Although 75% of companies invest in SEO in big and small ways, businesses still debate if they need professional assistance with SEO. In this article, we will break down why you should hire a local SEO Company and 6 questions that you should ask an SEO consultant to determine if they are good at what they do.
When To Hire A Local SEO Company?
Here are 3 questions that will pop up in your mind when you are ready to hire a local SEO company.
1. Am I Ready To Expand My Business?
While it is possible to optimize your digital assets in-house, it is expensive, time-consuming, and not foolproof. Having 1 or 2 in-house people writing SEO content, optimizing the website, and building authentic backlinks is not feasible and will take a lot of time.
Hiring a professional SEO company will ensure that you get faster results in less time. Most SEO companies have a team of experts who specialize in different areas of the service ensuring that you get a well-planned, and managed SEO strategy that brings you under the spotlight.
2. Do I Want To Optimize Internal Workflow
It’s harder to manage SEO services when your company does not specialize in it. Not only will it drain a lot of resources, but you may need to learn about SEO to establish KPIs and milestones – both of which will exhaust time and finances.
By outsourcing local SEO services, you can rest assured that the experts are managing your SEO needs and re-direct your resources in staff who specialize in your industry. This will optimize internal workflow and bring you under the spotlight at the same time.
3. How Quickly Do I Want To Build My Local Presence?
As mentioned above, any company can do in-house SEO, but since SEO is a time-consuming process, it will take longer to build it with a single person. It may take years before you see any traffic coming to your website through search engines.
Although some aspects of SEO do take time, like Google indexing and building a content inventory, an SEO expert can work on a few things that will quickly optimize you for search engines. This includes things like building a faster website, optimizing the website for customer experience, and setting up a Google My Business page for local SEO.
Questions You Need To Ask Before Hiring SEO Services
The SEO industry is saturated with service providers and only a few are experts. Here are some quick questions you can ask potential service providers to determine if they are the right fit for your brand.
1. How Many Years Of Experience Do You Have?
This question quickly establishes the service experts from the service providers. Try to look into multiple resources for the company’s authenticity. Social media platforms and Google reviews can give some idea on how experienced and authentic a company is. However, there is a disclaimer – there are many good companies out there with little to no social media presence. In this case, you should directly ask the company for case studies of past works and customer testimonials.
2. Do You Provide Other Digital Marketing Services?
Many SEO companies are actually full-service internet marketing companies that provide SEO as a part of their services. This is beneficial for most B2B and B2C brands as it means you can get more than just SEO services. SEO is a small fraction of digital marketing and web development services and working with a full-service internet marketing company would imply that you can start by building a strong website, UI/UX design, followed by local SEO and other digital marketing services like social media marketing – all from 1 service provider.
3. Do You Outsource Or Provide All Services In House?
While many good companies have a freelancer model, i.e. all their services are outsourced and they have an in-house management team, companies that have an in-house team are usually more affordable and better at managing project deadlines.
Always ask your potential service provider how many people will work on your project and if they are a part of the in-house team. Genuine digital marketing and local SEO companies are happy to provide you with this information.
4. How Will You Improve My Local Visibility?
Good local SEO is a systematic process that spans somewhere between months and years. A good local SEO company will incorporate local directories, backlink generation and hyper local content to improve your local SEO.
Do not work with companies that promise results in weeks or months. Local SEO is 90% skill and 10% luck and even the most experienced SEO specialists do not have control over the time taken by third-party websites to enlist you. Companies that guarantee results in weeks are either inexperienced and don’t understand how local SEO works or use black hat techniques that can damage your online brand image in the long run.
5. Will You Provide Monthly Reports?
Monthly reports help us understand what is working and what isn’t. Even the most experienced SEO companies cannot speculate any progress without having a proper reporting system in place. So when a company takes time to assess its progress and make the necessary changes to its SEO strategy, it is usually a good company. Asking a potential service provider if they provide reports and which software they use to track data will provide good insight into their experience and capacity to bring good results.
6. How Often Do You Revise And Edit Existing Strategies?
Good local SEO specialists use consumer behavior and data from local directories to improve their strategy. We need to give a strategy some time for it to work, hence changing it too soon will not guarantee success. On the other hand, if you take too long to spot redundancy in a strategy, you will exhaust a lot more resources before you see success. So, knowing when to change your strategy is important and good companies usually wait 3-4 months before they re-assess their existing initiatives.
Conclusion
We hope this article sheds some light on differentiating good local SEO companies from mediocre ones. You may not need SEO services as soon as you start your company, but as you grow and notice an increase in demand, you should outsource your SEO needs to an experienced company. Netlynx Inc. has 12+ years of experience in local SEO services and is always looking forward to bringing brands under the limelight.
