SEOCompany

Mar 31 2020

How to Align Your SEO Strategy to the Buyer’s Journey

Saying that your product is the best in the market won’t cut it in this digital age. Modern-day customers are getting smarter and wiser, and the internet is helping them make better purchasing decisions. These days, they can find out everything they want to know about a product or service before zeroing in on the one that’s right for them.

This is the journey that every buyer goes through.

The buyer’s journey not only helps marketers think like a customer; it also allows search engines like Google to help consumers go through their search process with little to no trouble. True enough, since around 67% of buyers’ research and influence happens digitally. If you want to maximize your SEO strategy, make sure to align it with each stage of the buyer’s journey.

What is a Buyer’s Journey?

In essence, the buyer’s journey is a process that’s composed of specific stages the buyers take when purchasing a product or service.

It has three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Some may begin their journey from the beginning, while others may start in the middle. There are also those that go through the entire buyer journey very quickly, while some take quite a while.

Below is a visual representation from Moz that illustrates the purchasing journey of a customer.

Stage 1: Awareness

This first stage of the buyer’s journey is all about discovery. This is where the buyer recognizes they have a problem but aren’t sure what it is specifically. More often than not, they’ll turn to Google for some answers. In this particular stage, the consumer is eager to find quality, educational content that can help them pinpoint the culprit or cause of their problem.

Stage 2: Consideration

Once the consumer clearly identifies their pain point and gathers enough information and opportunities to solve the issue, they move on to “considering” the myriad of possible solutions.

This is the phase where they have decided to address the problem and look for different methods or partners to help solve their issue. Thus, beginning their search for a service provider.

Stage 3: Decision

Finally, we reach the decision stage. Their search for potential solutions eventually leads buyers to narrow their choices of vendors and find the best company to work with. Typically, consumers are ready to buy at this stage, and they’re just making comparisons and assessing reviews to identify the service provider that meets their needs.

This stage is also where the buyer consumes additional content to support their requirement for a vendor. It is also where they ask the executives or decision-makers to approve the purchase (if they’re not the ones handing out approvals themselves).

Identifying Your Buyer Persona

Understanding the fundamentals of the buyer’s journey helps you identify and fill in the gaps in your marketing strategy. But before you dive head-first into it, you need to develop buyer personas to help you personalize your marketing collaterals and target specific segments of your audience base.

Each type of buyer has different demographic details, pain points, priorities, goals, experiences, considerations, intent, behavior, and buying patterns when they go through their own purchasing journey.

Creating customized profiles of your ideal customers allows you to learn more about what type of content drives them to engage with a brand or motivates them to purchase. This helps in content creation, product development, sales approach, and anything that deals with customer acquisition and retention.

Simply put, buyer personas help you better target and humanize your marketing strategy by perceiving them as real people. Below are the basic criteria that shape a customer profile:

● Job title and responsibilities

● Demographic details (i.e., age, gender, income, location, education)

● Psychographics (i.e., attitude, interests, values, personality traits, priorities)

● Goals

● Challenges

● Buying process (i.e., buying behavior, role in the buying process)

Once you’ve created your buyer personas (3-5 profiles are ideal), you may start studying how to fit your content to these demographics, align it to the buyer’s journey, and finally, use the information and your findings to implement an unparalleled SEO strategy.

Your persona can be short and straightforward or long and detailed, as long as it includes all the necessary information. To help you better understand what a buyer persona looks like, here’s a fictional example:

Michael Schrute – Potential Project Management Software (CRM) Buyer

Background: Michael is a well-put executive who likes to keep everything organized, documented, and transparent. He always finds ways to refine processes to make it easier for the company and employees to perform their work. Michael’s the type of person who’s always in-the-know about the latest gadgets and tech news.

Title: CTO

Decision-maker: Yes

Industry: Digital Marketing

Age: 30-45

Salary: $70,000/year

Education: B.S. in Information Systems

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Goals:

● To grow a productive, strong, and collaborative company

● To keep track of everyone’s work performance, tasks, and time logs

● To boost efficiency and streamline the process

Challenges:

● Needs to improve project management tracking process

● Current software often crashes or goes down

Aligning Your SEO Strategy to the Buyer’s Journey

While the fundamentals are the same, the approach has evolved. To tap your ideal clients and win in this ever-evolving time, you need to keep your SEO and content marketing tactics in harmony with the purchasing behavior of consumers.

1. Awareness

Scenario: Michael realizes that the company’s current project management system brings more inconvenience than usability. He goes on the internet for how-to articles and initiates a general inquiry on how to improve their system.

Objective: Build brand awareness for your product or service and educate the buyer

At the first stage of the buyer’s journey, the goal is to build awareness about your brand. Bear in mind that at this phase, Michael isn’t looking to purchase anything just yet, he doesn’t have anything specific in mind. So, he’s unaware of your business and his particular needs.

As a marketer, it’s your job to create awareness for your company, products, and services, so potential buyers can understand what you do, what you offer, and in what ways you can help him. But, your content materials should focus more on your prospect’s pain points rather than your brand.

This is the part where Michael’s research about the problem begins. The keywords are likely general search terms that are question-based since he’s still investigating the issue and exploring options.

Search terms for this stage are:

“How to improve task creation”

“How to streamline task template [current project management system brand]”

“What causes [current project management system brand] to freeze”

SEO Strategies to Consider:

How-to content – This could be in the form of a blog post or video. How-to content can walk prospects through their conundrum and open their eyes to your product/service as a consideration. Make sure to link your target keyword to relevant pages in your consideration stage materials.

Videos – Promotional videos found on your website or page content can spark audience interest around your product or service.

Pillar page – This covers all topics related to the product, service, or keyword, which the buyer is looking into in more detail.

Whitepapers and eBooks – These materials can provide more in-depth information, which can come with relevant statistics or reports to help the prospects better understand the problem.

Quick tip: Ensure that these resources are readily available on your website so buyers like Michael can access it when doing research. You can use a marketing automation tool to help you keep track of content downloads and gather prospect information. The data can give you more insights about interested prospects and help you refine your buyer persona’s preferences.

2. Consideration

Scenario: After acknowledging that his current project management system has incompetent features, he thinks that replacing it altogether is the best course of action. So, he starts asking recommendations from friends, read reviews, and research more about what’s available out there.

Objective: Nurture and build trust through your content

In this stage, Michael has discerned that he needs more automation and handy features in his project management tool. Since he’s already well-informed about his problem, he starts to seek content that can help him compare features, evaluate his options, and review the different tools and vendors available.

This is also the stage where Michael will start to reach out to the vendors, whether through a sales rep or general email. The move indicates that they’re on a deep dive in narrowing and comparing their options, so they start inquiring to examine the features that matter most for his company.

Simply put, this is the stage where Michael determines whether or not your brand and product are good enough for him. As he moves past the awareness stage, his search keywords change from “how to’s” to “best/top” queries.

Search terms for this stage are:

“Top project management system”

“Company A/Company A product review”

“Company A and Company B comparison”

SEO Strategies to Consider:

Video tutorials – Video tutorials on how to use your CRM tool can help prospects like Michael take a good look at your service for consideration.

Landing pages – Landing pages direct customers to a specific product or service, which can influence them to take action. This is also useful for collecting lead data, like names and email addresses for sending email newsletters/offers.

Blog posts – Blog posts are generally helpful for growing search engine traffic as they target keywords from each stage of the journey, for each buyer persona.

FAQ page – This helps answer the prospect’s burning questions about your offering. It can help in their comparison of products/services and vendors.

Pillar page – Since this discusses topics in depth, prospects can find everything they need to learn about your product or service through this content.

Link building – Acquiring external links from authority websites boosts your site’s domain authority and search rankings, which can help grow your visibility when prospects start searching. Not just for the awareness stage, but for all stages of the funnel.

Quick tip: You can use Google Analytics’ Site Search Reporting to view a myriad of keywords you can use to customize your campaigns for each buyer persona.

3. Decision

Scenario: Now that Michael has narrowed down his search for solutions and vendors, he’s finally ready to make a purchase.

Objective: To close the sale

As a marketer, this is your chance to brag about your product or service. You can create content, like blog posts or product pages, that provides in-depth information about the product and its features. This is how you can address Michael’s doubts, and finally convince him to purchase.

When you’ve successfully implemented the right strategies, and tailored content for both the awareness and consideration stage, prospects like Michael become paying customers.

Buyers have likely done enough research prior to reaching this stage, so chances are they won’t go to Google or other search engines for help. After all, they already have their options. Instead, you can focus on injecting branded keywords in your content to drive buyers like Michael to the right pages (i.e., live demo, free trial page, product/service page)

Search terms for this stage are:

“Company A CRM pricing”

“Company A CRM tutorial”

SEO Strategies to Consider:

Free trials and live demo pages- Pages, email newsletters, and ad copy that informs buyers of a free trial drive warm, qualified leads like Michael to test it out and eventually, commit to purchasing the product or service.

Success stories and reviews – Produce case studies and customer testimonials prove to prospects what past and current clients have achieved by working with you.

Quick tip: When crafting content and copy for your decision stage materials, remember to speak the language of your target audience. In this case, Michael is a top executive. You might want to drop phrases like “creative new approach” and “increase revenue” to attract these leaders.

Important note: keywords are highly crucial in your SEO tactic and most especially, in each stage of the journey. Make sure to perform keyword research for all three stages. That’s how your prospects find your brand, after all.

Make sure to naturally insert your target keywords in your on-page SEO elements for optimization (i.e., H1 tag, page title, image alt text, meta description).

SEO Strategies Must Be Aligned with the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is a vital part of inbound marketing and successful SEO campaigns. Because of the internet and powerful search engine algorithms, marketing has dramatically changed. From intrusive strategies, marketers now move towards laying out value-based and customer-centric marketing delivered at every stage of the customer’s journey.

Your website is your brand’s best sales representative, and with that, you need to develop tactics and content that cater to the purchasing behavior of your target persona(s).

If you’re interested in implementing SEO strategies mapped out according to your buyer’s journey and buyer personas, SEO Company is just the partner to assist you. Inquire now for a consultation!

Mar 30 2020

A Simple Guide to Effective Outreach for SEO

It’s been mentioned before, and it’s worth mentioning again: link building is critical for SEO. As you probably know in your heart and soul by now, it’s one of the building blocks for achieving higher domain authority and ultimately boosting your ranking on search engines.

One of the most frequently used tactics to perform this is through SEO outreach, which starts with sending a message to admins of relevant third-party websites. However, it doesn’t just involve that email—there’s so much more to it than that.

Through the process of building links, you learn that not all of them are deemed “good”. Some may break, fall into the hands of low DA websites, or worse. This is why an effective SEO outreach strategy is necessary. The top three choices for link building are blogger contacts, guest posting, and adding a link to an existing article—and all of these begin with a compelling outreach for SEO that convinces your prospects to agree with your request.

Reel Them in The Right Way

Before you start your outreach for SEO, you must first make sure you have a proper process in place. This not only lessens errors and heightens professionalism but is also necessary for uniformity and tracking of your prospects. Here’s why nailing your SEO outreach strategy is essential:

Broaden your network – Reaching out to different sources will make you discover other helpful brands that you can strike partnerships with someday or even those whose content you can value.

Build an ongoing relationship – Regardless of whether a contact accepts your link or not, it’s great to stay on their radar to build a business relationship and have your brand be associated with professionalism.

Get multiple links – If you’ve been successful in having them add your link to their posts before, chances are, they will accept links from you in the future, too.

Increase brand awareness – In a way, outreach is also similar to promotion. You will have a chance to let other brands, sites, companies, and personalities know about your brand and what it’s about.

Boost traffic and conversions – More people learning about your website through different outlets and content means more publicity and website visits.

Improve domain rating – The more active your strategy is, the higher your chances of increasing your domain rating. This will help you rank higher in search engines.

Preparing Your SEO Outreach Strategy

Here are the crucial steps in creating an SEO outreach strategy that works.

1. Understand your business

Get to the backbone of what your business represents, whether it’s your own, a company you work for, or a client of yours. Here are some questions to consider when thinking about this:

What is your unique selling point? What can you provide to other businesses to gain an edge over others?

What is your brand’s voice/style/tone? Are you conversational and friendly or professional and traditional?

Who are you reaching out to? What kind of audience do you want to read your content?

This will prevent your efforts from being just run-of-the-mill outreach emails and differentiate you from other companies who are potentially doing their outreach as well.

2. Define your goals

While getting more links is a great goal to have, you shouldn’t lose sight of why you’re asking a particular website to link back to your site. Are you trying to promote a product or educate an audience on a specific topic? Which buyer persona are you creating this content for? How will this help your company reach its SEO goals? Putting importance into this step will add integrity to your intentions for SEO outreach.

3. Identify your keywords

If you’re creating a guest post, it’s imperative to have keywords ready for you to incorporate in your article. This will help your brand be associated with those phrases, even if they’re found on a different website. Use hyperlinks so you’ll be sure that viewers can easily click through to your site. Pull the best keywords from your previously conducted keyword research for your blog.

4. Find your prospects

Be thorough with link prospecting. To make things organized, you can open an Excel sheet and first start listing out relevant websites, target influencers, and more to your initial outreach list. You can add a different column for identifying the DA and target audience of each so you can narrow down to high-quality prospects. Once, you’re feeling confident with the list you have; it’s time to start researching more about these websites.

5. Familiarize yourself with people and algorithms

Engage in an intelligent conversation with your prospects and let them feel that you’ve done your research about their industry as well. It pays to be attentive to the people you’re talking to, so you don’t come off as templated, inauthentic, or messaging with an agenda. Explain how your content can add value to their business and how it would be beneficial for both sides to have the partnership. One of the most important messages to get across is “What’s in it for me?”

6. Have a tracker in place

To avoid the rookie mistake of sending an email to the same contact person twice or having two different people reach out to the same website, it’s vital to have a tracker in place. In this tracker, make sure to note the status of the message, such as if it’s drafting, received, waiting for a reply, etc.

Make sure also to label those prospects that you’ve had a fruitful conversation with versus those you haven’t, so you know which pool of people to approach for future links and those you can devise a new strategy for in the future. Keep this file private yet accessible to team members who need to see the status of the tracker at all times.

Crafting an Email for Effective SEO Outreach

How exactly do you proceed with your outreach emails? Read on the following tips below.

1. Use a compelling subject line

Your subject is the first thing your recipient will read. If it’s generic like “Outreach Email” or “Request for Outreach,” chances are, they won’t pay much attention to it. However, if you ask a relevant question or present an exciting offer, it will be more compelling for them to click on your email. It’s a good idea to keep email subject lines short, so they can grasp the full content of the email no matter which device they’re viewing it on.

You can already personalize your email content from the email subject alone. For instance, if they have light material, you can start with a light joke poking fun at content that was previously written, but of course, don’t be offensive. You could also ask a question about a post that they’ve already published, which suggests that you’ve been reading their website and aren’t just after a backlink. Last but not least, if it’s relevant, you can mention that you’ve featured their posts in one of your previous content as well.

There are a lot of ways to get creative on the subject line—don’t lose the opportunity to show your prospects your value at this point since this will be their first impression of your company as well. If you don’t get them to click, the contents of your email won’t get to see the light of day.

2. Write a short and direct message

As mentioned previously, the prospects you’re contacting are also running a business. They may not have the time always to check their emails and reply right away to the people who send them messages. This is why it’s vital to K.I.S.S.—keep it short and simple.

Trust us, the recipient of your email will appreciate how you got to the point much quicker rather than having them read large blocks of text that may be irrelevant for them (if you didn’t correctly customize your email). You can still build up to your request, but don’t take too long to get there.

Always include your call to action in the body of your email. This will remind your prospect about the action they have to do, which is either to accept a guest post, add a link of your website in theirs, and more. CTAs are powerful persuaders, and if it ties in nicely with the body of your email, they’ll respond positively to it.

3. Sign off with your name and credentials

This is basic email etiquette, but one that’s worth highlighting. In the heat of the moment, it’s quite easy to forget signing off with your credentials, or not even being able to put your name at all. This is important for your recipient to consider so they know who they’re addressing at the other end of the thread. There’s also a much bigger authority that comes with signing off with your title rather than just introducing that you’re a part of a particular organization.

Your name and credentials will add recall about you. Should deals be made in the future, they would know who to look for at which department in your company.

4. Follow up

Following up is not a crime. By this point, you are highly aware that your prospects have a lot on their plate. They could’ve read your message, liked it, yet somehow it could’ve slipped their minds to reply since they were called to do something else. It happens.

If you follow up, they’ll likely be more inclined to set aside some time to draft a proper reply since they acknowledge that they missed your first email.

However, be careful with the frequency of your follow-ups. It’s ideal for sending a message at least three to five days after your first email. But if you still don’t hear from them after the second one, it may be wise to cut your losses and try a different approach at a later time. Don’t immediately cross them out from your list—go for a different angle and save their details for next time.

Should You Use an Email Template?

To template or not template? That is the question.

There are pros and cons to templates. Personalizing every message for each of your prospects can be time-consuming, but if you send out a templated email blast to them, you may also be hurting your reputation.

It’s much better to send a well-thought-out and customized email when you outreach, to not sound robotic. Your recipient can tell if it’s templated since it will seem unnatural. Instead of using templates that go word for word, you can create outlines or formats depending on the type of prospect you come across. So, instead of a traditional model that looks like this:

Hi, I am reaching out because I love your content and I think I can bring something to the table for your readers. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

You might want to go for something that looks like this:

Hi [Name],

[Give a brief introduction of yourself and your company.] [Provide a reason why you are reaching out.] [State your goal for the partnership.] [Give them contact details.]

[Sign off with name and credentials]

You can also include previews, offers, and interesting tidbits that can entice them to do business with you. It’s essential to be creative at this stage since they likely receive tons of emails every day, so you must give them a reason why they would want to provide you with their time of day.

Templates are useful because they can automate some parts of the outreach process and save you time from thinking of what to type each time you have to outreach. That said, always remember the importance of added context and personalization.

Build a Smart SEO Outreach Strategy

Creating an SEO outreach process must be strategic, but it also doesn’t have to be overly complicated. The main thing to remember is to personalize your emails. Avoid giving excessive praise as this can make you look like you’re brown-nosing the prospect. Just be persuasive and direct—they’ll appreciate the simplicity of your email!

Finally, don’t forget to include a call to action. A CTA will remind them of the desired action and tie in with the purpose of your email.

By following the steps above, you’ll be able to craft an effective outreach strategy that can target your prospects and spark a good working relationship with them.

Mar 29 2020

How to Hire the Perfect SEO Agency (A Complete Guide)

Every day, Google receives and processes a staggering number of searches—roughly 5.6 billion in total. That essentially means you have the same exact number of opportunities to bring your products or services in front of web users through search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, reports say that companies’ SEO spending may reach $80 billion in 2020. This only underscores how important it is for companies to get their hands on the best tools, strategies, or ideas for SEO.

The challenge lies in overcoming the competition from the billions of websites who are also trying to position themselves in search. Granting that not every website is targeting to rank for your niche, your SEO strategy needs to be on point with the latest changes in search algorithms to give your website a good fighting chance.

Hiring an outsourcing firm who knows the ins and outs of SEO may ease the burden for you, provided you choose the right SEO agency. However, it can be difficult to weigh the options since SEO companies bring with them different sets of pros and cons. The key is in identifying that one agency who meets all your SEO requirements in particular, including budget, range of services, industry know-how, and business fit, to mention a few.

Fortunately, you can get around the challenges of selecting a good SEO company with this comprehensive guide. We’ll give you a collection of tips and data about SEO outsourcing.

What to Expect from Your Outsourced SEO Provider

Your company can make the following gains through SEO outsourcing:

Less capital costs. Contrary to misconceptions about the high costs involved in SEO outsourcing, your company can have more financial stability when you hire a third-party SEO provider. You won’t have as many costs associated with overhead expenses in hiring, training, and paying the salary/benefits as you would if you were to build an in-house SEO team.

According to Forbes, in the United States, the most experienced SEO professionals are paid as much as $150,000 per year. Compared with outsourcing, where the most that companies charge for monthly retainers is $10,000 per month, it’s quite clear which option can provide significant cost savings. That’s not even mentioning the cost of purchasing specialized tools and equipment if you were to choose doing your SEO in-house.

More expertise. Google’s search algorithms are constantly changing, which might make it hard for your SEO employees—what with many other things on their plate—to keep up. By contrast, an outsourced SEO provider will have a research & development process to track such updates, so your company can stay on top of current trends and apply the best practices in SEO.

Less training. Someone training for SEO has to go through a steep learning curve, but new employees might not be always prepared for this kind of onboarding. A mismatch between your new hires’ ability to learn fast and the many demands involved in SEO work might cost your company more resources than what’s necessary. With SEO outsourcing, there’s no need to worry about your projects taking a backseat as there will be SEO pros who can get to work as soon as they have the green light.

Balanced perspective. It’s true that no one knows and understands your business better than you, but this shouldn’t prevent you from considering a partnership with an external SEO firm. Outsourced SEO providers have years of experience working across a wide range of industries, which can be a great way to implement checks and balances in your company. Ultimately, this can help you come up with fresh ideas for your business as well as discover new opportunities in your niche.

Increased scalability. SEO isn’t a one-time initiative, but rather, it requires a consistent effort before you get the results you’re hoping for. By its very nature, outsourcing SEO is the more logical choice over building a team in-house when it comes to scalability. With the latter, you’ll have to consistently pay a fixed salary to your employees whether your SEO needs are big or small.

On the other hand, SEO companies offer services that scale to your needs. If you need to ramp up your SEO, they have an entire team ready to work on your requirements. Then, should your priorities change such that you need to scale down, you can choose how you want them to handle your SEO needs—whether it’s on a per-project basis, hourly package, or retainer model.

Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Agency

Here are some guide questions to ask during a potential SEO partner’s pitch:

1. What types of SEO work will you do?

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline that involves technical aspects (crawling and indexing) as well as on-page and off-page optimization. A basic service contract should at least include a technical SEO audit, where the SEO company evaluates different factors on your site and detects and resolves redirect problems and other errors.

Check with the company what specific services your package or contract will cover, including the amount of deliverables they’ll turn out per month and the number of hours it will take to do it. You’ll want an agency that’s completely transparent with these things.

2. How will you improve our search rankings?

Needless to mention, the end goal of SEO is to get your company to rank—the higher, the better—on search. By hiring an SEO agency, you’ll have experts working on your keyword research, building links, and so on, to help you reach your goals. Yet, even with your SEO partner at the helm, there’s a need for you to understand how their process works.

This should keep you feeling reassured that the work they’re doing for you is guided by best practices in the industry instead of a potentially harmful, which isn’t likely to give you the site traffic you’re aiming for.

3. What kind of ranking increases can we expect?

Speaking of ranking goals, your next question might be something more specific—that is, what will your website’s ranking potentially be after launch or months into the campaign? Although there’s no way your SEO agency will be able to give a definitive answer, much less guarantee that you’ll be ranking no. 1 or zero on search engine results pages (SERPs), they should be able to set some expectations for you.

Specifically, they should be able to explain the different factors that might affect your brand’s organic search position, ranging from something external, such as potential competition, to something technical, such as Google algorithms and updates.

4. What’s your link building strategy?

Since link building is a key component of SEO, you need to address with your SEO agency how they intend to approach it. They might start the ball rolling by telling you how backlinking works, what kind of links your company should invest in, and how they’ll be getting sites to link to you, among many others.

Generally speaking, SEO companies won’t be able to tell exactly how many new links you’ll be getting per month, so consider it a red flag when someone promises to give you a large number of links.

5. How will you inform my company about the changes you make to our website?

You’ll need to give your SEO company access to your website, which means they’ll be able to make changes to it as they go. Be sure you know what changes are being made to your website over time as this will help your web dev track any issues that might arise afterwards.

You can ask your SEO agency to send you reports regularly, so you’re updated on movements in key metrics like traffic source, conversion rate, page speed, bounce rate, and the like.

6. Why should we hire you and not other agencies?

If you’re still undecided whether a particular SEO company is a good fit for your business, this is the ultimate question to ask. By posing this question, you’re giving your target company an extra opportunity to showcase their edge over their counterparts, although you should be discerning when they start making unreasonable promises like guaranteed rankings and immediate results.

Instead, a good SEO company will focus the discussion on what they know about your industry, how they envision the potential partnership between the two of you, and how they have steered happy and loyal clients to success.

5 Steps to Find the Perfect SEO Partner

Here are the steps you need to cover, starting with the research process, onward to the sales pitch, and all the way to the actual selection of your SEO agency.

1. Audit their digital footprint.

Obviously, you shouldn’t get an anonymous entity to be your SEO partner with no signs of digital activity because after all, you’re after a company that does digital services day in and day out. Nor should you make a hasty decision based on search results for the “best SEO agencies” since your research at this point still has a long way to go.

If you want more conclusive results in your hunt for the best SEO outsourcing firms, start with their website. It can tell you a lot of things about their services and expertise, especially if the website is regularly updated with relevant blog posts as this means they’re making an effort to be industry authorities.

2. Set measurable, realistic targets.

It’s important that you don’t get too carried away once you think you’ve found your dream SEO agency. Instead, you need to take time going over your targets with your partner company before signing any contract.

When setting goals, make sure they’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (SMART). Take note of the difference between a SMART goal and one that isn’t in this example:

Non-Smart Goal: Get more business through link building.

SMART Goal: Build approximately 10 links per month to the company website over the course of the next quarter through an outreach strategy with reputable industry authorities.

3. Agree on an action plan.

From the get-go, you need to be aware of your SEO partner’s game plan for your campaigns. A good action plan will detail everything you need to know about a project, including the timeline, type and amount of deliverables, required resources, proposed strategies, and the like. If there’s anything unclear about the details, you shouldn’t hesitate to ask for clarifications and more specific information. Don’t leave any gray areas unsettled.

4. Determine your budget.

In the beginning, you may want to set a low monthly budget and spread it across a reasonable amount of time. This kind of approach is ideal if a large part of your business depends on SEO, but getting the results you want may take a number of months. By starting low with your budget, you’ll have more flexibility later on if you need to expand it based on the return on investment (ROI) you’re getting.

What’s good about SEO outsourcing is that you get to choose which areas you want to outsource for SEO experts to handle. Meanwhile, if you have an internal team of people who do not have advanced skills in SEO but who may be able to thrive with basic training and hands-on learning, you can also use learnings from your partnership to train your in-house unit.

5. Make sure it’s a good fit.

You’ll be working closely with your SEO agency for a good amount of time, which is why you need an agency that has a similar value system or work culture with your own company. If you and your SEO partner don’t meet eye to eye, you can’t expect to have a healthy and fruitful relationship down the line.

Furthermore, an ideal agency is one who’s familiar with your brand as well as your business vertical, so there can be a proper alignment of goals and techniques across the board.

Which SEO Company Is Right for You?

In this highly connected world, SEO may be the best way to reach your target audience. You need to take advantage of every search on Google and other search engines as an opportunity to let people know about your business. If you can get this right, you’ll be able to strengthen your online visibility and make your brand top-of-mind among consumers.

On the other hand, if you’re not quite sure how SEO works or which SEO practices can bring the best results, you should probably leave your most pressing SEO work to experts.

Use the guidelines we’ve laid out for you here to help you identify your dream SEO agency. We at SEO Company will be more than happy to help find a great SEO partner for your business. Our vast network of reputable partner agencies will make sure that your website performs well based on Google’s standards and your own business goals.