Many marketers consider Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as the most critical aspect of a digital marketing strategy. By optimising web pages for search, you can significantly improve your website ranking whenever your prospect types in your target keywords.
While there are plenty of materials that will teach you about how to create your company’s SEO strategy, it will take years to learn the skills and techniques. Hiring an in-house team of SEO specialists may be a good option, but if you don’t have enough budget yet, you can always outsource.
Hiring an SEO agency is like hiring other specialists. You only need to make a few considerations to determine if the agency can indeed meet your needs.
Ask for an SEO audit
Before a team of SEO specialists can create an effective SEO strategy, they need to have a full grasp of your site’s overall SEO performance. They need to know the major drawbacks of your pages. Additionally, they must check the meta data, selection of keywords, content format and other technical factors that may affect the searchability of your website.
Determine the strategy
After auditing your website, the next step of any SEO agency is to send you their proposal. How do they plan to help you improve your site ranking? What are their suggested keywords? How long before you see results?
Their specialists must explain their plan clearly. Additionally, they must identify the key performance indicators they will use for the strategy. You should ensure that the SEO agency follows the latest guidelines set by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The last thing you want is getting penalised by search engines because your SEO strategist used prohibited techniques.
Check the proposed content
Apart from the keywords and topics, it’s also the task of your SEO specialist to check the content of each page. They should ensure that your web content is free from grammar mistakes and plagiarism issues. The written material also needs to be easy to read. They must clean up the chunky texts, dangling sentences, sentence fragments and run-ons and other issues.
Ask for their local SEO experience
Using local SEO, you can rank your pages for local searches. This type of SEO strategy is crucial for small and medium enterprise owners. Your SEO agency must have enough knowledge and experience in dealing with local SEO. It takes a lot of skill and time to create the right strategy for a website.
Gauge the team’s ability to meet deadlines
Don’t forget to ask how long it will take for the team to deliver the SEO service. It’s crucial to determine if the team can provide the service within the agreed timeframe. While it does take time to audit the site, edit the content and come up with a sound and effective plan, your target team must be able to provide you with a reasonable timeline.
Don’t miss the chance to optimise your website for search. If you want to organically rank for your chosen keywords, it’s essential that you apply the right strategy. It will surely help if you hire a seasoned SEO agency in Sheffield to set up the site and perform the rest of the off-page and on-page technical tasks.
This content was originally published here.