How to choose an agency for SEO?

SEO is not a cup of tea for everyone since digital has become a fad. Every other agency hires a person and claims to have a digital wing. It just doesn’t work that way. For SEO you need a content writer, links, keyword research, competitor tracking, and analytics. Broadly 2-3 people are required to do the task.

So I will give you a list to check how to finalize an agency for SEO projects:

1.Timeline – Any agency if claims that they can give results in 1-2 months. It’s technically not possible. Because as Google algorithm is evolving. To rank a website it takes a good amount of 50-80 content pieces with proper alignment of keywords, properly hyperlinked, and then creates further sub-branches by popularizing those links. It requires a good 80-100 man-hours per month for 6 months to achieve desire results.

So the ideal time to see any results falls between 6-9 months.

2. Keywords Suggestion – The core of the SEO project is to rank the keywords. So some agencies will include easy keywords (low search volume with low competition) with fudged numbers to show that these are important keywords with high search volume. You can’t blindly believe in an excel.

Tell them to open google keywords planner (or any other search tool) in front of you and see the ‘keywords search volume’ by yourself. The ideal combination is high search vol. with low competition. Keywords can be modified by making it a long tail keyword. For example, if your leather shoe business is in Hyderabad. You need not target India but at the same time, you will not find high volume keywords for Hyderabad.  So if ‘best leather shoes’ is your shortlisted keyword. You can make it ‘best leather shoes in Hyderabad’ to give you a refined search. This is allowed.

3. The journey of a keyword – Ask for an audit report and also the current stats for your keywords. You can manually check by going into an incognito mode of google to check for unbiased ranking, you can also cross-check it by putting the list of keywords in this software.

Once you have cross-checked the current status of ranking. Every month you will see a slight change in the ranking. This will be an indication that the strategy is working and there is a sufficient amount of work going on at the backend. For example – Generally, an agency looks for words in 1st 10 pages that means rank will be somewhere between 1 to 100. It has to go down gradually from 100 to 80 to 60 to 40 and so on. If you can’t spot this kind of trend, drill down the agency for reason and modify the strategy if required. You can either make it a long tail keyword or choose another one altogether.

4. Put some paid media budget aside – if the website is new, it needs a push. To win the race fast the car needs a nitro booster. In a similar way, there need to be some paid media (AdWords) spend on the website to give it a traffic boost. Once you get a boost, organic traffic also increases gradually.

5. Plagiarism & Content Mix – Content should be a mix of blogs, articles, social media. You have to assist the agency in giving a proper download of the work you do to help them write genuine content. Check for plagiarism from this software (https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/). It should not have duplicate content or google will penalize and suspend the website. So make sure every content goes through a plagiarism check.

6. Reporting – Mandate elements that need to be captured like traffic, links, new audience, page analysis, and so on. You have the choice to create your own dashboard and see real-time work as well. Make sure you spend sufficient time to understand what are the metrics being captured. There is a lot of analysis that can be captured from google analytics.

7. Username and Password – Create a google id and share it with the agency. Never let an agency create it on their own. This will bestow the power with them and they can steal all the data as and when required making you helpless.

Feel free to comment, if you feel anything additional needs to be added to the list.