Keyword Research. What Your SEO Company Should Be Doing for You!
Are you ready to hire a company to do your keyword research and other SEO tasks for you?
Or maybe you’ve hired a company, yet aren’t exactly sure what they should be doing?
If you said yes to one of the above, this article is for you.
Hiring the right company to do keyword research and other SEO tasks for your website can help you achieve goals like increasing your traffic, brand reputation, signups, revenue, and profit.
Unfortunately, many SEO companies hide behind excuses, collecting your money while saying the right things to you. They speak about patience and that there is nothing to say in the first 12 month. Do not believe them.
Before hiring an SEO Company to do your keyword research, you need to know what the SEO companies should (and shouldn’t) be doing for you.
They Should Have A Clear Understanding Of Your Goals
You and the SEO company need to address your goals before any hiring is done. The depth of this chat will vary, but there is one important point. Not all companies will be able to achieve your goals depending on what their internal resources are. Making sure they have sufficient internal resources available to help you, will ensure you can get started on the right foot.
Some possible goals:
- Do you want more traffic?
- Do you want more sales?
- Do you want people to sign up to your website?
Bad goals in SEO are vanity metrics such as traffic numbers, keywords ranking no.1, and achieving a high DA score.
They Should Be Requesting Access To Various Accounts
Keyword research can be completed with external software tools. But any professional SEO company should be asking for access to various systems. These systems help complete tasks involved in implementing keyword research SEO.
The systems your SEO company may request access to is:
- The backend of your content management system (CMS)
- Access to Google Analytics (view or admin access to be determined)
- Access to Google Webmaster Tools
- Social media account access
- Past audits that you have had completed
If they don’t ask for any of the above, you should be concerned. Ask them an open ended question such as ‘do you require access to any of our accounts?’ Gauge their response carefully.
They Should Provide An Audit Of Your Current Keyword Rankings
Once you’ve got your goals in place and the company has agreed to help you achieve these goals, they’ll need to figure out the baseline where they’re working from.
The level of detail will vary from audit to audit. At the very minimum there should be a list of keywords you are currently ranking for and your positions. And another report listing potential keywords your company can target going forward that will help you achieve your goals.
They Should Be Openly Telling You What They Will Do & Are Doing
SEO is an interesting industry as the business primarily is based around Google. The Google algorithm has never been released. Therefore there is no need for SEO companies to not release their information to you as none of it’s proprietary.
If a company is saying their techniques are confidential, this should sound of alarm bells for you.
SEO processes can be explained in simple terms, so regardless of your SEO knowledge there should be a logical reason why they are doing everything that you understand.
They Should Be Providing Ongoing Keyword Ranking Reports
With access to various accounts, your SEO company can generate keyword ranking reports on a consistent basis depending on what you agreed with beforehand. They should be able to highlight any of the key improvements, what worked, what hasn’t and possible suggestions going forward.
It’s important they remove any personalisation when they generate reports, otherwise you’ll have misleading figures.
They Should Be Getting Authoritative (and Related) Backlinks
We mentioned earlier no one knows the algorithm that Google uses for determining ranking websites for any keyword.
What is commonly agreed upon between all reputable SEO companies is backlinks play a role in the rankings.
A backlink is a link from a site, that is not yours, linking to your website. You can think of this as an endorsement.
Not all backlinks are created equal. You want links coming from websites directly related to your industry, or powerful websites that are known to be trustworthy websites.
If you notice a bunch of links all of a sudden (you can check this manually), you’ll want to chat with your SEO company about their processes.
They Should Be Giving You Tasks
SEO companies will need you to change your ways from time to time to help you achieve the desired results.
You’ll need to do things on your end which will depend on agreements such example of as accepting media interviews from time to time. Interviews are one way to earn backlinks. You might also need to follow process documents provided to you by the company when you upload products to your store. If you use the same title everytime, you aren’t giving yourself to ranking for other keywords.
The tasks given will be minor, but when followed will help support the keyword research made by the SEO company.
They Should Be Will To Make Changes
The SEO industry is always evolving and a company that doesn’t look to tweak their processes is going to be left behind in no time. They should be continuing to do keyword research as trends and interests of people searching for terms can change. If they see new opportunities for you, they should be able to approach you.
What They Shouldn’t Be Doing:
- Hiding their processes
- Spamming your site with low quality links
- Targeting irrelevant keywords
- Putting you at risk of getting a manual penalty from Google
- Ghosting you
How do you feel? If any of the terms confused you, dig further on our blog to broaden your SEO knowledge.
Keyword research is the foundation of good SEO. By keeping the above points in mind, you’ll be working with an SEO company who can complete keyword research to the level you require for success.
Need some SEO help? Custom Fit Online is a Whistler SEO company that has been in business since 1995. Contact us today for a free consultation.
By Roy McClean