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A detailed checklist to make sure that your SEO Company is doing the right job

Search engines are masking their algos and policies in a complete mystery. Unfortunately there are not any hard and fast rules exposed by search engines adhering which one can guaranty the top rankings and first page impression in search results. So coming up with the solid points detailing what works for SEO and what does not to achieve the search engine optimization campaign targets, can only be achieved by analyzing the websites that hit page 1 of the search results against your desired keywords. This is basically called “competitive analysis” and is the base point to start with any organic SEO campaign. The effectiveness of an SEO campaign directly depends on the competition, sometimes you’ll start receiving results sooner and sometimes you got to do lots of efforts, spend tons of money and monitor each and every competitor for at least 6 months to gain prominent position on search engines and hit page 1 within search results for your potential keywords. It’s really hard to audit the success of and SEO campaign especially for a layman who’s not aware of the organic SEO life-cycle and besides of this, existing of numerous SEO companies on the globe and several diverse theories each of them claiming the proven SEO results make it more difficult to choose the right SEO Company.

Basic tasks of an SEO Company

SEO is not a rocket science but must be addressed with sensible approach. If you’re not aware of the whole SEO process and not sure of the fundamental activities conducted by a professional SEO Company, a little research on the internet will give you an understanding that organic SEO campaign doesn’t generate results quickly where as SEM and PPC put your website right on the top position in search results instantly. Another difference in PPC and organic SEO is that you can sustain with your paid rankings as long as your search engine marketing budget allows. However, organic SEO is an ongoing phenomenon and even if you have not hired a professional SEO Company, you should be aware of the whole SEO process yourself and know the ongoing tasks to achieve and sustain high SEO rankings. Considering the fact that search engines keep updating their algorithms and policies, be patient with your SEO Company for 3-4 months to the results.

The biggest hurdle in understanding and revealing the effective SEO steps is that search engines don’t expose any guidelines ensuring the top rankings. However in a broad perspective following activities are the primary jobs an SEO Company should perform and are considered to be playing 80% roll in achieving results for any organic SEO campaign.

1. Optimized page titles, keywords and meta tags
2. Optimized headings, bolds, italics and Alt tags.
3. Optimized programming (proper usage of CSS and adhering Web 2.0 standards)
4. Keeping targeted keywords in URLs or the domain name.
5. Well optimized content copy with appropriate keyword density and geared towards actual users (not the search engines)
6. Quality back links from relevant yet good PR websites.

If you’re operating with an experienced SEO Company and they’ve intelligently integrated above myths within your website, you should be expecting to see your website within first 20 results of search engine search against targeted keywords. However, competition directly affects your results, time frame, cost and efforts. If you’re dealing with very highly competitive keywords, you SEO Company should put in more efforts to beat the competition and hence will consume more time to get you stable and high rankings over search engines. But as a business owner and the one who’s spending hell of money on an SEO Company to achieve and maintain high rankings, you must be keen to know the daily or at least monthly progress using which you can gauge how effectively your SEO Company is managing your search engine optimization campaign.

But below are two methods you can use yourself to see how much they’re putting in for your website.

Analytics and Traffic Stats

Google provides a very easy to use analytics and stats software named as “Google Analytics”. One should be able to integrate it with any website without any hitch. Ask your SEO Company to install Google analytics for you that you can monitor on daily basis the amount of traffic, the sources of visitors, high performing keywords and bounce rates. You should compare your traffic stats with previous dates, months and years to know more about the efforts your SEO Company is putting in place for your website.

*A smart SEO Company should not only focus on getting high rankings and increasing PR of your website. As a professional SEO consultant, I always critically analyze and compare the bounce rate to make sure that SEO efforts are helping the prospect customer in real sense. i.e. an SEO Company should also analyze the landing pages to make sure that they’re providing the specific information to the visitors and encouraging to take an action.

Google Alerts

Any time an article posted on a blog, news is placed on a press release website or a directory picks up your link, Google alerts will inform you through email. Configure Google alerts by your company name and once it’s done, you’ll start receiving alerts from Google. So more you receive alerts, means more your SEO Company is doing for you.

Auditing your SEO Company

Since I have been debating throughout my lectures, articles and white papers that SEO is a time consuming process and as a business owner, one should be patient while working with and SEO company. However, a question always stays there, “How much should I wait to see results of my SEO Campaign and efforts done by my SEO Company?” Even if you’re not an SEO guru and are a simple business owner with minimal or no knowledge about SEO and website designs. I am plotting some situations below. If any of the situation occurs while working with any SEO Company and nearly 6 months are over, I would suggest to fire your SEO Consultants and choose the right ones with proven track.

Traffic increased but not getting conversions?

May be your landing pages are not formatted well and giving hard time to visitors to take an action or your SEO Company placed your ads on some places to generate spam traffic just take credit of increased traffic. You must consult with your analytics and try to analyze all sources of traffic, keywords, search engines referring sites etc…

No Improvement in traffic and position within search results?

May be your SEO Company is not working at all or putting into wrong keywords. One can understand that highly competitive keywords can generate high amount of traffic for your website. But it takes longer time to deal with such keywords. A smart SEO Company should not focus only on working with highly competitive keywords, but they should consider your return over investment (ROI) too. Like said in start of this article, SEO is not a rocket science but must be approached sensibly. A combination of high, medium and low competitive keywords should be used to start with any SEO Campaign.

SEO Company reports lots of inbound links but little affect on ranking?

Depends when actually they started with link building, normally SEO companies optimize your website first (on-page optimization) and then move towards off-page factors of SEO process. So maybe it will take some time to bring results if those links are not 4 months older. But if those links are more than 4 months older, rest assured, they will cause negative effect on your search engine ranking. First try removing such links and then better to work with a renowned SEO Company.

SEO Company reporting improved ranking but no affect on traffic and conversions?

This can happen if your SEO Company is operating and collecting data from a different geographical location (different country). Especially Google have dedicated domains for each country and organic search results vary from country to country. You just use your Google’s search box and search for some of the keywords, if search results are close the agency’s report, its fine. Otherwise, they’re just lying and must be fired immediately.

Of course there could be several other scenarios that could drive you seriously reconsider your SEO Company. However, it’s difficult to know whether your agency is doing hard to get you page 1 impression or not. But sounds a good idea to keep in touch with your SEO Company constantly and ask for monthly ranking and competitive reports so you can track, compare and know more about the efforts put in place by your SEO Company.

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1. SEO Process – Search Engine Optimization for Newbies
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
4. SEO Process, Search Engine Optimization Process
5. Top Google Ranking and SEO