Once again, I’ve just heard a far too familiar tale where a trusted company, that has been paid quite a lot of money, hasn’t delivered against their contract – and the client hasn’t been able to extradite themselves from it.
Every time I hear this, and it is more times than you would expect, it never fails to amaze me; it is really bad for the industry’s reputation and we are all tarred by it.
I’m talking about a company delivering SEO services, who in my opinion have severely failed their client. Basic work hasn’t been undertaken and because SEO is considered such a black art, the client didn’t know what questions to ask the contractor or what to expect from the outcome. Their website wasn’t performing any better two years down the line, from the commencement of this monthly work, than it was before.
If you think that you are suffering the same problem with an SEO provider, here are three questions to establish what is happening.
3 questions to ask a SEO provider
If they hadn’t, then, how will they feedback progress to you? How are you going to measure success? Do you know what ‘success’ will look like if they are successful in increasing your website’s visibility?
Have they identified what you are already ranking for, what your competition is ranking for and if there is enough traffic to these keywords to make them important?
There is no point in ranking highly on a keyword/phrase no one is searching on.
Working on a website’s SEO involves many aspects and required actions. What order are they suggesting? This may include, tackling on-page SEO first; this is the frequency and position of keywords on a page, it is also the page SEO title and meta descriptions, (which are the words you see when you search for something in the list).
SEO is also affected by site speed, poor site build, badly redirected, pages, broken links, and pages that cannot be found (404 error). The full list is extensive; the important thing is that there is a plan to move things forward systematically and that they can demonstrate improvements.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve a site’s optimisation, but at the end of the day, it’s all about conversions. If you are not seeing more business as a result, that should probably be the first indication that either the work has failed, or worse case scenario, hasn’t been done at all!
SEO isn’t a one hit wonder, so it is not uncommon to have to work away at it; the outcomes can be influenced by what your competitors are doing, if one of the search engines has changed its algorithm again and any number of things. But good monthly reporting and checking progress can spot issues and allow you to keep the momentum up.
There is nothing more satisfying than to see keywords and phrases you have worked on climb the ranking ladder and to hear that, as a consequence, your client has gained business. This is why clear and understandable reporting and communication is vital. My mantra will always be measure, measure and measure again. Know what you are trying to achieve and be honest if its something that you can’t achieve because the competition is too hot. SEO really isn’t a black art; it isn’t even complicated – there is just a lot of work required to begin with.
If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of the service you are receiving. Ask these three questions of your provider.
And, if you don’t get a satisfactory answer, give us a call or fill out the form below and we will give your site a quick audit to see if the basics have been addressed – FREE OF CHARGE!
And guess what? You really can genuinely be number 1 in Google with local SEO!
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