Six questions to ask when hiring an SEO Consultant

It is estimated that with correct SEO strategies set in place it can drive conversion rates up to 14.6 percent. The notion behind SEO is pretty straightforward- strategies set in place to help rank your website in search engines overtime. However, there are different types of SEO strategies but which ones are the best for your business?

These are six questions to ask an SEO Consultant or Company before hiring them for SEO strategies. 

1. What are your metrics for success?

This is one of the top three questions to ask a top SEO agency. It is imperative to understand how this company will measure success following your business’s goals and KPIs set in place. By knowing how an SEO Consultant will measure success, this gives a better understanding of their overall process and how it will align with your goals. 

If there is not a clear understanding of how these strategies will align with your goals after a couple of meetings or questions being answered, these are the next steps. 

1. Goals: As a business, any Omaha SEO Consultant should be able to take your business goals and create them into actionable strategies that can be measured and analyzed. However, the most important part of this is making sure to set realistic goals within your business. If you want to increase sales by 10 percent each quarter that is realistic, but increasing by 100 percent might be a stretch! 
2. Metrics: How is this Consultant tracking goals? What software platforms are being utilized? This is the next question to ask. Any SEO Consultant should be able to explain how these goals will be measured. 

2. What services do you provide?

A business who is interviewing several different top SEO agency will start to notice that not all agencies are the same. Would you hire a mechanic to work on your vehicle if they told you they would only repair half of it? If so, then that is a different conversation at hand. It is imperative to understand the exact services that you will be paying for. 

A great example is blogging strategies. If a company tells you they offer blogging strategies, then what does this entail? 

There is also a difference between on-page and off-page SEO strategies a company can offer. 

Don’t worry, we offer the following Omaha SEO services: 

3. Can you provide a current and past list of clients?

Don’t let anyone sell your their sales pitch without knowing their current and past clients. Ask for proof when searching for an SEO Consultant. A reputable SEO Consultant should be able to direct your towards industries they have worked with, businesses and explain if they cannot legally tell you about working for or with specific clients. 

4. What experience do you have in local and national search?

It’s not enough to just be local for some businesses, for a business who needs local and national rankings how will this Omaha SEO expert provide this for you? If a consultant has experience with local SEO strategies, this expert should be able to tell you about adding meta descriptions, Google My Business profiles, Yelp, Bing and so much more. 

IF this expert is not able to explain this, it is a red flag. On a national level for ranking, how will they get your website to break through with larger and more established companies? It is a doggie world out there, make sure you hire the right consultant who can guide you through the process. 

5. Are you currently outsourcing work?

Outsourcing has a bad rap, but not all outsourcing is not bad. As a business, you should not automatically disregard a business who outsources work; however, understand what work is being outsourced and how the company communicates with this person. 

There are certain instances when outsourcing work is concerning for SEO strategies dealing with on page optimization and link building. So, in this case, beware of this type of work being outsourced. 

6. How do you go about link building?

Any top SEO agency will tell you (or should) that link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Without quality links being backlinked to your website, it can and most likely be difficult to get out of the Google shadows. 

These questions are the starting questions to ask any SEO Consultant or company who could potentially handling all of your SEO strategies. For more information on SEO strategies or digital marketing in general, please contact our professionals!