Top 10 Rules for Choosing an SEO Service and Avoiding "Money Lost, Trouble Gained"

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

SEO services are the safest and most sustainable path to getting your website to the top of Google. SEO services improve your website's visibility in the top positions of search results. It is also a method of indirect selling that reaches potential customers at the moment they search for products and services that match their needs.

What Benefits Will SEO Services Bring to a Business?

Realistically, visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo is extremely important and effective. Thanks to these engines, your website can significantly increase its traffic, which not only boosts brand awareness but also drives revenue and profit.

But appearing in just any position won't deliver good results — it has to be the top positions. And SEO services will help you do exactly that, by optimizing your website to Google SEO standards and raising your rankings. While this work demands more time and effort than advertising, which buys you an instant jump to the top, in return SEO services save you a considerable amount of money and keep your keywords in top positions for a long time.

However, the SEO service you choose may sometimes fail to deliver the results you expect. This comes down to many factors: for example, your market may already be saturated with businesses doing Google SEO, so more time and effort are needed to reach the desired rankings. Or the SEO service provider — the SEO Agency — you chose may lack expertise and technique, professionalism, and a real understanding of your needs! That's why this article lists 10 questions to help your business evaluate and choose the agency that fits you best.

10 Excellent Rules for Choosing the Right SEO Service

Choosing an SEO service provider is like "choosing whom to entrust with your gold." At this point, the agency will take over and be responsible for your brand's face on the Internet — your company's website. That alone should tell you how important this choice is, right? But don't worry: today Markdao Agency will share 10 essential rules — or rather, 10 questions — to help you find the right partner for your business.

Markdao groups the 10 questions into three main categories: Understanding the agency's professionalism; Agreeing on how the business and agency will work together; and What happens when the SEO service contract ends.

Assessing the professionalism of the SEO service agency

1. Can we see the clients who have used or are using the agency's SEO services?

A professional SEO agency will gladly provide a list of clients it has worked with across all its services — including SEO services — along with their contact information. In addition, reputable agencies usually publish their client lists on their websites under a Projects section, so your business can review them in advance. Why do you need to know this?

Knowing which clients have worked or are working with the agency lets your business assess its professionalism, working style, and project delivery approach. You can't know exactly what results the SEO service has brought to the agency's other clients, but you can verify part of it by checking their websites' rankings on search engine results pages as well as their traffic and conversions from those websites. That is part of the effectiveness of the SEO service the agency provides.

SEO services should involve an agreed working method between the business and the agency

2. How will the agency improve your website's rankings?

If you ask this question and the agency can't explain how it will do it, be wary! According to digital marketing experts, the agency should present its strategy and plan for the SEO service project — how it will improve your website's rankings and an estimated timeline for hitting the targets.

A professional agency will also proactively offer to audit your website to check for problems — broken links, and so on — that could negatively affect how search robots evaluate the site. This is usually done completely free of charge. Based on that audit, they will explain how they'll optimize the on-page elements so your website becomes as friendly as possible to Google and other search engines. To better understand what on-page optimization involves, check out Markdao's article Website SEO optimization guide.

Besides on-page SEO, you can also ask whether the agency provides an off-page SEO strategy to promote your brand and product content on other websites — publishing blog posts, posting in forums, on satellite sites, on social media pages, and in press releases.

3. Does the agency comply with Google's rules?

Google evaluates your website against many different criteria, and this search engine also has its own "house rules": any website that violates — or deliberately violates — them will face serious consequences. In fact, there are 12 SEO tricks that are absolutely forbidden, including creating spam content, generating automated content, and adding hidden text and sneaky links. When choosing an SEO service, your business must make sure the agency follows Google's rules and stays away from dirty tactics. Otherwise, your website's rankings will plummet — or worse, Google will remove it from search results entirely.

4. Will the agency get your website to the #1 spot on Google, Yahoo, or Bing?

If the answer you get is "Yes," be careful. Reputable agencies typically only guarantee their SEO services will get your website into the top 5 or top 10, and rarely commit to the #1 position. If an agency insists it can do this, experts say it may be a low-reputation operator that uses dirty tactics to push your website to #1 by any means.

What should really alarm you: stay far away from any provider claiming to be an "insider" or to have close relationships with search engines so your website will be prioritized over others. Only Google, Bing, and Yahoo can decide your website's ranking based on their own criteria.

5. Does the agency have local SEO experience?

Why ask this? Because local SEO services really matter for small and medium businesses trying to attract customers located near them. If your website is optimized to local SEO standards, it will appear at the top of the local listings when someone nearby searches for keywords related to your business.

To achieve that, SEO agencies should add your business's city/province to the website's meta title and meta description so your address is listed in the local listings of Bing, Google, and Yahoo.

For example, if you search the keyword Digital Marketing Agency, you'll see Markdao Agency in the first results of the local business listings.

6. Will the agency notify the business of all changes made to the website?

SEO services include two phases: on-page and off-page. Especially in the on-page phase, the agency has to make many changes to the website to make it friendlier to search engines, including touching the code — particularly when editing HTML tags (meta title, meta description, headings, etc.). So it's safer and more reliable if the agency informs you in advance of what it plans to change and on which pages, and if code changes require your approval.

7. How will you measure the success of the SEO campaign?

To evaluate the effectiveness of an SEO service, you can track your website's traffic and where it comes from. A professional agency should be adept at using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to track your website's rankings across search engines, the number of links from other sites sending traffic your way, the keywords searchers use to find your website, and more.

You can ask when the agency will send you reports on the quality of the SEO service and how it uses that data to adjust and improve the campaign (improving rankings, traffic, etc.). As a rule, Markdao sends statistical reports to its clients 1–2 times a month.

8. How will the business and agency communicate and stay in touch?

Regarding communication between the agency and the business during SEO service contracts, agencies usually go along with the business's preferences. It's best to ask which channels they typically use to reach clients — in-person meetings, phone, Skype, Zalo, Viber, email, etc. — and decide which works best for your business. You should also agree on when the agency will contact you with progress reports. Professional providers regularly send reports for clients to review before a meeting to propose the next steps.

9. What are the SEO service costs and payment terms?

What you need to know is what you'll pay for the SEO service, including how the agency charges — by the hour, by headcount, or per project. Project-based payment is the most common form in the SEO field, though it can also be flexed depending on the project's scale and complexity.

Another important question to ask: how often will invoices be due — every 30, 60, or 90 days? And will late payments occasionally cause problems?

What happens when the SEO service contract ends?

10. What happens after the SEO contract ends?

When the SEO service contract ends — or if you want to terminate it early — you should still retain ownership of all the content on the web that was optimized by the SEO agency. That means you must be assured that when the contract ends, the agency will not change or delete any content it created, edited, or optimized for you.

On the other hand, your business should also ask in advance whether the agency charges any fees if you want to terminate the contract early. If so, require them to state this in the contract.

That's how Markdao — a Digital Marketing Agency — has shared the 10 essential questions to ask before choosing a reputable SEO service provider. We hope this article is useful for businesses, especially those looking for a partner to promote their brand's online presence as effectively and successfully as possible.

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