What are the criteria for finding the best SEO consultant?

Best SEO consultant: the 6 criteria for choosing an SEO agency

• Agency size

  Choose an SEO agency that is neither too big nor too small. You need to choose a company that is appropriate for the size of your organization. If you are a freelancer, prefer to work with a freelancer. If you are a small business, choose a SEO agency that has a larger team and additional resources.

• Reputation

  Not all reviews available on the Internet reflect reality. You must then analyze the e-reputation of the SEO agency: how long has it been in business? What is its background? Do they create content? Do they have credible evidence or references? Do their clients attest to the agency’s talent?

  A good practice is to check if the agency itself is favorably positioned on the search engine. Look at the client references available on the agency’s website, its social media and don’t forget to contact it directly by phone so that you can make up your own mind after an initial exchange with a project manager.

• Performance indicators

  Your company is unique and deserves an agency that listens to it. So don’t take a ready-made service. There are e-marketing agencies that sell the same services to all their clients. Each market has its own specificities and each company has different needs in terms of objectives and Google visibility. Select a SEO agency that knows your industry, its customers and its issues. Believe me, you will save time.

  Be careful to analyze what are the relevant keywords on which an agency wants to position you. If it’s on your domain name or on queries that are not very popular, you are on the wrong track. Make sure that these are keywords that can bring you ROI (return on investment). A reliable agency will first offer you a technical audit of your site. The SEO audit is a key step providing you a detailed analysis of your business, your positioning and your visibility on search engines. It helps to identify your strengths and weaknesses and to set SEO goals. If you want to appear on the keywords of your main competitors on the first page of Google; the SEO audit in addition to a good visibility strategy are essential.

• Realist results

  Beware of those who promise you quick and exceptional results, especially structures that indulge in dubious SEO techniques such as Black Hat SEO. A freelance SEO or a SEO agency must clearly explain the risks they take. Black Hat SEO aims to exploit the flaws of the algorithms to manipulate the results in its favor. However, Google punishes web pages that cheat and climb too quickly in the Serp (Search Engine Result Page). Penalties range from downgrading the website to its total disappearance on the web. Therefore, it is important to surround yourself with web marketing professionals to reference your site.

  To give you more context, a SEO mission takes about 3 months before being effective and showing visible organic results. A trustworthy web agency will not sell you a service with quick results in less than 2 weeks.

  If your business is just a few days away, you should opt for a different type of campaign. In order to have immediate visible results, the only possibility left is to use paid search with Google Ads or Social Media with Facebook Ads for example. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is another customer acquisition channel of digital marketing and requires another level of expertise. It also allows you to improve the positioning of your website in search results. If you are interested in SEA, you can discover our service presenting the differences and complementarities with SEO by clicking here.

• Budget

  Be careful with the budget and the time allocated for your file. Getting to the top of the Google ranking with SEO is difficult and it’s a permanent work. To be among the first results, it is necessary to: optimize the website, add regular SEO blog articles, adapt to changes in the algorithm of Google, have good strategies for indexing, internal linking with incoming and outgoing links Backlinks, structuring Hn tags etc. And the list is still long… You will have understood, improving visibility with the objective of arriving in the first positions Google is a long-term work.

  One of the levers of the global referencing of a website is to make its content live in continuous ways and on all angles. If you do not want to become a consultant, it is therefore advisable to use a SEO agency that will allocate a certain number of hours per month to your site.

• Transparency

  Finally, the last criteria to take in the selection of the web and digital agency is transparency. A reliable reference agency will present its methods with pedagogy, its planning and its actions in all transparency. You have the right to ask for a detailed action plan concerning all the techniques and SEO tools that will be used to optimize your website.