Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of helping your customers connect with your business online.

Our team uses modern SEO services, backed by the best digital practices, to increase your traffic & rankings for vetted keywords and long-tail phrases that drive business to your site.

There are three major facets of SEO, and the most effective SEO companies consider all three as components of a comprehensive SEO strategy.

• Technical SEO considers code, site structure, site speed, and other metrics that could impact your search traffic. During a technical SEO review, an SEO professional will make sure that search engines can crawl your site and its content, will review 404 errors, and will analyze redirects, among other tasks.
• User experience (UX) is the optimization of the content of your digital properties. During an on-page SEO review, an SEO expert will analyze user-facing aspects of your site, including content, navigation, and keyword optimization.
• Off-page SEO means improving your SEO presence by earning links, strengthening the brand online, and improving the popularity of the site and content. To execute off-page SEO campaigns, an SEO agency will look for opportunities to increase your domain and page authority through incoming links to your site from other high-quality properties.

Many SEO agencies operate in one of two ways:

1. They will offer only one facet of SEO (such as link-building).
2. They will do all the research and strategy without being able to effectively implement any of it.

Modern SEO requires a holistic strategy and experienced execution. Make sure the SEO agency you are evaluating can do all three (technical, UX, off-page), and that they have a clear strategy for balancing them.

SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and your SEO partner should have some ideas as to how your business needs a unique approach that caters to your industry, business model, and goals. SEO for a local business interested in attracting customers from a dozen zip codes requires a very different approach than SEO for a major corporation with a global market.

Experience in your industry is a plus, but it’s not necessarily a requirement. More important is the  SEO agency’s ability to articulate how they will adapt the general approach to cater specifically to your niche. Make sure that the company can highlight specific places where the general approach will vary.

I focus my design decisions on goals, which I will explain when presenting the designs. This will mean I have considered your target audience, competition etc. As a piece of design work that’s functional, a logo doesn’t need to be liked by you personally, but should instead perform for your business. I will cooperate with you to ensure the design achieves all goals agreed upon, which will include any specific requests made before starting the designs.

It’s unlikely to happen, however, if you still dislike the designs you don’t need to make full payment. Before starting the project I take 50% payment, so if you don’t like the work done for you, you don’t need to pay the final amount.

This is kind of a trick question. While SEO companies may come to the meeting with certain, general goals in mind, their success metrics should really stem from what success means for you. No SEO company can guarantee page-one rankings, and those that make these types of promises are likely using black-hat techniques. These techniques may get you traffic for a short time, but they’ll ultimately land you a penalty—along with significantly reduced traffic and rankings.

Legitimate SEO professionals will build their plans around your goals. If you’re looking for increased traffic, they may prioritize keyword optimization or content creation. If you’re looking for more local traffic, they may recommend optimizing your local business profiles on directory and review sites. An SEO agency’s success metrics should be directly based on your business goals, so look for companies that turn this question around and seek the answer from you.

Effective SEO takes time, but that shouldn’t prevent an experienced agency from giving you a time frame for results. In general, you should expect to see results from legitimate SEO techniques within six months of getting started.

The possibility of seeing results earlier depends on the health of your site. For instance, correcting technical errors and oversights can net some legitimate SEO gains in a short period of time. However, if your site is already structured well and free from technical issues, you will have to wait longer for measurable change.

If your SEO company promises quick results, ask why. If they point out technical factors that need to be cleaned up, good. If not, be wary—they might be using outdated, spammy techniques that will eventually get your site penalized.

Ideally, mobile should be part of the conversation when you discuss the general strategy. Google announced last year that they were in the process of moving to a mobile-first index, making mobile optimization more important than ever. Look for companies that have a process for conducting a mobile audit of your site, and ensure your SEO agency can convincingly articulate why mobile is an important SEO consideration.

The most successful SEO initiatives are part of an overall marketing plan, so avoid companies that expect to perform their tasks in isolation. SEO goes hand-in-hand with content marketing, and public relations and social media marketing activities can be used for effective link-building. Your SEO partner should be very open to collaborating with your other marketing teams—as well as other teams as needed, such as your web development and sales teams—and should have a basic plan for integrating their efforts with your existing marketing initiatives.

In the past, keyword research meant plugging a term into a keyword research tool, populating a list of relevant keywords, and developing content with keywords inserted at various places. However, modern keyword research requires much more effort—it’s an exercise in understanding user intent. It seeks to understand what information a user is looking for when searching a keyword phrase and provides content catered to the intent behind the search.

As you’re interviewing prospective SEO companies, make sure that they refer to user intent and speak about the tools and methodologies they use to determine keyword intent. If the entire conversation revolves around number of searches for a keyword and keyword density, it’s likely that they’re operating on outdated practices.

Legitimate SEO companies should respond with a long list of questions and needs. To conduct their work effectively, they’ll need detailed information about your audience, industry, goals, and KPIs. They’ll need to know what other digital marketing platforms you’re using that will affect your content, if any, such as marketing automation. They’ll also need access to your Google Analytics. Effective SEO requires a partnership between multiple teams and company leaders, so agencies that need very little from you are unlikely to build an SEO plan that will help you achieve long-term success.