It depends. Is your website a hobbyist blog or a vehicle for new business? If you answered with the latter, than an SEO plan may be right for your business.

Some websites, usually in less-than-competitive industries, can rank with little to no effort. This is great news for your business and means there’s usually no compelling reason to hire an SEO company.

Others, usually in more competitive industries, or in bigger markets, can find ranking in search engines difficult. This is when it’s best to hire an SEO company – or if you’re patient and tenacious enough – to handle SEO on your own.

Contact us for a free SEO audit.

Yes, and we wouldn’t recommend hiring any agency who doesn’t do the same. Keep in mind, all of our clients are guaranteed results in the top 5 positions on page 1 of the search results. Many companies will only guarantee Page 1 results – this means your position could be 6-10 i.e. toward the bottom of the search results page, which generally produces very little click-through activity.

Desired goals and results will be discussed prior to the start of your project so that everyone is on the same page as far as expectations. We will not take on a client if we don’t feel we can deliver adequate results.

No. While we guarantee your position in Google search results, we can’t guarantee X amount of users will click through to your site, and/or X amount of users will contact you after clicking through to your website.

After evaluating your website and discussing goals, we will give you a realistic timeline. This is generally 60-90 days but varies based on the competitiveness of your industry. Think of it like building a house. How long will it take? It depends! Are we building a tiny home or a four story mansion?

It depends on the competitiveness of your industry, and future Google algorithm updates. To put this into perspective, we’ve had some clients keep their search engine ranking position after several years with little to no upkeep on their SEO. Alternatively, we’ve had some clients (usually the ones in more competitive industries) whose search engine ranking position will continuously bounce around. Again, this can be due to new competitors entering your space, as well as Google updating their ranking algorithm. For example, Google’s heavily weighted factors that determined your website’s ranking position in 2019, may not be the same, or as critical, as what Google uses to rank your website in 2021. This is how Google prevents spammy search results and continues to be the most dominant search engine.

We’ve noticed that many SEO companies have a reputation that’s on par, or worse, than a used car salesman. We know this, because we get calls every single week from organizations who were promised the moon by a third party SEO company, only to be let down by what was actually delivered (or not delivered, in most cases).

When it comes to SEO, a good rule of thumb to use is: “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Is the company making wild claims and asking for little compensation? That is a red flag, and the company will likely not deliver results, or worse, will use spam-tactics that temporarily get your website in high positions in the search results, only to ultimately have your website blacklisted from Google after they catch on that you’re using spam-tactics to appear in their search results. This can be devastating to your business. Google didn’t become a half-trillion dollar company by displaying websites that spammed their way to the top of their search results.

If you’re doing SEO, it is absolutely critical that you hire a company that has proven results, references, support, and perhaps most importantly can tell you about the types of methods they use to rank your website! More on each of these four critical areas below:

1. Can the SEO company show you previous results? If they can’t show you the websites they’ve helped climb, why would you trust them with your website? View results from our real clients here.

2. What exactly does the SEO company do to get desired results? If they respond by telling you something along the lines of “we can’t give out our trade secrets” – run for the hills! The truth is, no one has a magic formula to get desired search results. Google has a complex algorithm that is geared toward showing their users relevant results and not spam. That being said, there are a number of common threads amongst which websites rank better than others, and we strategically apply these proven methods until we get the results that we’re seeking. We’re referring to things like server analysis, content writing, link building, internal link structuring, creating/optimizing your robots.txt, alt and meta text optimization, and creating your sitemap.xml. Prior to getting started, we will discuss a plan of action so that you know what’s happening with your website. We do not utilize spam-tactics, otherwise known as “blackhat SEO”.

3. Can the SEO company give you legitimate references? We provide references with phone numbers to our potential clients who would like to speak with references before hiring us.

4. Does the SEO company offer any type of support? A phone number where you can reach them? All of our plans offer email support, and our Business and Enterprise plans also offer phone support.