be aware of. It can be a great keyword with insane amounts of search volume, but if there are already sites that have hundreds of links and authority for that keyword, you’re going to have your work cut out for you.
3. Are we looking at what competitors are ranking for as part of our keyword strategy?
Absolutely. This is a great strategy.
If your competition knows what they are doing from a digital standpoint, then why wouldn’t you want to check up on them and see what they are doing? Especially if it’s working.
You can find so much great information from this. You are able to see what they are targeting and see what strategies you can use from them to beef up your plan of attack.
However, one thing that you want to be sure to double-check is just because someone is doing good in business, doesn’t mean that they are doing good on the digital side of things.
4. What is your take on content, what is the role of content in SEO? Who writes it, what’s the rhythm?
This is something that you definitely want to bring up in the conversation.
To put things simply, you need content. It is going to be what makes your SEO go and get you to where you want to be.
Now, as far as who is writing the content, it will be either someone internally for your company or from your SEO team.
Both will have their perks as well.
If you choose to go with someone internally to write the content, this will help to keep things coming from the most knowledgeable resource.
If you decide to let the SEO content writer do the writing, they will have a better understanding of how to get the most from a blog post and keyword so that it ranks better, which in the end, is what we are after in SEO.
As far as rhythm, you want to be releasing it on a weekly basis, or every other week at the very least.
5. What percentage of your work is ‘technical SEO’ and audits?
This is an important question because if you see an SEO company just offering you technical SEO and audits, it is like a “cop-out.”
This is because they are able to charge a bunch of money for not a whole lot of work and effectiveness on your site.
Now, if you are a larger corporation with tons and tons of pages, then technical SEO is going to be a large chunk of what you are doing before you get your content strategy into place.
If you are a smaller to mid-sized company, they should look at it and get things straightened out, while keeping an eye on it so things don’t go crazy. It should be about 25ish% of the time that is being put in.
6. For ‘on-page SEO’ are we expected to do some of that work, or do you handle it?
The agency that you are working with should be taking care of it. They should be doing it on a regular basis so you don’t have to worry about it.
In a perfect world, they will have it be a part of the content and then continue checking up on it in the following months and check and see what search engines are ranking it for.
7. What are the Key Performance Indicators that will help us decide if we’re pacing successfully 6 months and one year in?
The agency you are working with should be filling you in on the referring domains and organic keywords, and then pivot over to a rise in search impressions which can be found on search counsel.
You should also see if the organic traffic is starting to have an increase and get more clicks onto your website. Basically, you want to be seeing a serious increase.
Conclusion
These are the 7 questions that you should be asking your SEO agency to make sure you’re not getting bamboozled.
Hope this helps you to feel more confident in your decision and navigate your way through those waters.
