It’s important to find the right SEO agency to match your needs. Some digital marketing agencies will sell you their SEO services, but they aren’t experts at SEO. They’re digital marketing generalists. Other SEO agencies are great, but they are too pricey.
With so many to choose from, how can you choose the best SEO agency for your business?
Table of Contents
Why invest in SEO?
Let’s start with an overview of why you should be thinking about hiring a SEO agency in the first place.
The beauty of free traffic is that it’s…. well, free. Great, right? Unlike paid ads, which work well as long as you’re paying, organic traffic delivers a constant and predictable flow of website visitors month after month.
Paid ads can bring you a lot of traffic, but the moment you stop paying, the traffic plummets to zero.
With SEO traffic, if you get it right, it’s like watching a magic show. Even after doing it for years, it still amazes me that it’s completely possible to get many thousands of website visitors for free, month after month.
In my opinion, the ROI from SEO investments absolutely crushes the ROI of PPC traffic. I’ve had this conversation many times.
One friend told me that he gets X number of visitors per month for X number of dollars using paid ads. I told him that I get that same number of website traffic each month from SEO, to which we replied “yeah, but how much did you have to invest to get that traffic?”. I gave him my answer and he said “That’s not that good.” But, when I told him that I don’t only get website traffic for one month, I get it month after month after month and I don’t need to pay for it….
Well, now he comes to me for SEO advice on a regular basis.
How to find a SEO agency
A good test of a SEO agencies’ worth is whether or not you found them by using a search engine yourself.
If they are so great at SEO, they should be using their skills so that people like you will find them, right? If a SEO agency isn’t showing up in Google or Bing for their own services, why would you think that they will be able to help your business?
After you’ve narrowed down your list of SEO gurus to those that you found in search, it’s time to take a closer look at their services and prices. It’s important to make sure that you’re comparing apples with apples.
Some SEO agencies will charge you a fixed fee per month, or per project. When talking to this type of SEO agency try to figure out how many hours work they will do for you. This will allow you to determine their hourly rate so that you can easily compare one SEO agency to another.
If the SEO agency that you are talking to already quotes prices per hour, that’s great. That should make it easy for you to quickly realise that our SEO services are great value.
After considering price, how much personal attention will you be getting from your SEO agency? Some agencies “sweep you under the rug” and simply send you a monthly progress report. And a bill. They tell you that they are working hard on your account, but there’s no transparency.
If you choose us, you’ll have access to our experts whenever you need them. You’ll be able to work alongside them if you want, or you can sit back and watch their every move with complete visibility.
With no bill shock.
Why is it so hard to find a good SEO agency?
One of the reasons that it’s so hard to find a good SEO agency is that they aren’t always flexible with what they offer. Some of them require you to pay for X number of hours per month, and you need to use those hours in that month. Sometimes you don’t have much to do though, so you end up wasting the hours on unimportant stuff.
Another problem with working with these types of agencies is that sometimes you might really try to ramp things up and find that you become the bottle-neck in the process. Or worse still, you find that your SEO agency is wasting hours on unimportant tasks because you told them to “do more work”.
Unfortunately, you probably won’t realise that these problems exist until you have been working with them for a couple of months and wasted a bunch of money.
What about hiring a freelancer from India?
Don’t do it.
I was a small business owner myself for 7 years before starting my own SEO agency and I tried everything. I hired people in India for $8 per hour, I outsourced some SEO work to a “full service” SEO agency in the Philippines and in the end, it was all a waste of time and money.
There definitely are smart and competent people in each of those countries. But, the two biggest problems are:
- Finding a really good person is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and
- Once you’ve found your SEO wizard-unicorn, it’s very hard to work with
them effectively because of the distance, timezone, language difficultiesand lack of structure to your working relationship.
Also, if you only have one person you don’t have any redundancy. Working with an SEO agency of outsourced talent means that if someone is sick there is always someone else to cover them who understands the process and is familiar with your account, even if they aren’t usually your primary agent.
With us, you’ll feel like you’re working with an Australian SEO agency. I hand-pick every person who will ever go near your account. You can feel confident that I’ve gone and found the geniuses that you’re looking for. I’ll help you to get the most out of them and I take ultimate responsibility for their work if there’s ever an issue.
It’s only when you decide to top-up more hours that you’ll remember that we definitely are NOT an Australian SEO agency. Because our prices are a fraction of what you would normally pay for SEO services in Australia.
“White hat” vs “black hat”
Simply put, “white hat SEO” are things that Google will not penalise you for. Conversely, “black hat SEO” are things that will come back to haunt you if uncle Google catches you. In the middle, there is “grey hat SEO”. It’s a little dodgy, but not likely to cause you the same harsh penalties as engaging in black hat SEO.
Don’t go anywhere near black hat. Just stay clear.
When you first start learning about SEO and the factors that help you to appear higher in search engines it doesn’t take long to think of a few black hat ideas yourself. Keep learning though, and you’ll find that the short term gains (if any) won’t be worth the long term pain.
There are many vendors of black hat SEO services. Lots of people are selling spammy links to your website for $5 for instance. Don’t waste your time.
After been deeply immersed in the SEO universe for many years, we strongly believe that the only option is to do things the right way.
White hat.
And… perhaps a little grey hat here and there.
On page SEO
On
This is our bread and butter. We eat this stuff up. If you’ve ever worried that your web pages may not be properly optimised for Google, it’s never too late to fix it.
You are right to worry though. If your web pages are not properly optimised, how are search engines supposed to know that your page is relevant for any particular keyword?
We efficiently handle all on page SEO services. We can fix and
Off page SEO
Off page SEO are all of the things that happen off your website, that you have much less control over. This includes things like getting people to share your content on social media, getting back links from other powerful websites and getting mentions elsewhere on the web.
On page SEO is just a matter of doing the work to optimise your own website and individual pages. If you know how to do it, you can definitely get all of that stuff done.
However, off page SEO can be more tricky.
With a structured approach to off page
Slowly but surely your website will become a powerful domain and you will be rewarded with lots of website traffic.
Which is more important, on page or off page SEO?
All pages should have every technical aspect properly
That’s the starting point.
Once you’ve done that you can try to get back links, shares and mentions. But one without the other is like trying to run a race with one leg. It would be far better to use two legs if you could!
Stealing traffic from your competitors
This is our secret sauce.
This is the single-best SEO hack I’ve seen to get crazy results and increase website traffic beyond what you ever thought possible. And this is something that you won’t find anywhere else.
We
This strategy is not always possible for every business. It depends a lot on your niche and your competitors. We assess every client one-by-one to determine if we can add value this way or not.
If we can’t, we’ll let you know early.
Holistic approach to SEO
Just beginning to do SEO isn’t a great idea unless you know where you’re heading. More importantly, what’s your strategic plan? What’s your content plan? Once you’ve answered these questions you can move on to the 2nd layer of questions:
- How will your content be better or different
to what’s already out there? - Which keywords should you be targeting and why?
- What sort of content would suit these keywords the best?
- What is the user intent for these search terms and will your content satisfy the user?
- How will you arrange the content on your site?
- How much content will you publish and when will you publish it?
- How will you get your content indexed in search engines?
- How should you track your progress and measure your performance?
Don’t know the answers to all of these? Not to worry, that’s what we’re here for.
Failure to get any of these things right will leave holes in your SEO efforts.
For best results, you need to make sure that your “SEO engine” is running as efficiently as possible, with minimal leakage taking away from your efforts.
SEO is life agency
I just have one question for you. How did you come to land on our website?
Yep, you found us in organic search, most likely in either Google or Bing. We didn’t pay to show up in those results, you found us for free. That should prove to you that we are worth our salt as an SEO agency.
We can add value to your business whether you’re a complete newbie to SEO, or if you’re already a ninja looking for some extra help. There are no contracts, joining fees, cancellation fees or anything else. You can come and go as you please and scale up and down whenever it suits you.
Find out more about our packages here.
What to expect from us
Once you join I’ll be in contact with you to help you determine what would “move the needle” most effectively for you. After an intro call, I’ll assign one or more wizards to your account, depending on your needs. We’ll all be able to communicate with each other anytime and there will be complete transparency on what is currently being worked on.
We’ll also take care of reporting so you can see how you’re tracking over time.
Finding an SEO agency that you can trust and one that will also help you to “move the needle” can be overwhelming. I know, I’ve been there myself several times in the past. I’m sure that you’ll be impressed by how talented our SEO wizards are and I know that together we can move the needle and bring you a lot more website traffic to increase revenue in
Give us a try today.