The Delaware SEO Man - Online Marketing Expert

SEO has become sort of a catchword for numerous things online marketing. Accordingly, there seems to reign a confusion regarding SEO services starting right from what exactly these services are, what ends they are supposed to serve, what is the difference between SEO and other areas of online marketing, what to expect from an SEO expert (whether an individual or a firm) and finally, if you’re looking for a good SEO firm to rev up the online marketing section of your business, how to decide the best prospect for the job.

In this article, we aim to talk about a number of basic but important things that we hope will help to clear up the confusion about SEO services a bit and will also help those who are looking to hire an SEO service to understand what they can expect from a good SEO firm and how these expectations can be met.

When You Go About Looking for An SEO Firm

It may happen that you have been assigned the task to look for a top SEO firm who will be hired by the company you are working for. So, for instance, if your company is based out of Delaware, you turn to the Internet and google with the search phrases such as ‘Best Delaware SEO’ or ‘Best SEO in Delaware,’ etc. However, here starts the problem. You get a search engine result with a list of SEO services that come with meta-descriptions all of which read more or less the same. So how are you to decide what SEO service would be best to pull off the job for you? Should you go for one of the top three ranked companies, since you are thinking that they should be able to do a decent enough job for you if they have been able to achieve such high rankings?

Well, to put it simply, choosing the right SEO firm for your job is not that easy. Listings depend on a range of different factors. This is what we found in an article published in The Forbes magazine not so long ago. The writer was the owner of an SEO firm himself and the company was based out of Utah. And it so happened that at the time of writing the article, if you searched the keywords Best SEO Utah, his company was listed first on Google. Now, the writer, generously enough, lets us in on the secret that this happened not because they were necessarily the best SEO firm in the region, but due to a combination of different factors. One, theirs was one of the first SEO firms in the region. They also happened to be in possession of an old domain name that they had been using since 1996. And finally, the writer concurred, perhaps they have also been decent at their job, too.
The reason we mentioned this is that this should give you an idea how search engine results work. And subsequently, you must realize that in order to find the ideal SEO firm for the particular task you have at your hand right now, you need to look deeper than merely search engine listings. So, what are you to look for exactly?

The Three Levels of SEO

An SEO firm will commonly offer you a host of services including ongoing SEO, one time SEO audit, content marketing, retargeting, PPC management, link building, link removal, social media marketing and so on. These mostly relate to the field of online marketing, but they are at the same time closely associated with and are often dependent on traditional marketing practices. However, first things first, let us have a look at what SEO or Search Engine Optimization pure involves. Basically, we have three tiers here:

1. The TECHNICAL which involves examining the structure of a website in order to determine how difficult/easy it is for those search engine bots to crawl and index the contents of a given website.
2. ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION which tinkers with elements such as HTML tags, keywords, metadata, etc. with a view to optimizing traffic to a site.
3. OFF-PAGE OPTIMIZATION which involves things such as link building, social media marketing, social bookmarking and others.

What to Expect From a Competent SEO Service?

In short, the above is all that SEO involves and the goal of SEO is to get your website/webpage a high rank on the search engines which means greater visibility. However, here lies the snag…greater visibility does not necessarily translate into greater sales. And if you are running a business, to state the obvious, greater sales is what you’ll be looking for.

Set Your Goals: This should be your first priority. We have already briefly mentioned the various SEO services a today’s SEO firm will offer its clients. But what is more important than what is offered is what you need. For example, it is far too common a fallacy (and yet, one that is hard to understand) for companies hiring an SEO service to get overly impressed by the ‘look’ of the website of an SEO service. If it looks professional enough and is enough eye-catching, etc., it is commonly assumed that the guys behind the website are good at their job.

And yet, is it a nice-looking website you are looking for when you hire an SEO firm? Obviously not? Because then you would have been hiring a website developer and not an SEO service. There are loads of SEO firms with ‘nice-looking’, well navigable websites who are doing very poor business. Now, this should have been self-explanatory enough. Yet, the reason we mention this that we have found it to be too common a tendency in people to get highly impressed by the look of a website when they are looking to buy/hire some or other service from that site—be it SEO or something else.

So, that out of way, to go back to what we were saying: about setting your goals. And we can never overestimate the importance of setting one’s goal firmly and properly. Because you can only measure the success of your SEO efforts and that of your engagement with an SEO company with reference to that goal. So, what are you looking for? Is your goal to increase leads by 60-70% over the period of the next two quarters or do you want to see a sales growth of 20-30% in the period of next 12 months? Or, is it after all simply that you want your boss to know that some good people are looking for this troublesome SEO business and you don’t want to think any more of it? Whichever it may be, make sure to properly communicate your goal with your SEO firm. Unless there is proper and adequate communication, you can never hope for good results.

Let the SEO Firm Do the Talking: Now, once you have specified exactly what you are expecting out of your collaboration with the firm, it is time for you to decide whether a given SEO firm can fulfill your expectations. Of course, you will ask for formal case studies. Also, it is important to check how much experience the firm in question has working with companies related to your industry. For example, if you are an accounting firm, you would ideally look for an SEO service which comes with the considerable experience of working in that industry. See what sort of works they have performed for other companies and what has been their success rate?

Now, although case studies and prior experience of working in the same industry are important, make sure too that you don’t get stuck with those only. You may not always find a good SEO firm from around your region which has a lot of experience of working in the particular industry to which your business belongs. We are living in fast-changing business landscapes and thanks mainly to the introduction of new technologies, many new business opportunities have opened up in the last few years. These businesses are not often of a traditional nature and it is also difficult to place them in one or other category. For instance, if your company works as a marketing platform for various app-building clients, you cannot realistically hope to find an SEO firm who can show you ten case studies of working with similar companies.

In such a case (as well as in the traditional scenario), it always helps when you let the SEO firm talk for itself. Tell them your goals and simply ask how they hope to achieve it? Most SEO firms will be glad to offer a free consultation since that gives them the opportunity to win over more clients. Once you have specified your goals, it may take the SEO firm a few days to complete the consultation, especially if they need to go and do some basic research on your industry. And that should be okay with you, too. It is, after all, not the easiest of tasks to find the right SEO firm for your business and one thing you should not do in this situation is rush it.

Which is why you should also hold consultation with more than one firm. This relates to pricing, of course, but more importantly, you will get different proposals and this will help you get a better idea of what SEO firms do in general and how are they going to help you achieve your goal?

Now, when it is okay to hold talks with more than one SEO firm, you must also make sure that you do it in a discreet manner. There are companies who feel like if they let the SEO company know that they are shopping around, perhaps it would encourage the said company to compete more. However, this is not always the case—at least, not when you are looking to engage one of the best SEO firms in the business. So, if you jet them in on the fact that you are asking proposals from other firms as well, it will actually make them compete for less. So again, be discrete.

Listen to Their Stories: So, when we were saying that you should let the SEO firm do the talking, we didn’t mean only that you should discuss your goals and their proposals. That of course, but keep this in mind that creativity is one of the key factors when it comes to SEO success, especially in today’s business scenario where, again courtesy rapid changes in technologies, things are moving and changing at a faster rate than ever before. What this means is that strategies which worked previously do not necessarily mean that they would work in the future as well.

This is why it is of utmost importance that you put enough stress on the creative aspect and flexibility of an SEO firm. And the way to determine that aspect is to let them tell you their stories. Such as their background, their past experiences of both successes as well as failures. What they did when they found themselves in a tight corner. What strategies they had employed to get themselves out of such a fix. All of these will give you a proper understanding of how the company works and how well they will be able to cope with your own needs.

Keep this in mind always that the best-ranked SEO services are not necessarily the ones that can do the best job for you. You need to find out on your own the company who will be able to perform the work in the most efficient manner. Also, the fact that SEO is not only about page ranking. Not today.