5 Steps To Choose The Best Local SEO Company For Your Business

5 Steps To Choose The Best Local SEO Company For Your Business

If you own a business which has even the smallest digital presence, you are already, in all likelihood, aware of the fact that you’re going to need a local SEO company to help raise your business to the next level and put you head and shoulders above the competition.  While everybody and his aunt will tell you the importance of having a great local SEO company for your business, what they don’t usually tell you is how to choose one.  A quick internet search will throw up a baffling range of options when it comes to local SEO companies but, never fear, we’ve put together the following 5 steps which will help you to choose the best local SEO company for your business.

Its All About You

Your first step is to put together a list of the things you wish to achieve through local SEO.  This is important as an agency who fits the bill in terms of raising your company profile may not be the right fit if you are specifically looking to increase your conversions.  At this stage, its a good idea to create a request for proposal which will include information about your business, your goals and your expectations when it comes to SEO results.  Creating your request for proposal at this early stage provides you with a template for your requirements and will help you to manage your expectations as you begin your search.

Desperately Seeking SEO

When starting your search, you may save considerable time by asking for recommendations from other people within your industry.  You can then add to this list by running an internet search for SEO companies in your area.  When doing this, it’s best to be as specific as possible if you don’t want to get bogged down by too many hits.  For example, Googling best SEO company will return a whopping 283,000,000 responses, whereas, searching for Best SEO Company London will cut the responses down by a considerable amount.  When compiling your list, don’t forget to check out reviews for each company – lots of negative reviews or, in fact, little or no reviews are all red flags telling you that this is a company to steer well clear of.

Walking the Talk

It’s now time to drill down a little deeper into your chosen local SEO companies – which means taking a closer look at their online presence.  If a company specialises in gaining visibility, you’re going to expect them to have a pretty impressive digital presence of their own, right?  Start with a simple internet search to see how their presence measures up with other, similar businesses.  Next, you may want to arm yourself with a sentiment analysis tool.  These clever tools use artificial intelligence in order to scour the internet for mentions of a brand.  These are really affordable and easy to use and, the great thing is that the tool will neatly group the results into a single sentiment – Positive, Neutral or Negative.  This gives you an ‘at a glance’ view of what other people make of the company and, you can also go further and view individual comments.

Making the Cut

Now that you have a manageable list of local SEO companies, it’s time to reach out.  Send your request for proposal to each of the SEO companies on your list, along with a request for a recent case study to be forwarded to you.  This latter point is important as it will give you a good insight into how the company works and how they will go about gaining the results that your business requires.  Once you’ve collated all of your completed forms and case studies, it’s time to examine these results in order to trim down to a shortlist of two or three companies.

Question time

At this point, you’ll want to sit down face to face with your shortlisted companies as this will help to give you a feel for the dynamic of the company and to meet the staff who are likely to be working on your account if you choose to hire them.  During your meeting, there are some important questions that you’ll need to ask and, these include:

• Can you tell me about your experience with Schema? How long have you been using this?
• Will I have my own, dedicated account manager?
• Based on my brief, what is your understanding of my business?
• Have you worked with other businesses like mine?
• What kind of SEO do you think would work best for my business?
• What is your reporting process?
• What kind of results can I expect?

These questions will help you to fill in any blanks from your request for proposal and allow you to gauge the way that their responses are formed without the benefit of being able to take their time over an email response.  This meeting should arm you with the tools needed to cut your shortlist down to one or two local SEO companies.

Conclusion

You wouldn’t commit to a new employee without doing your due diligence and checking out their background as well as their resume and, the same goes when choosing a local SEO company for your business.  By checking all the boxes and meeting the company face to face, you’re much more able to make an informed decision which, in turn, gives you a better chance of forming a rewarding, long term relationship.  Having done all your checks and choosing a company, always run the contract by your solicitor before signing on the dotted line to ensure that you won’t come across any nasty surprises further down the line.