There are a great number of SEO agencies out there, all of them carrying their own standards in both the quality of their SEO and their customer service. We feel that one of the most important aspects of SEO is to help clients realise their potential, and then to find reasonable targets and achieve those targets through a service that explains the logic behind our decisions, and how they will help you maximise your potential.
Transparency
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Transparency is crucial to an SEO agency that wants to help you. Every decision made should be made to your benefit, and a good agency will always be able to show to you how they affect you in a positive way, and eventually prove it once an appropriate timeframe has elapsed.
Some SEO agencies make a habit of telling their clients that they can guarantee top positions in Google, but many of these agencies also choose to target keywords that don’t even get searches, neglecting to tell you this in the process. This, obviously, is not a productive use of your time and money, and the likelihood of any increased business as a result of their focus on poor keywords is very low indeed.
This applies to all changes made during your SEO campaign. You need to know the reasons behind certain changes or strategies, otherwise you don’t know if the effort made will produce results for you. As a result, it’s important that you also take an interest in your SEO campaign. While it’s tempting to sit back and let your agency handle everything for you, it’s important that you get hands-on and find out why they do what they do.
Your Best Interests
When you begin an SEO campaign, you’re obviously looking to improve your rankings in Google, but the objective of doing this is to increase your business success through greater visibility and brand awareness. A good SEO company will work with you to decide which keywords you would like to target in your campaign, choosing keywords that match your level of competition, which will aid you in bringing in new business through new search terms.
It’s important not to aim too high when starting with SEO – You want to rank well for a keyword with a huge search volume. This is understandable, but you also need to understand that these keywords are incredibly competitive, meaning smaller businesses are going to struggle against massive corporations. Say you were building and selling branded computers, and you wanted to rank well for the keyword ‘Buy a desktop PC’. This keyword has over 3,600 searches in the UK alone, and as you can imagine, the desktop computer market is extremely competitive.
You would be going up against giants like PC World and Amazon, who are far more able to dedicate resources into SEO, as well as having a much more well-established presence on the internet.
If you invest in SEO that targets keywords that are this competitive, you are doomed to fail. The resources you would have to invest would likely be far beyond your financial capacity if you wished to gain the presence to be number one for such a term.
Some agencies would be happy to focus on such keywords, but not us. We see the importance in building your business up, focusing on smaller keywords that convert into business much better. We will never choose a keyword we do not believe you can rank for, though it is important to understand that ranking for keywords can take a lot of work, and we won’t hide this either.
Co-operation
Going into a campaign with an SEO agency means both parties need to co-operate. The relationship we have with our clients is always more of a discussion than a report, and this is important in keeping both parties updated to the latest news regarding the campaign and any other factors that may affect it.
With this, it is also important that your SEO agency works with you to help you understand the concepts at play. Sure, they could tell you ‘Change your title tag to this’ – But without explaining why, can you be sure that the decision has your best interests at heart?
At Essential we always do our best to let you know what changes are necessary, as well as the reasons behind them. This way, we can help you understand what every action means, as well as letting you give us the feedback we both need to work out the best approach for your business, and your business style.
Tools
One thing that we do at Essential is we provide tools that let you see what we’re doing, and all of the statistics relevant to your keywords and site. We believe it is very important to convey information like this to our clients, so we have developed our own online systems to help show everything you need to know about your campaign.
We find that some of our clients have complained about previous SEO agencies they have worked with, telling us that their methods were much more smoke-and-mirrors. Often in these complaints, the client tells us their agencies made changes, but wouldn’t show numbers and figures to back the changes up. Specifically why this would be done is anyone’s guess, but we feel that this kind of under-the-table approach is completely out of order.
Instead of mystifying what is being done, we prefer a transparent approach, letting you know what is happening and working with you to help your understanding of our actions, and what you can do to further achieve your goals.
Your Objective
The most important aspect of your SEO is setting an objective that is reasonable, and then putting in place a strategy that helps you reach those objectives. Any good SEO agency will help you to understand the work that will go into increasing your online visibility, since understanding your objective and the steps it will take to get to it is very important. If your agency refuses to tell you anything about your SEO, that looks very suspicious to us, as there is no good reason to hide anything from our clients. If your SEO is being done well, then your agency should have no issue with letting you know more about anything they do. After all, Essential don’t.
