Choosing which Search Engine Marketing Agency to hire can be a bit like choosing a surgeon; you may have no idea how they do their job, but you’re going to look to other indicators to get a sense of whether they’re right for the task at hand.
Doing Search Engine Optimization for your website is clearly not as life-or-death as heart surgery, but the health of your website—and by extension, your company—can most certainly hinge on the health of your SEO and the ability for people to find you on organic search.
So how do you know whether an SEO Agency is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and up-to-date on the latest SEO services and strategies? Here are some hacks that will provide crucial insights when choosing your SEO agency.
1. They stop you
At first thought, it seems counterintuitive for a good agency to disagree with the client. But a quality SEO agency will let the best practices lead the way, and sometimes that means telling the client when a common practice is hurting the website or when the backend is set up incorrectly.
Does this lead to difficult conversations? Sometimes. But friends don’t let friends continue with awful SEO tactics. A good agency will have identified who is the lead contact within an organization, and that person will commonly support the SEO professionals’ recommendations.
2. They keep up with trends
“What are the biggest changes to SEO in the past six months, and how does that affect our site?”
If your SEO Marketing Agency can’t answer this question, it’s time to find another.
Google makes changes to its algorithm several times a year—there were no fewer than 10 Google algorithm updates in June 2021 alone. Does your SEO Agency know what they entail, how they might affect your site(s), and ultimately, do they know what you should do to optimize?
3. They look at your bigger picture
A good search engine marketing agency will first look at the greater health of your site before diving into fixes. This usually means an SEO Audit. To borrow from the earlier surgery metaphor, this is the annual doctor’s exam that checks your vital signs to get a clear picture of your overall health. A solid SEO audit will evaluate things like: on-page and off-page factors, user experience, speed, bounce rates, browser support, mobile-first design, and more.
You wouldn’t believe some of the strange things uncovered in SEO Audits—some of which can be easy fixes that will make an immediate impact on your site’s health.
Take, for example, the client who had one massive gif on their homepage, which was taking several full seconds to load. To Google, this means that a user on a 3G network and an older mobile device would likely have a rather poor user experience. We found this behemoth and the loading time delay it was causing right away. The client removed it and the impact was significant: this one small change resulted in their homepage experiencing a 15% increase in sessions, a 61% increase in dwell-time, a 171% increase in conversions, and a 132% increase in conversion rate.
Beware, then, with your Search Engine Marketing Agency, that the easy, sparkly answers that seem to be too good to be true often are.
Looking for an SEO Agency that can do all this and more? Get in touch with Fiddlehead to see how we can help optimize your online presence.