How to Choose a Good SEO Company for Your New Business

With so many SEO companies out there, it's hard to know which one is the best fit for your new business. Luckily, we've got you covered. We've put together some key factors you should consider when choosing an SEO company — before signing the dotted line and committing to working with them. Here are 9 things you should know before choosing an SEO company for your new business.

1. How to choose an SEO company

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of making sure your website ranks highly in the search results when people look for keywords related to your business. You can hire a company to do SEO for you, but it’s important to know what to look for during the selection process. Often, it can be difficult for businesses to decide which SEO company is right for them. SEO is confusing, incredibly technical, and some companies charge exorbitant amounts to implement their unique strategies. It can make choosing the right SEO company extremely difficult.

You may have realized during your research for a new business that you want a specific SEO company or company that specializes in SEO. You may also find yourself in a situation where multiple companies compete for your business, requesting your hard-earned dollars to optimize certain aspects of your website or business. As contractors and companies, they may have a monopoly on the marketing space and may even charge you higher prices.

As SEO is pretty darn technical, things like keyword research, optimization, and content writing can quickly get complicated. If you have other people working on your business, you may not have the full background or know-how on performing a competitive SEO audit.

Whatever the reason, looking for a partner, or a company that can step in and contributes what they know to better help you achieve your goals can result in a lot of time and money saved.

People often refer to brands as “images” and “logos” when describing what an SEO company does. The closest thing to the perfect image or perfect logo we all strive to create is likely an SEO-optimized image or website.

That’s why it’s important to know what specific measures an SEO-friendly company does in creating their images and homepage to rank highly for keywords related to your business.

2. What questions to ask your potential SEO company

Before you hire an SEO company, you need to ask certain questions to make sure they’re a good match for your business. These include:

To make sure your questions have all been answered, make a list of questions that are important to your company and conduct your research.

When you’re working with an SEO company, they’ll want to make sure you have a great experience. To do this, they might ask you questions about your business:

Observe other people using your service. It’s not enough to know what they do. You need to know why they do what they do. When you work with other people, you learn about their motivations, pain points, and style. So, when you work with an SEO company, you should observe what they do and try to glean insight on how your company can help them.

Other important questions you should ask are:

Making sure you have answers to your questions will make you a more desirable client. Plus, information on other similar businesses will also give you an edge on your competition.

When working with an SEO company, you need to have a clear idea of how they work. It’s important to understand the specific steps an SEO company takes to get the traffic they want so you can make sense of what it is they do. For example, you might need to know:

You need to know how they communicate with webmasters and other marketing team members. They may use text messaging, email, in-person events, and social media. Here are some other things you should know about how an SEO company works.

Here are some common areas of difference between an SEO firm and their competition:

Search engines determine the best places for web pages to appear. So, prominent placement on the first page of search results is a powerful ranking factor.

3. Hiring an in-house SEO specialist vs hiring an SEO agency

To determine whether your business should hire an in-house SEO specialist or hire an SEO agency, there are a few things to consider. The first thing you should think about is whether you have the time and resources to train and manage a full-time SEO specialist. If you don’t have the time, then an SEO agency may be the best solution. In general, agencies charge relatively higher hourly rates than a full-time SEO specialist. However, it's important to note that an hourly rate tends to fluctuate, which can make it difficult to predict how much an SEO agency will be able to charge.

The second factor is how competitive your market is and how far you want to push your new business. One thing to keep in mind is that you can’t hire an agency if you don’t know who your competitors are.

It may be tempting to hire an SEO agency and think it will take you a long way. However, they can easily squeeze out clients who are paying their employees a better salary. This means you could be losing out on potential sales closing revenue that would come from hiring an experienced and dedicated SEO expert in-house.

In general, the more competitive your market is, the more you should ensure that your website is optimized to get the best rankings. Ultimately, such optimization is about getting your website right for search engine spiders.

It’s also important to ensure that you own all of the relevant assets on your site, including the ideal-ranking page, and the names and photos of your staff. When investing in SEO, remember that the experience comes down to the humans at work.

Once you’ve made the initial decision about hiring an SEO company for your new business, connecting with them can be a bit of a pain. Before you decide to work with an SEO agency, make sure you:

Once you’re done with your research, you may notice that some of the information provided by a particular SEO company looks very similar to the details you find online.