How do I know that my SEO and SEO company is good?

When you make an investment, you should always know how to measure its success or stagnation, and SEO isn’t different to any other investment in your business. With how long we’ve been in the digital marketing space we know how important it is for our clients to know that what we’re doing for them is not only in their best interests but also working in trackable and tangible ways.

While a good SEO company and good SEO go hand in hand, we’re going to split them up here so you can see how they work together to create a successful digital marketing plan.

While we are both proud of, and passionate, about our sector we are well aware that not every player in the industry plays by the same rules we do and it’s important to know what the other side looks like when you’re considering an SEO company for your business.

Quick Jargon Busting: Black Hat SEO is a term used to describe tactics that may or may not work in the short term and tears down other websites instead of improving their own. The phrase is borrowed from the concept of “black hat hackers” who hack computer systems for gain, which in turn was taken from old Western movies where the ‘bad guys’ would wear black hats while the hero and his cronies would wear lighter colours.

There are a few things you should be looking out for, both positive and negative, that will help you assess your SEO options.

1. Rapid results: we all know by now that ‘win quick with no effort at all’ offers are too good to be true. Anyone offering you overnight SEO results can’t be following industry best practices because the process simply takes time.

2. They promise you everything: many will tell you SEO will take your small, local and hand made business to rival multi-billion dollar chains. It’s important that your SEO consultant tells you the truth about your goals, because SEO can be one of your best asset on the road to success but it’s not magic.

3. They don’t discuss their methods: vague references to link building and follower counts should alert you to the potential black hat tactics they might be planning on using. Don’t mistake this for legitimate focus on link building and social following which are both important parts of you digital marketing strategy, but these should be organic with a steady growth rate just like your search engine rankings.

1. They’re open and transparent: being happy to discuss the process they prefer is a huge green flag because they’re secure in their skill instead of their method. Just like the difference between ‘following the recipe’ and ‘being able to cook’ – the basics of SEO are simple but it’s the execution that matters.

2. They’re clear about timelines and expectations: good things take time, and SEO is one of the best things you can do for your business. Having good lines of communication with your consultant is important. You don’t need to be in constant contact – they’re here to help you after all – but knowing that you can call and ask questions (and get an honest answer) is vital.

3. They provide trackable metric reports: there’s a big difference between telling you things are going well and showing you. You should be able to see where your reach has improved, and we’ll go through some ways you should be looking at this later in the post.

1. Quality content: the creation of content that supports the reputation of your brand and builds up the trust between you and your customer is vital to good SEO. By focusing on the quality of your content and publishing it regularly you and your SEO team are working together to build your reputation as a trustworthy source of value, expertise, and reliability.

2. Your long term success: instant results might be satisfying in some ways but the real reward is in reaping the benefit of an action you took months or years ago. A good SEO consultant has your long term interests at heart and will work hard along side of you to build a bank of quality SEO that brings visitors in for years to come (or even indefinitely with good maintenance!).

3. Your unique position in your sector: an SEO consultant who is on your side isn’t going to pressure you into taking digital marketing action that goes against your core values or your brand voice. In other words, just because we live in a social media saturated world you don’t have to learn trending dances and put your face out in the world lip syncing. Some clients would both love and benefit from that kind of social media plan, but not every business is suited to light hearted social posts.

1. Numbers at all costs: promising things like a hundred followers a day, a minimum number of likes per post, or other shallow metrics should be a large red flag for you because the only way you can guarantee things like that is to buy them and that is bad news for your reputation and long term results. The former because if it’s discovered you’ve been buying followers, and the latter because
a) purchased followers don’t organically interact with your posts and nothing looks worse than a 100k account never getting more than 10 likes, and
b) they usually disappear when the credit card is disconnected. (Pssst – It also explicitly breaks many platforms terms of service and you risk losing your accounts.)

2. Targeting other websites: if a part of their strategy is to attack your competitors standing in the digital landscape then you should immediately disengage. Being better than other websites is the goal, not using underhanded tactics to get search engines to distrust your competitors. Not least because it’s unethical behaviour, but because it puts your online reputation at risk and search engines are cluing in more and more to these tactics and they’re becoming less effective – even in the short term.

3. Quantity over quality: recommendations to post spun, generated, or other low quality short content on a website to ‘trick’ search engines into thinking you’re very active is a bad plan for many reasons. When you lower your standards in one aspect of your business, your customers will assume you’re happy to lower standards in other areas too – like your quality of service, accuracy of quotes, and reliability.

Now we’re going to look through the metrics that can help you decide if your SEO is good and working for you, or needs more attention. There’s not a hardline rule about what is good and what is bad, but all things are relative and progress is progress – remember that as you move through your SEO journey.

These metrics are the more measurable of the lot and can be measured for trends.

Traffic from Organic Search
This number reflects the number of people who have searched for, found, and clicked on your link in a search engine like Google or Bing. This is the ultimate metric – it means you’re being seen by people and they’re clicking through to your page, but I isn’t the be all and end all.

Impressions
This tells you the number of people who have seen your results, but not necessarily clicked on your link. This metric is also used for ads and posts.

Numbers of ranking pages
How many of your pages rank well determines how many clicks and visits you get and therein lies the value of regularly posting high quality and optimised content.

Backlink numbers
Backlinks are how we refer to the behaviour of linking between websites, these are important to algorithms because it shows that reliable and trustworthy websites trust your website.

Referrals from other websites
The number of clicks from links housed on other sites.

Page and Domain Authority
While this isn’t a metric that search engines directly consider, it is a way we measure the authority and quality of websites and is a good way to track your progress.

Brand Mentions
Interactions with large and verified brand accounts which can lend your account, website, and footprint legitimacy.

Conversion Tracking
The rate of people who go to your site and actually end up as paying customers, signed up to memberships, or newsletters.

Brand recognition
The more popular your results and account is, the more people who see your company name and this builds up over time.

Value adds for your customers
By providing value that you’re not obliged to you build a relationship with them as they learn to trust you.

Customer relationship building
Take every opportunity to speak to your customers and help them – it might seem like effort for nothing but decisions are often based in emotional connections. When you’re looking to buy a product or a service that you don’t know much about, you’re more likely to choose the one you know is a well established company even if their products are similar.

Market Leadership
Standing out as a sector or industry leader helps to establish your reliability.

Now that you know the ways you can measure and differentiate between good and bad SEO, and find a good SEO company, you can use this knowledge to form your decisions.

You can get in touch today to schedule a free site audit to start looking at your site and deciding where you want to go from there.