A quick search on Google for SEO Consultants, Search Engine Optimisation Specialists and the like will return thousands upon thousands of results. But how do you know which one is best suited for you and your company?
The first thing to do is narrow down your search to SEO companies that are in the same county or town as your business, for example, SEO Essex to find us. The reason for this is that it is better to meet face to face than dominantly converse through telephone and email conversations. Once you have pin pointed your search to a specific geographic location, look at the websites of those that are returned on the first page – if they’re a good SEO company, they will have done their keyword research and should be ranking well for the term.
Now that you have established which SEO companies are based in your local area, it is time to consider which one to contact. This can be established by going onto their websites and seeing what services they offer, what the feel of their website is and whether you think that they will be able to help you.
You Get What You Pay For
When choosing an SEO company, keep in mind that the price that you pay will be reflective of the amount of time and effort that the company will be putting into optimising your website. Therefore, those that are offering really cheap services will typically put little effort into the keyword, on site and off site SEO phases, for example, companies that offer SEO for £50 will generally have the whole process automated, which is something that Google frowns upon, which will ultimately result in you wasting your money.
SEO costs and budgets can range from tens of thousands of pounds to a couple of hundred, but sometimes it is worth paying that little but extra to get a better level of service.
Submission to Hundreds of Search Engines
When you look at the services that SEO companies offer you, avoid the ones that make a song and dance about submissions to hundreds of search engines. Why? The UK search engine market is dominated by Google and even their closest competitors, Bing and Yahoo!, are having to merge in order to compete, so submission to hundreds of irrelevant search engines isn’t likely to improve the traffic to your website.
But I want to be Number 1
In an ideal world, every SEO company would make their clients rank number 1 for every relevant search term. However, the reality is that this is not always possible and the SEO companies that guarantee a ranking of number 1 in search engines should be approached with some caution. Which search engine will they get you to number 1 in? What techniques will they use to get you there? And sometimes they will choose an obscure keyword which has little relevancy to their clients industry in order to fulfil this promise and they may even mean getting you to number in the paid adverts and not the organic searches, which are completely different.
Those with the knowledge of SEO are fully aware of the techniques to rank a website highly in Google, Yahoo and Bing, however sometimes this can take many months, if not years to achieve. It is dependent on the competitiveness of the market, your budget, how much SEO work your competitors have done and other variants such as these.
Back Links or Bad Links?
Back links make up a very important portion of an SEO campaign. However, it is quality over quantity that will have the greatest impact on your website and improve your rankings in search engines, therefore those SEO companies that offer thousands of back links could end up to be a fruitless and costly exercise. A couple of things to be careful of are that if your website goes from having ten back links to hundreds or thousands in a very short period of time, search engines such as Google will deem this to be unnatural and consequently reduce the emphasis that these links would normally have and never go for black hat techniques!
Free Analysis Report
The SEO companies that are confident in their abilities will be more than likely offer you a free analysis report at the initial point of contact. These usually contain a general overview of your website in regards to its current search engine positions and what can be done to improve this.
These are just some pointers on how to choose the best SEO company for your business. If you would like to get in contact with us to see what we can do for you, then please do either by phoning us on 01245 608 225 or emailing us using the contact form.
