Did you know that 70% to 80% of users ignore paid search Ads and click on the organic results? The people who come to your website after clicking on an organic result are 14.6% rate of closing, which is higher than most other paid media. In short, great SEO can supercharge your business growth, but for that, you need the best SEO as your partner.

The Dangers of Hiring the Wrong SEO

It’s a minefield out there when you go looking for the best SEO company for your business. Step in the wrong place, and kaboom! Your rankings can come crashing down, possibly forever.

The wrong SEO company can damage your reputation with Google irreparably, taking the worst case scenario. Old school tactics such as buying incoming links or stuffing your content with exact match keywords may still work, but not for long. When the Penguin and Panda updates hit, you may find you’ve got a lot of work to do and money to spend. These are Google’s algorithms that are not nearly as cute as their monikers suggest. Penguin measures the quality of your incoming links, and Panda determines the quality of your content, broadly speaking.

But Why Do I Need an SEO Agency?

Let’s rewind a bit. Why do you need an SEO company in the first place? You could always hire an SEO professional and do it in house—or, even better, do it yourself. That would be like planting an apple tree to eat an apple a day, and not being sure if you’ll get apples at all. You’d probably put in a lot of labor and wait for a long time before you could eat your first apple. It would be much wiser to go to the market and buy them fresh and organic.

Benefits of Working with the Best SEO Firm

That’s why smart entrepreneurs outsource SEO — it’s fast, convenient, and it delivers results. Working with the best SEO company

• You get the expertise and the bandwidth that your company lacks
• You can access the latest technology and tools
• You get knowledge of latest SEO best practices and Google’s policies
• Your traffic and sales are stable so you can plan ahead
• You can grow more rapidly—in a survey, 90% of the firms identified outsourcing as crucial to their growth strategies

How Does an SEO Company Achieve these Results?

Of course, a great SEO company does all this by optimizing your on-page and off-page content.

• It creates unique, targeted content that automatically gets linked to.
• It optimizes your website for the right keywords that balance traffic with customer intent and your page’s content.
• It optimizes your meta data and search engine results page to drive more and better quality traffic
• Focusing on Local SEO. It window-dresses your local business to show up on top of local searches and bring you more customers
• The right SEO partner can even help you boost your PPC campaigns by suggesting the right keywords for different AdGroups.

How to Select the Best SEO Company for My Business?

For the above to happen, you need to find the right SEO company, and that’s where things get risky. Selecting the SEO is one of the most critical decisions. Follow these steps.

1. Understand your SEO goals—do you want to rank locally, nationally, internationally, on mobile, or just everywhere?
2. Find out how much organic traffic you are driving right now and what is your SEO ranking for different keywords
3. Try and get some recommendations from your friends and coworkers, anyone who has worked with a good SEO agency before
4. Look up online for SEO agencies in Australia or in your particular area
5. Short list a few agencies and make a comparison sheet with the following parameters

• The results that they promise in the first three months
• The type and frequency of reporting they offer
• Recent examples of the results they’ve achieved
• What is their back-linking strategy and what you can expect
• How much do their services cost and how would they charge you
• Do they offer content marketing? If yes, what is the quality of the content they’ve created for their previous clients

The right SEO agency will have their compensation tied to the results you achieve. They will be prompt and proactive in replying to your questions and providing information. And their knowledge will extend beyond SEO to other digital marketing areas such as PPC and conversion optimization.

Conclusion

Hiring the right SEO company can mean the difference between rapid and sluggish business growth. The right SEO partner will continuously improve your ranking and organic traffic through legitimate tactics that will keep driving you customers and sales for a long time to come. A final word of caution—do not fall for the cheapest SEO company, because they might do more damage than good.

Working with the right SEO company doesn’t cost you a dime out of pocket. However, it can earn you a fortune by bringing you more and more organic customer traffic, day after day, for years to come.