Questions to ask your SEO agency – Part 1

The digital era is well and truly in full flight. Just 10 years ago, some businesses were allocating minimal percentages of their marketing budgets to online, including SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Fast forward to 2010 and no business can afford to be without this element of the marketing mix.

Ranking your business in the various search engines is important for many reasons – brand awareness, traffic to your website and most importantly lead generation.

Experian Hitwise has been in the online space for many years and has learnt through clients and industry experience that there seem to be many ‘cowboys’ offering SEO services, ultimately promising the world, only to leave clients disillusioned and with no real results in sight.

So to avoid all the heart ache, expense and frustrations, we have put together the top 11 questions you should be asking an SEO agency before signing anything plus the answers they should be giving you!

Following are the first three questions in this three-part series:

Question 1: What is your SEO Methodology?

At the end of the day, if you’re paying any marketing agency money to build your business, that’s exactly what you should get in return – growth. The beauty of online is that it shows undeniable statistics about traffic, bounce rates and all of those other little gems that TV, radio and magazines have no real way of proving. You SEO agency must be dedicated to delivering services that positively impact your bottom line and ensure that both your SEO and business objectives are being achieved. SEO is certainly not a ‘set and forget’ function – it is a constant learning, monitoring and tweaking process that should be carried out by experienced SEO professionals.

A highly consultative methodology should be employed to ensure your agency completely understands the habits and key drivers of your customers and how you can appeal to them in the most attractive way.

Question 2: How Important is Keyword Research and How Do You Do it?

Keyword research is very important – this is how Google and other search engines understand what your website is about and determines how to rank it accordingly on the search engine result pages. There are a range of highly developed software tools available on the market that your agency should have access to so they can learn exactly how and what your customers are typing into the search engines. This is how your SEO agency can then develop a baseline for these keywords through understanding what your main product offerings are – thus allowing them to provide relevant and impactful keywords to focus on.

Question 3: Do You Guarantee Results?

In short, no agency should ever promise this. This is because there are a wide range of variables from both your website and the search engines.

For example, each and every client is different and so are their resources. If an agency makes technical recommendations that will no doubt increase the likelihood of traffic, yet you do not have the budget or resource to make these changes, then the agency is somewhat limited to the success of the SEO campaign. It also depends on the nature of your business – the more competitive your relevant keywords are, (e.g. car insurance) the longer it will take to see movement within the rankings of search engines.

On the flip side, search engines are quite secretive with the algorithms they use and will often change them without notice. Therefore, the way an agency should work around this, is by utilising highly experienced SEO professionals to monitor the search engines regularly to identify any changes, big or small.

This report has been republished with permission from the authors at Experian Hitiwse.