Hiring an SEO agency to manage your business’s online presence may feel daunting at first, but things are not as difficult as they might seem initially. Of course there are an innumerable number of agencies out there offering first-rate search engine optimization (SEO) services, but unfortunately not all agencies can optimize your site to the levels being advertised. It’s critical that you understand the basic mechanics of SEO before hiring an agency, that way you have some baseline expectations for the team to meet. The last thing you want to do is invest time, money, and patience in a company that doesn’t follow through on promises.

If you want to learn more about SEO fundamentals and which attributes indicate that an agency is reputable, qualified, experienced, and dedicated, read through the following sections.

Optimizing Your Main Page to Accommodate SEO

The key to a successful SEO strategy starts on your main website. On your website, you must have unique text, working internal links, chat bots, useful site maps, a URL structure, and server response codes. If you don’t know much or anything about these facets, a qualified SEO agency can assist you. Before these professionals get to work optimizing your site (in terms of SEO), they can implement web design strategies to ensure you’re starting off from the best possible foundation.

SEO-Optimized Text

You may be inclined to tell site visitors as much as you can about what you’re offering, but you must avoid doing this. Unnecessary text can hold back your website, inhibiting it from reaching its true potential. Duplicate content is another aspect that successful websites do not include, for this as well drags on a website’s ability to perform well.

Perhaps your business offers a plurality of services. This is great, but you should not use an individual page to advertise each service your business provides. A principle of website design is uniqueness, and this is especially important when it comes to creating website content. While subsections shouldn’t be avoided altogether, you must be very careful when relying on these because they’re often prone to including duplicate content.

A qualified SEO agency will be able to review your website’s text and optimize it accordingly. If you hire an agency that encourages you to include a lot of text—even text that you feel is superfluous—this should be a red flag and an indication that the agency is not worthy of your business.

Backlinks

If you want to master Google’s algorithms, you must first master backlinks. Backlinks can only be established once an effective site structure has been organized. Backlinks go hand-in-hand with what is called domain authority, and this can be simply explained as a scale which ranks how your site measures up to those that are similar.

If you don’t know what your domain authority is, you can use Moz’s tool to find out. You’ll want to have a high domain authority score because this will help distinguish your online business from competitors in the digital landscape. While it may be true that you are one of the best operating in your field, unfortunately Google does not have a lot to gauge that by, so it needs artificial metrics to create a baseline.

If you want to prioritize boosting domain authority rank, you must express this to the SEO company you hire. If the company tells you to not be concerned with the domain authority ranking, you should be concerned with their level of expertise. A qualified agency is likely to recommend HARO.

Online SEO Marketing Is a Never-Ending Process

If you want to show Google that you’re operating a legitimate site and gaining legitimate traffic, you must constantly be marketing and implementing the web design fundamentals. You should have blog topics that are compelling, and you should always be promoting your blogs on social media pages like Facebook. Earning blog traffic is a key to ranking high, and any professional SEO agency will agree with this point. You must also remember to only include relevant, thoughtful information on your homepages and main pages, for these are what viewers see the most. If your website is full of superfluous content, then viewers are likely to click away in a short amount of time. You must also ensure that your website is mobile friendly.

Qualities to Look for in an SEO Company

Now that you have a baseline understanding of what a successful SEO strategy looks like, you can consider which qualities you want the agency you hire to embody.

Reliability – First and foremost, an agency must be reliable! They must respond to you quickly, and they must do whatever they can to accommodate your requests (as long as they are reasonable). What you don’t want is an agency that rudely asserts they know more than you do. While you may not have a thorough understanding of SEO as they do, this does not mean your preferences and ideas should go unrecognized. A reliable SEO agency will do whatever they can to accommodate your wishes while always keeping in mind your business’s best interests. If, for example, you have an aspect of website design that you think would look great on your site, the agency will have to verify your preference to see if it’s in line with SEO best practices.

Experience – If you want to run a thriving online business or e-commerce store, you must employ an experienced SEO company to help you reach your SEO-related goals. Experience is key in the realm of SEO because a lot of elements rely heavily on trial and error. You don’t want to be an agency’s first client; rather, you want to be working with a team that has a proven track record of success. There are many sites online that provide great interview questions for gauging experience. Consider this one here.

Reputation – Another important quality is reputation. You only want to be working with a company that has a solid reputation of consistently delivering first-rate service. Thanks to the advent of Google, and review sites like Yelp, it’s now easier than ever to see if a company is worthy of your business.

Innovative – You’ll want to hire a team that is innovative. Forward-thinking companies are always up-to-date on the latest procedures, technologies, and practices. When you work with a company that’s leading in their industry, you know you’re going to be getting first-rate service and cutting-edge insights. Also, an agency that shows they’re constantly developing is one that’s worth investing in because one of life’s truths is that learning never ceases. Do you want to work with a team that values what they do and prioritizes delivering exceptional customer service consistently? Your complete satisfaction should be their number-one goal.

Getting in Touch With a Leading Agency

If you’ve been looking for leading SEO professionals to assist you with all your SEO-related endeavors, get in touch with Bluesoft Design now. We’ve been helping clients build outstanding websites for years, and we want to use our expertise to help you!