Choosing an SEO agency

Building a website for your business can be an excellent marketing tool. Allowing you to promote your services to new customers and potential investors. A frequent misconception about Website Development is that once the new site is built, customers will easily find your website and return each day hoping of some exciting news or product launch. The daunting reality is that despite there being maybe a thousand potential customers browsing the web today, there are probably just as many 'websites' put out to attract their attention, which is why your new site needs to be Search Engine Friendly and to rank highly for keywords that your target audience will use to try and find your product.

So how do you select the agency or consultant for you?

Past Experience

One of the most telling ways to choose a Search Engine Optimisation Company is to ask for examples of current rankings for other clients. Good SEO companies will be able to give you a sample list of the best performing keywords for another of their clients. Keywords ranking in top 20 positions are OK. Keywords ranking in top 10 positions are good. Keywords ranking in top 5 positions are excellent.

Competition

Are those sample keywords competitive? With a sample list of high ranking keywords, its now up to you to do some research on the competitiveness of those words and phrases; just because a phrase is at postion 1 in the search engines does not mean that it will be relevant to your site or drive new customers to you. Ask yourself if you would type that phrase into a search engine to find a given service. For example, if you sell flowers and someone wants to buy a bouquet of roses, would they type "Florists in Manchester" or "Rose flower shops"? Both phrases are indeed relevant but one will be used more in searches and therefore drive more traffic to ranking sites.

Look for quality not quantity. See if any obvious phrases that have been included on the report to 'fill it out'. If these 'filler rankings' constitute most of the report then you need to think carefully about employing this SEO agency. Even just a handful of high ranking competitive phrases that have been achieved as a direct result of that firms efforts is what you are looking for.

Organic or Paid Search

There are, effectively, two areas of search engine marketing. Paid search is the easiest to classify. Paid search allows your site to appear in certain sponsored positions within the search engines. You would then pay a nominal amount for every click in order to maintain these listings. Organic search is everything else; it is being ranked based on the Search Engine’s opinion of your site. If the Search Engine believes your site to be relevant to a phrase then you will appear high in the listings (on the first few pages of results), otherwise you will appear lower down (on results pages very few people visit).

Fluid Creativity specialises in Organic Search Engine Optimisation, attracting the audience that matters most to your website. Our SEO team has in-depth understanding of the leading search engines and how they rank web pages. For further information about choosing an SEO agency contact us online or call 0845 658 837

Articles in this series

• Choosing a PPC Agency
• Choosing an SEO Agency
• Choosing a Web Designer
• Choosing a Graphic Designer