Made in the USA: Classic Marketing Meets SEO
So, you’ve read several recent statistics that say “there is little to no benefit for the business, no matter how much you spend on an SEO strategy, if it’s old and outdated.”, and you probably read a few of our blog posts about SEO (if you haven’t, we highly recommend it).
And you also know that no matter the company size, in today’s digitalized world, profits and conversions for the most part depend on marketing and promotion (both online and offline). It’s important to grow your brand and attract customers to your website or your physical store.
Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve last spent on SEO or maybe you’ve just built a new website. In both cases, the SEO strategy must be updated to ensure maximum effectiveness.
That gets you thinking.
If you are not familiar with SEO and how it works (or how to implement it effectively), then that would mean putting your trust in the SEO specialist/company that you hire.
The most important thing when choosing an SEO specialist or company for your business is to keep quality and strategy over quantity as a rule, not an exception.
Because you understand that SEO is the key to profits and scaling your business, before making a purchase, people use Google and other search engines to find products and services from domestic and international companies.
Your positioning is important with search engines because if you’re not ranked high, customers might not know you even exist. Investing in SEO is essential for your company, lead generation, and brand awareness.
Using SEO correctly will help you improve organic website visitors, and revenue and help you grow your business forward.
However, it’s pretty difficult to find a good SEO specialist, because of a few reasons.
That is why in this blog post we’ll deep dive into those reasons as well as provide alternatives to how you can achieve your business goals of building an online presence.
Before we get into the reasons why good SEO specialists are good to find, let’s deconstruct that job title/meaning. What does SEO specialist even mean? Simply put, it’s nonsense!
The job titles “specialists”, and “managers”, all these recently-created bubble tech terms are a waste of time and money by mismanagement of companies just like Twitter, who have recently been laying off 3700 employees, and Facebook (Oh Metaverse!) laying off 11,000 employees and many others follow. We’ve also dedicated an entire blog post to “Why an in-house SEO Expert is a Hoax (in most cases)”.
In any case, regardless of what we call it, we need someone that can help us take our SEO game to the next level. A jack of all trades, that also knows web development, writing, reading, designing, etc.
While it’s important to find the best person or company to help you with your SEO quest, the simple reality is that it’s very difficult to hire a good SEO specialist. All of these we’ve listed above:
Another reason would be is most good SEO specialists feel as though they can work better and more efficiently alone. It does sound counterproductive as more things can be accomplished within a team, but when you reach a certain stage of SEO mastery, you feel as though nobody would be able to do a better job than you.
As we mentioned in our blog post, probably the main reason is that SEO specialists avoid working and will never work in-office because they don’t need to. It might sound strange but if they can make a lot of money (and if they are good at SEO they should) from anywhere in the world, they don’t usually take in-house offers from companies.
However, there have been rare cases where SEO specialists would take up an in-house job offer, but only if the company offers the perfect conditions, extremely well pay, is not far from the office, freedom to work, etc. Additionally to that, a good SEO specialist makes around 200k, by US standards after taxes, so it would make more sense for them to be self-employed as they would make significantly more due to deductibles.
One overlooked aspect when hiring an SEO specialist is that once you hire them, you’re pretty much stuck with whatever you got. You won’t be able to request another account manager because the SEO specialist is the only one on your roster.
Sure, if you don’t like them or they aren’t performing well, you can fire them and hire someone else, but think of the manpower, money, energy, and most importantly time you just wanted thinking this person was the one.
On top of that, they may not fully understand or factor in all aspects of your business, if they are working alone.
It’s one of the most important reasons not to go with an SEO specialist: Limited time and availability. If your business needs more manpower or more help, you only have the SEO specialist to lean on, which might be a thin branch.
If you have an enormous task for them, it probably will take a while to be completed, no matter how hard they work. 8 hours are 8 hours, you can’t multiply them if you are 1 person.
As a third-party provider, when performing the tasks, they rarely take full ownership of the work, which effectively means that they are not fully completed, which compromises the result. And, on top of that, your business has to do the actual SEO work.
They rarely perform the necessary tasks to implement the strategy. Since they don’t do the actual SEO work, your company will have to take care of it on its own.
These are just a few of the reasons why you can’t find a good SEO specialist and what happens when you hire one.
Although in our opinion hiring a good SEO specialist is both hard (as it’s difficult to find any good ones) and comes with a lot of side effects.
So, what’s the alternative?
Given the limited amount of choices and the niche industry/profession, the best 2 ways to go from here are:
Full disclosure, this option requires you to spend probably your most important resource, time. To become an SEO specialist, you have to invest time into learning the craft, working freelance, or for some other company until you reach a certain level.
You can even start by learning by doing for your business, but like most skills, this craft is best and most effectively learned and implemented if you have someone to learn from, a mentor. And if you’re working on your business solely by yourself, that mentorship aspect will be swapped with a lot of trial and error.
Instead of investing time in yourself to become an SEO specialist, you can invest money into a quality SEO agency that provides all of the services that you need to get started and scale up.
We’ll list out all of the most important benefits of going with an SEO agency, but probably the 2 most important ones are availability and results-driven.
Perhaps a better question would be “What are the benefits of working with a good SEO agency?”. That’s a good question, as not all SEO agencies are created equal.
And it’s important to find the best one as SEO is crucial for the business and when done well, you can constantly reap the benefits of SEO without much maintenance. There are a few benefits to going with an SEO agency, some of them aren’t like improved rankings, increased revenue from online channels, and more brand visibility for the business, just for starters.
In general, SEO offers a lot of benefits and the best SEO agencies are in the best positions to provide them.
When thinking of SEO, most people who are familiar with the term, think of increasing rankings as its ultimate objective, which is somewhat of a misconception. While it is one of the purposes, increasing the website ranking is a broad term in itself.
SEO companies know, the power of reporting and tracking data, so that’s why they track a variety of metrics to evidence the value of their services over time, as well as provide statistics to the company.
One key benefit to working with an SEO company over an SEO specialist is the speed and effectiveness of the work that’s been executed. SEO companies are well-oiled machines with multiple specialists in different areas of SEO, and they are working together to provide the fastest and most effective results possible.
On the other hand, giving the gigantic task of building and executing an SEO strategy for your company to one SEO specialist, would cause delays in the implementation of a project.
Multiple people working on a project can deliver the best and faster results than one person. Working with an SEO company promotes maximum efficiency.
The most common fear that business owners have about SEO is if they pour a lot of money into it, how will they know if it works? That is why one of the strong suits of SEO companies is the case studies that they have and the results to show for their work, which should be continuous.
While inexperienced SEO specialists might provide ideas that are a guessing game, working on processes, methodologies, and strategies that work and are effective is how SEO companies win.
Although there are proven strategies that work, just like any other digital industry, SEO continuously evolves and so the SEO companies evolve with it. An example of this is when in 2020 Google made over 4,500 updates to their algorithm, to which everyone that works with SEO had to adapt to.
On top of that, to also overpass their competition and keep up-to-date with search engines, SEO companies have to provide top-class expertise, and innovative methodologies to get the most results. That level of collaboration, invasion, and expertise is something that not even the best SEO specialist can provide.
No matter how beautiful your website is, if it’s not set up to be effective, it won’t perform to the best of its ability. It also comes with a hefty price tag. If you’ve invested in building such a website but you don’t see any or little organic traffic, your money has more or less been wasted.
SEO delivers an ROI (return on investment) of more than 12 times that of marketing spend by making your website profitable. And by investing in SEO and an SEO company, you achieve both at the same time.
Now, it’s time to dissect how to find the SEO company that would best suit your business needs. Just like picking the right perfume, it takes time, patience, testing, and ultimately a final decision. Here’s a blueprint on how to find the right one for you:
While it might seem the easiest to go with whatever you see first on Google, it’s better to take the time and learn more about the SEO company, its dedication, level of support, etc. You can find a list on Google by literally searching for “SEO company near me” and it’s going to pull up a list of companies that specialized in this field.
Although, in our professional opinion, it’s better to search globally as you would be able to find more companies that work for you. Then, you can see a list of them, sorting them however will make it easier for you.
If you have a business partner and want to present it to him, it’s best to include information in a sheet, such as a brief overview, total current clients, total staff employed, big clients, date of SEO company creation, etc.
Online reviews often tell you the big picture of the SEO company you’re looking at. Also, most customer reviews are often left on Google so it’s best to start from there. In the list of reviews, it would be practical to look at several different aspects such as:
The last one is particularly interesting as it will show you the company at its best and worst. In the reviews, you would be able to see customer-oriented service, dedication, professionalism, etc.
It might come as a surprise, but sometimes SEO companies, for whatever reason, aren’t able to handle your project. Whether that’s a staff shortage, consumed by other projects or your project is just too complex for them.
A simple call or email will provide you with the information that you need. If not, set up a quick pre-interview call with the SEO company so that you can find out more about the company.
After the list has been filtered, it’s time to set up interviews with each SEO company. Often, a good practice is to have multiple representatives join the interview, and bonus points if the company owners join as well.
Have some questions prepared to get to know the SEO company. But, it’s probably more important the questions that they ask. A good SEO company will be interested in understanding your company holistically, and will always put focus on how your website appears in search results, not just where.
Examples of questions that an experienced SEO company might ask are:
If they ask similar questions to the above, it’s a great indicator that they know what they are doing and are interested in being a part of your company’s vision. Usually, they don’t ask about the mission and vision of the company, as it’s expected by the company reps (a.k.a. you and your team) to provide that at the start.
However, be extremely weary if any SEO company promises that they’ll rank your website first on Google. Chances are, they’re probably not that good.
Apart from the background check the SEO company would not only be online reviews but also references of clients that the company provides they’ve worked with. The best practice is to ask reference questions such as:
The last one is meant to be broad as most companies prefer to keep their corporate secrets just that. However, a lot of tools are available on the web to do a comparison of when the SEO company was hired and compare to up until they have completed the work.
It’s essential to look for fluctuations during this process and not just at the beginning and end. Often, a great indicator is how they’ve handled the downtime, and how they’ve contributed to the profitable period.
The whole point of this is to get a feel for how well the SEO company conducts the day-to-day operations, aims toward the bigger picture, and how well they’ve translated the client’s ideas into profitable and scalable measures.
Additionally, for any review or recommendation provided, you can also speak with their prior customers, as this will offer a better sense of their operation methods, success rates, areas of specialization, etc.
All of it will help you bulletproof their credibility or scratch them from the list, and a detailed examination of their past work would do just that.
Now, since we’ve narrowed down the list to a handful of great SEO companies, before starting with work, request that they conduct a website audit to give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO.
A few things we would recommend to be thoroughly looked at are:
By following these few recommendations, usually, you end up with only 1 SEO company or a handful if you’ve got a list of some really good candidates. In any case, by following these 6 steps you would be able to choose with ease the SEO company that will help you grow your business.
You can’t go wrong with choosing the right SEO company for you at this stage, even if you have a few still on the list.
For modern companies that want to scale their business online, building an SEO strategy and implementation is one of the most important corporate decisions to make.
Because SEO is directly linked with your online presence, profits/conversions, and website effectiveness, we need to make sure that we choose the right SEO company that is going to help us achieve all of the above and more.
There are a few benefits that come with hiring an SEO company like result-driven work, fast delivery, top-class expertise, etc which greatly outpace the benefits of hiring an SEO specialist as a freelancer or in-house.
Also, above we’ve listed a few steps that we would recommend that you take in order to find the best SEO company to help you scale your business.
Even though we’ve provided this blueprint, we understand that it might difficult to find such an SEO company. That is why we SEO Jokers are happy to have a call with you to discuss how we can help you effectively run your website and scale for the future!
To find out more, click here.
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