Our guide to choosing an SEO company
Like most businesses, we get called about three times a day and emailed about 10 times daily by companies offering to do our SEO for us. The irony of them calling us is not lost, but it does give us an opportunity to speak to some other people in our industry, and to find out what they are telling the business community at large. Today, this article is going to offer a set of guidelines you may want to consider to help you in choosing an SEO company if and when you are looking to outsource your SEO.
Choosing an SEO Company – the checklist
- Firstly, in our experience, the companies who are pro-actively engaging in cold calling to offer SEO services tend to not be very visible themselves on the web. Our first litmus test for choosing an SEO company would be whether you can find THEM when you search for something related to what they do. If they cannot walk the talk with their own business, it does not send a very positive sign that they will do any differently for yours.
Secondly, are they offering you a cast iron guarantee that you will rank in position X within a set amount of time for a specific keyword? If so, then run as fast as you can in the other direction, and remove them from your available options for choosing an SEO company. There are so many variables in search engine optimisation, most of which are outside of any one persons control, that offering a guarantee is a sign that somebody does not actually understand the business. Sir Alex Ferguson would never dream of guaranteeing Manchester United would score in any given game, regardless of the opposition. The other team, the ground, the weather, fans and the referee all have some influence on the outcome. Granted, if his team don’t score he might be a little red faced and angry, but the same principle applies to SEO. We know that what we do works, and we know that all things being equal a customer will see their rankings rise at a predictable rate over a given period of time. But to guarantee this effect would be ignorant and misleading to customers.- Thirdly – and this is a big one – what is the likely return on your investment? Given that we cant offer a guarantee of ranking, this one is a mix between mathematics, realism and experience, but it is a key ingredient both to choosing an SEO company and to deciding on your spend level. If you sell lower value items, and make on average 30pence per unit sold, a £500 per month SEO contract is going to need to deliver at least 2000 additional unit sales per month to make it worthwhile. Even if you ranked first place for your keyword, are there enough monthly searches to generate that kind of business? Alternatively, if you sell higher value items and each sale nets a profit of around £600, this same SEO contract would only need to generate a single sale per month to be worthwhile, but again, would top ranking for your keyword be likely to lead to this? There is a rough equation to be used when predicting your traffic and sales, and for the purpose of choosing an SEO company we advise you use this formula:
On average, around 46% of all clicks go to the first result in search queries. You can find the rough number of monthly searches using Google’s keyword tool. This should give you an idea of traffic levels, and most websites work at a 1-2% conversion rate, so work at 1% of traffic, then multiply this by your average sale to see if SEO is a worthwhile choice for you.
If your site is not eCommerce, but a conversion from the site is somebody getting in touch, then of your enquiries how many lead to sales? Factor all of this in at the start of any SEO discussion and you will have a much more informed choice ahead of you.
Fourthly, does it make sense to put this work out to a third party? This is a judgement between your time and your cashflow. Put a value on your time (or the time of the person who would be doing your SEO activity for you), multiply this by the number of hours they would need to spend on it, and add in the cost of materials, software and SEO training if applicable. Now get some quotes for your SEO from companies like us. Compare the costs, and make a decision based on this. This is the point where you are choosing an SEO company or choosing to keep the tasks “in house”. Your SEO company should know what they are doing, so whilst they might cost more per hour the time is much more efficiently employed. Now look at this cost and go back to the last point about return on investment. Does it still make sense?- And finally – and possibly most importantly – if you are going to go ahead and use an SEO company, seek references and ask for proof of what they do. If they cannot show you some results they have achieved for other customers, and are not happy for you to speak to those customers, then something is not quite right. Your SEO provider should be proud of their work, and their customers should be their best advocates. These referenes and proof of concepts should confirm what you have already found with the above checklist, but this last step is as important as any other when choosing an SEO company for your business.
Our guide to choosing an SEO company
SEO can make an incredible difference to your business. It would be great if you would consider asking us to help, or to provide a quote for you to evaluate our proposals. Ours is still an industry which is filled with providers who do not deliver on their promises, and who use underhand techniques – both in the original sales contact and in their actual SEO activity – safeguard yourself by asking these questions from the start and you should confident in choosing an SEO company.
Tony is the Managing Director of Flosee, and also our lead developer. He has been building, modifying and beautifying websites since 2001 and is almost always glued to a keyboard in one way or another.
Great checklist!
Even we get emails from companies offering SEO services – then when you check out their site there’s no SEO on their own site.
It is one of the most annoying trends in our industry. Cold calling and speculative emails DO have their place in a marketing plan, but the minimum of prior research into who you are contacting would go a long way, and not bothering to optimise your own website when that is the service you are offering is just plain silly. Glad you liked the article!
Great tip about so called SEO experts having to cold call too generate business. Certainly don’t go there.
A problem I had with a customer was he bought lots of similar domains in addition to his main site and simply redirected then to his main site. Clearly he shoud have added content to create additional link juice but didn’t want to spend the money.