So, you’ve decided that your business needs outside help with SEO. Now you have one fundamental question: how do I hire best SEO Expert? Finding an excellent professional SEO firm can be challenging if you don’t know much about search engine optimization. There are a lot of trustworthy experts in the SEO industry, but a few con artists have made many people wary of SEO.

We’ve seen it over and over again. A company needs SEO services and starts looking for help from digital marketing agencies but doesn’t know where to begin. We want to make a tool that will help business owners spot con artists and stay away from them with this post. We’ve talked to dozens of SEO experts to determine what they think. We’ve made this list of the most important questions to ask any SEO company based on what they say.

1. Learn about their past.

Try looking for an SEO company on review sites like Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp. Check their average rating and read a few 1-, 3-, and 5-star reviews to understand what a bad, intermediate, and great experience with this company might be like for any customer. Any business with a long history should have a few bad reviews, but if there are a lot of bad reviews, that should be a red flag.

2. Ask them about how they do SEO.

The way each SEO company works will be different. No matter what, their team should be able to talk about these processes with ease. Don’t be afraid to ask for a breakdown of their SEO methods and what they will give you at each step.

• If they say they do SEO audits, you should ask them what steps they take in those audits.
• If they say they do keyword research, you should ask them how they find good keywords to target.
• If they talk about technical SEO, you should ask what that means.
• If you’re still unsure what any of these deliverables mean, you can ask for more information. A big part of the salesperson’s job is to explain these deliverables in terms that anyone can understand.

3. Ask them what you can expect from their SEO services.

Prospects who believe that they can rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) overnight are not uncommon. Finally, we stress that SEO is a long-term process that can take between three and six months to begin to show benefits. ‘ Any SEO company that claims to be able to send you to the top of Google’s search results in a week is a scam, and we’ve seen it many times.

Even though quick wins are not unheard of, they are excellent when they occur. As soon as possible, inquire about what a good SEO strategy would look like and what kind of outcomes you can expect to get from such a campaign.

4. Ask about SEO work done in the past.

After hearing their benchmarks for expected results, ask to see a case study from one of their past clients. These may not be available at all companies, especially smaller ones. Case studies are a great way to show good results for a particular service. Marketers always want to show the outliers, so it’s important to know that the results in the case study probably don’t reflect the actual metrics you’d see if you worked with the company.

Streamline signed up for our Content Marketing Service for Standard Growth. Typically, we’d expect this service’s organic traffic to grow by 50% over a year. However, we chose to focus on an outlier in this case study. Note how old some of the case studies might be. Over the past five years, SEO has changed in many important ways. More recent case studies will show what results in a company can usually expect. You should expect case studies that are one to two years old, but anything older than that is likely out of date.

5. Ask how open they are about their progress.

We strongly believe that everything we’re working on should be clear to everyone. Every client we work with gets their Growth Hub. The Growth Hub lets clients see how their SEO campaigns are going. Clients are notified in real-time when articles are ready for their approval. They also have access to all strategic assets and other things. Below, you can see a complete tour of the Growth Hub.

Many reputable SEO companies will communicate clearly, but some won’t. Hire SEO companies that aren’t afraid to show you what they are doing. You should be able to see what they are doing and where everything is.

6. Ask the SEO company how they handle reports.

Most reputable SEO companies will give you a report if you keep working with them. Ask to look at an example of a message they send to clients. It would be much help if you also asked what the company’s main measurements are.

Find out what tools they use to report on SEO. Our favorite tools are Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz. Will you be able to use some of these tools to ensure that the metrics they give you are correct?

Good SEO companies will report the number of backlinks, where the site ranks for high-priority keywords in search engines, and how much organic traffic has grown. Good firms will tie these metrics back to how much money your business makes.

7. Ask how much time you have to give.

Think about how much your time and money are worth when figuring out how much it will cost to work with a particular company. Even though both are limited, one will be more limited than the other. These two costs will be different for each SEO company. Some may want you to work 10 hours a week, while others may only want you to work 2 hours a month. Neither choice is better or worse, but some costs will work better for one business than another.

Before hiring an SEO company, you should know how these costs affect your business. Some brands want you to be more involved, while others want you to spend as little time as possible with them. We’re proud of how little time our clients have to pay with us. It is great for some businesses and terrible for others.

8. Ask them about building links.

The number one thing determining where you rank in search results is how many and how good websites link to you. Getting links from sites that people trust is the best way to move up in search results. There are very few exceptions to this rule, but they only apply to big brands and leaders in their fields.

Ask them why the SEO company didn’t say anything about getting good sites to link back to you. Some people will say that building links is too dangerous. It is not valid. Building links can be difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. Building links is the fastest way to get a return on your SEO investment, so it should be the first thing you do when doing SEO.

If the SEO company builds links, ask them how they get other websites to link back to their clients. Avoid companies that talk about “payment” or own a network of sites that can connect to you. These are sometimes called “private blog networks” or “PBNs.” These “black hat SEO techniques” can get you in trouble with Google.

Never forget to ask them about Link Buildings.

• What kind of link outreach do they do? Do they use their email address, or do they need one of your company’s emails addresses?
• How do they find new chances to build links?
• How do they check the quality of a website before asking for a link?
• How do they report on getting links?

Final Lines:

SEO is essential for any business to do well. Fifty-seven per cent of B2B marketers say that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing effort. You’ll be ready to fight even the best SEO cons with the answers to these questions. Can’t find the right SEO company? You can contact us to find out what we can do for you right now. Want to learn more about how the digital marketing landscape is changing? Hire the best SEO Experts to stay ahead of your competitors.