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Most Important Things You Need to Check Before Hiring an SEO Company

As a member of the 21st century, you know that search engine optimization is crucial for the success of your business. You need to draw in those clicks and page visits to stand a chance in a world dominated by huge corporations like Amazon. Hiring an SEO company to boost your numbers and ensure that your website catches the eye of search engine algorithms is often the best choice, but you want to make sure you vet your potential SEO company properly. Here are a few things you should check before deciding on the right SEO company for your website.

Knowledge of Search Engine Updates

In the past, SEO companies could “get away” with shoddy work. Fortunately, search engines have developed beyond their past versions, weeding out poorly optimized webpages through updates to their algorithms. Google, for example, has improved its search engine via its Penguin, Panda, and BERT updates. These improvements help the search engine to sift through the billions of webpages with so-called clickbait and deliver the user pages that best answer the user’s query.

With advances like BERT, which uses deep-learning AI techniques to understand the context inherent in human language, search engines are becoming much better at looking for quality webpages. You want to make sure the SEO company you hire understands how these updates operate, how they change the SEO game, and how to optimize your website to make use of these algorithms.

Red-Flag Promises

Another issue you want to check when assessing a potential SEO company is the way they talk about their services. Avoid companies that make outrageous promises, such as saying that your website will be ranked #1 on Google. There are no guarantees in the SEO business, and an upstanding, professional SEO company will acknowledge that. In fact, ranking on the first page of Google often takes several months of work and is not a quick-fix kind of service. Gravitate toward SEO companies that show you the work they will do to boost your site’s engagement rates rather than those that make empty promises or set unrealistic goals.

Ability to Make On-Site Changes

Having quality SEO content is only one step toward optimizing your website for search engines. In many cases, it is also necessary to make adjustments to your website’s layout and structure. The user experience is crucial to retaining visitors to your website. You don’t want to boost your search engine rankings only to have people click on your website and immediately click away due to a poor user interface. Ask the SEO company you are considering hiring about their staff and their ability to make on-site changes. A good SEO company will be able to tell you a specific plan for how to upgrade your site and will have people on staff with the credentials to do so.

A Purposeful Strategy

Whether an SEO company plans to do keyword research, revamping of your title tags, a certain number of blog posts per week, or other strategies to boost your search engine rankings, you need to make sure there is a method to the madness. Writing blog posts just to fill a quota does not make a successful strategy. Instead, the content created by the SEO company should be geared toward specific goals, such as using popular topics and keywords in your local area. Talk to a potential SEO company about the reasons behind their services and how the actions they take on your behalf will create better engagement for you. The best SEO companies will craft a plan unique to your website and its one-of-a-kind needs.

Use these four tips to guide your decision regarding which SEO company to hire for your website. Keep an eye out for companies with a solid track record of honesty, quality, and consistency.