Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the key to any digital marketing effort you make. But when you approach an SEO company, they try to wrap you up with the jargon only they can understand. They talk about page rankings, link building, and meta-descriptions. As a business or an individual trying to build a brand online, what should matter most to you is how SEO helps you achieve your goals.

This is where a good SEO company differs from thousands of others blinking in the virtual space. A great SEO firm knows that clients need results. Its experts will sit with you to decide the metrics you would use to measure its performance, send you reports regularly, and help you track the improvement in pre-decided metrics, determine the conversions from the SEO project, and calculate Return on Investment (ROI) on SEO.

When you choose an SEO firm, here are a few things that you should keep in mind:

SEO firms should understand the business aspect of the work.

Many search engine optimization experts get excited about Google rankings. And rightly so! When you are at the top of organic search results, you draw a lot of free traffic. It takes humongous efforts to achieve that position. You need to establish authority, trustworthiness, and expertise of the site to get more search engine visibility and more customers.

But good SEO companies understand that clients who hire them want to know what they are getting in return for what they are investing in. The SEO reports they share with the client include metrics that serve the business purpose for the clients and show them the value for money. The report may include:

• New users visiting the site organically (showing more people are aware of their brand),
• New email newsletter subscribers (showing that people are more interested in what the company is offering),
• No. of users clicking on the email ID or phone number of the company (showing their intention to contact the company),
• No. of pages a user visits and the amount of time he or she spends on your site (showing what a person is researching and his or her interest in what one finds on the page),
• No. of users filling up the contact form or downloading brochures, whitepapers, ebooks, etc. from the site (showing that people are interested in products and services of the company and may want to be contacted), and
• online conversions (people who purchase a product or service of the company or perform actions expected from them).

The best SEO company is the one that takes time to understand what you are trying to achieve through SEO and works to make that possible for you.

You have a dedicated SEO expert as your relationship manager.

Search engine optimization includes a lot of work, such as:

• creating fresh content,
• fixing broken links,
• improving page speed, etc.

Hence, constant communication with the SEO company is essential for your business. You need to work with a company that is responsive and provides you with excellent customer support. One indicator of this is that they respond to your calls, emails, and queries quickly and accurately.

A good SEO company will provide you with a dedicated relationship manager or account manager who can act as the go-to person for you for all your queries and doubts. The SEO experts working on your account should be accessible to you. You should be able to talk to them and understand what strategies they are using to support your goals. You should be able to discuss the SEO report they share with you and track how well their customized strategies are working for you.

Client retention rate by a company and the clients acquired by the company through recommendations (also referred to as Net Promoter Score) are other statistics that may give you an idea about how client-friendly an SEO agency is. Other factors that can provide you with insight into the customer service of a company are:

• rankings and ratings by customers, 
• customer satisfaction surveys, 
• conversion rate the company has achieved in other projects related to your industry, and 
• how the SEO company’s performance stacks up against its competitors.

Ask the company for documents that showcase these statistics. If they shy away from sharing the documents with you, you can cross them off as ‘unprofessional’. If an SEO company is not organized in its daily operations, you cannot expect it to professional enough in the way it manages your project.

The company can deliver what it promises.

We often see that at the time of sending proposals, SEO outsourcing firms promise the moon and stars. Then, they fail to achieve the extremely high targets they promised and look for excuses. As a business, you cannot get swayed by false claims. You have to be diligent and conscientious in choosing a team that can understand your expectations, negotiate realistic goals, and achieves the metrics it projected.

The SEO experts who work with you need to be organized and communicative. They should discuss what you want, assess your website from the technical perspective, and be able to present a plan to achieve your goals. This may require studying:

• factors that affect your mobile and PC traffic, 
• what your competitors are doing,
• best keywords to target,
• the right kind of content you need,
• link building strategies, and
• other online and off-line optimization activities you need to do.

To assess whether the SEO company will be able to deliver or not, check:

• the qualification and experience of the team that will work for you,
• read the reviews and testimonials of clients and doing market research of the company’s past track record, and
• review your RoI and other performance indicators regularly (preferably every week).

We recommend that working in collaboration with the SEO company you hire is a better strategy than completely outsourcing the work as it allows you to keep a track of what it is doing and keep an eye on the progress you are making.

Author’s Bio – Jessica Jones is an academic writer at GoDissertationHelp, a company based in the UK which provides all kind of academic help to the students. She loves to write about technology, education, marketing, digital marketing, Life, etc. She is working in GoDissertationHelp, an academic writing service which provides the best dissertation editing services in the UK.