by Lindsay Pietroluongo
Looking to hire an SEO optimization company? Read this article before moving forward.
Search engine optimization companies help businesses improve their visibility in Google and other search engines. In turn, this brings more organic traffic to the brand’s website, which can lead to an increase in converted clients and customers.
Choosing the right website SEO services is a critical decision, directly affecting your brand’s credibility and growth.
By relying on professional SEO services you trust, you’ll rank higher on search engine results pages while building a strong online presence. As a result, having an excellent digital reputation makes it easier to attract qualified traffic and drive consistent results.
What happens if you cut corners instead of choosing one of the best SEO companies, though? Serious consequences of neglecting your SEO strategy include losing search engine rankings, wasting your marketing budget, and causing long-term damage to your online presence.
In this article, we’ll give you the framework for vetting an SEO company so you can get the most value.
NetReputation is the best SEO agency for building and protecting your digital presence. Call us at 844-461-3632 to learn more, or fill out the contact form below for a free consultation.
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What Do Reputable SEO Companies Offer?
Since not all SEO companies operate the same, you want to only consider the best SEO agencies when looking for a partner. Here’s what a top search engine optimization agency will include in their process.
High-Quality Content Marketing
Valuable, well-structured content will serve your target audience as well as search engine algorithms. A reliable SEO firm will offer content writing services to develop blog posts, landing pages and website resources that meet certain goals, such as:
- Answering audience FAQs
- Demonstrating your brand’s expertise
- Naturally incorporating relevant keywords
Importantly, your SEO digital marketing agency should never use clickbait tactics or keyword stuffing when developing your content.
Ethical Link-Building
Building links the ethical way will earn your brand relevant backlinks from high-authority sources. This happens by creating and promoting high-quality content, using digital PR techniques, and developing real relationships with industry leaders.
Link-building should never rely on buying paid links or participating in link schemes. When it comes to SEO performance and your online reputation, long-term credibility is much more valuable than quick, cheap wins.
Your link-building team should know how to avoid Google penalties and boost your domain authority via backlinks in a sustainable way.
Technical SEO
Your site’s SEO performance will suffer without technical optimization. Technical SEO includes:
- Addressing issues like broken links, crawl errors and duplicate content
- Creating a mobile-friendly website
- Ensuring that your website is fast-loading
- Structuring your site for easy search engine indexing
Even if you have the best content in your niche, your visibility will suffer if you don’t include technical SEO in your digital marketing strategy.
SEO Services Transparency
Reliable SEO companies are transparent about their strategies, pricing and progress on your campaign. You should be clear upfront about what to expect pricing-wise and from the contract. Moreover, you should receive regular reports with understandable performance metrics, such as conversion rates, keyword rankings and website traffic trends.
Overall, the SEO agency you choose should never make you wonder what you’re paying for, how much you’ll be charged, or if the SEO optimization services are even working.
Alignment With Business Goals and Your Industry
The search engine optimization agency you hire should tailor their SEO and web strategy to your specific business goals as well as your industry. Whether you run a law firm, an online SaaS company, or multiple retail locations, your SEO team should customize your campaign specifically to your brand.
This includes customizing keyword research, content, conversion tactics and other SEO tasks to your audience, competition and niche.
Aligning SEO efforts with your unique needs means driving the right type of organic traffic to your website.
Red Flags To Avoid When Vetting an SEO Services Company
Unfortunately, not every company will engage in white label SEO services. Some will do more harm than good instead of operating with your best interests in mind. As you evaluate potential SEO specialists, keep these red flags in mind.
Black-Hat Techniques in Your SEO Strategy
There are all sorts of black-hat SEO techniques that untrustworthy companies will employ, such as:
- Cloaking: Users and search engines see different versions of the same webpage as a way to trick the ranking algorithm.
- Content Scraping: Content is copied from another site to your site instead of developing original, high-value material.
- Hidden Content: Hiding links or text by using white text on a white background can deceive site crawlers.
- Keyword Stuffing: The same keyword(s) are used way too much on a webpage to manipulate rankings.
- Low-Quality Backlinks: Buying links or getting spammy backlinks from low-quality sites artificially inflates your page authority.
Avoiding these types of SEO tactics goes beyond providing SEO services that are ethical. You also need to protect your website from being penalized, losing rankings, and causing long-term damage to your brand reputation.
Guarantees or Instant Results
No SEO firm should promise that you’ll see instant results or make 100% guarantees. The right SEO agency knows that this is a long-term strategy and numerous elements go into its success, including your brand’s competition, your industry, and what your SEO audit shows.
Even the best digital marketing experts can’t control the Google algorithm or ranking factors. Any SEO or marketing agency that uses pushy sales tactics and promises a No. 1 ranking on Google is either outright lying to you or plans to engage in low-quality tactics that won’t be sustainable.
Overreliance on AI Content or Paid Links
When it comes to growing your presence, increasing your ranking, getting qualified leads and more, you don’t want a strategy that takes shortcuts.
AI tools can be helpful when it comes to generating content ideas, out-of-the-box marketing strategies and even content itself, but they have to be used responsibly. The final result should have a human touch so that the information is accurate and on-brand.
Paid links are another cheap SEO shortcut that unreliable companies will use for a quick boost in page authority. However, Google prohibits them, and if you get caught, you could face penalties — including no longer showing up in search results at all.
Missing or Vague Reporting
You need to have solid communication with your SEO marketing team, which includes receiving regular updates and reports. Those reports should be thorough and clear, too — vague metrics could be a way to mask the company’s inefficiency.
The only way you can accurately track the effectiveness of an SEO campaign is by going over KPIs, like backlink quality, conversions, and organic traffic. Furthermore, your SEO team should be willing to explain the data included in the reports so you’re never in the dark about what’s happening.
How To Evaluate the Track Record of an SEO Services Company
There are a number of ways to evaluate an SEO company’s track record, such as:
- Check the Google Search ranking and domain authority for the SEO marketing company.
- Explore the agency’s social media marketing and profiles, and get a feel for their social proof.
- Look over the blog, resources, and thought leadership content that the SEO agency offers.
- Review the ratings, reviews and testimonials for the search engine optimization company.
You can take control of your online reputation with professional SEO services. Call us at 844-461-3632 for more information.
Industry and Niche Expertise
By choosing a company that has experience in your specific industry (B2B, healthcare, legal, SaaS, or something else), they’ll understand the nuances of your niche, including:
- Your audience
- The competitive landscape
- Content expectations
This allows the company to create a competitive strategy and messaging that will resonate with your audience.
Communications and Reporting Standards
As mentioned earlier, it’s important to work with a company that’s communicative and transparent. The SEO marketing agency you choose should do the following:
- Clarify the KPIs that will be tracked, choosing the most important ones for your goals (bounce rate, CTR, keyword ranking, etc.)
- Consistently check in with you on a predetermined schedule to provide updates
- Give you access to real-time dashboards and monthly performance summaries
SEO clients should be treated like strategic partners by being informed and involved in the process.
Contracts, Pricing and Scalability
Pricing models must be transparent. Avoid any digital marketing company that tries to cover up its fees and pricing information. Here are a few ways that a reputable agency will communicate its pricing with you:
- All pricing model options are outlined, including hourly rates, monthly retainers, and project-based rates
- Each package or tier has a breakdown of the charges so you know how much you’re paying for each component
- Add-on services and custom solutions are provided along with upfront pricing
Additionally, you should have a clear idea of how services and pricing may change as your brand scales up (or down) over time. Furthermore, your contract should have clear terms, specific deliverables, and exit clauses so you don’t have to be locked into the agreement if the company doesn’t follow through on its promises.
Questions To Ask Your SEO Agency Before Signing the Contract
When you’re making your list of questions to ask your SEO contact, here are a few to get you started:
- What is your process for improving visibility in Google Search results?
- How do you measure SEO success over time?
- What tools and platforms do you use for search engine optimization?
- What is your reporting like, and how often will you deliver updates?
- Can you share case studies or client success stories?
At NetReputation, we’ll work with you to develop an SEO campaign that will build your web presence and increase quality traffic to your site. Give us a call at 844-461-3632 to learn more.
How SEO and Reputation Management Are Connected
Your SEO strategy and online reputation management are closely linked, with each one helping to strengthen the other. Both SEO and ORM strive to shape how your brand is perceived online.
A strong SEO strategy helps accurate, positive, on-brand content rise to the top of the SERPs. This is commonly the first place where users learn about your brand and form an opinion. SEO is also able to suppress misleading or negative content by ranking favorable results above harmful ones. When supportive content rises to the top, your digital reputation improves.
Coordinating your off-page and on-page SEO tactics with ORM reinforces your authority, brand identity, relevance and trustworthiness. Search engines, users and even other SEO agencies will view your company as credible and a leader in its field.
All of this is possible by choosing the right SEO company. NetReputation offers SEO services and solutions for individuals as well as businesses.
Get started today with a free consultation with one of our experts. Call us at 844-461-3632 or fill out the contact form below.