Walnut Creek Chamber Of Commerce: How To Hire An SEO Company

Press release from the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce.

WALNUT CREEK, CA — If you're going to hire an SEO company, you’re going to want to make sure you’ll get what you need for the money you’re spending. Here’s our guide for how to hire an SEO company.

How To Hire An SEO Company

Here’s the process you’ll want to follow when you’re ready to hire an SEO company.

Conduct a 2-way interview with potential SEOs. Make sure that they’re genuinely interested in you and your business. Some things to look for include:

• An interest in helping your business beyond search engine ranking. The SEO should want to know:
  • What makes your business, content, and service unique and valuable to customers?
  • What does your typical customer look like and how do they find your website?
  • How does your business make money and how can search help?
  • What other channels are you using (offline advertising, social media, etc.)?
  • Who are your competitors? What do they do well online (and offline)?
• Check their references.
  • If they provide prior clients, check their references.
    • Make sure SEO was able to provide useful guidance and worked effectively with developers, designers, UX researchers, and marketers.
    • A good SEO should be someone you can work with, learn from, experiment with, and who cares about you and your business, not just getting the highest search rank.
  • Ask for a technical and search audit (you’ll probably have to pay for these). A technical audit reviews your site for issues related to internal linking, crawlability, URL parameters, server connectivity, and response codes. A search audit will break down your search queries into categories such as branded terms (those with your business or website’s name) and unbranded/general keyword (possible suggestions for improvement include updating obsolete content, improving internal linking, generating buzz, and learning from your competition).
    • If you trust an SEO candidate, give them restricted view, not full or right access to your Google Search Console data and analytics data.
    • Before they change anything on your website, have them conduct a technical and search audit to give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO.
    • In the audit, the SEO should prioritize improvements with a structure like:
      • The issue
      • The suggested improvement
      • An estimate of the overall investment
      • Estimated positive business impact (ranking improvement, greater agility, etc.)
      • Plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation or how to experiment and quickly recover if results aren’t as expected
• Decide if you want to hire them.

LEARN MORE, including What An SEO Company Does.

This press release was produced by the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author’s own.