Cheech Foo, our director, was featured in an article on InternetRetailing.com.au, on the recent release of the Google Video on how to approach the hiring of an SEO professional or agency.
Just to recap, here are a few important tips from Maile to take away.
- Timeline:In most cases, SEO professionals need four months to a year to help the business implement improvements before the potential benefits can be seen.
- Hiring process: Businesses should conduct a two-way interview with potential SEO hires to make sure they seem genuinely interested in the brand and business. They should check their references and ask for (and probably pay for) a technical and search audit. Then they can decide whether to hire or not.
- Auditing process: A good SEO professional will prioritise improvements in a defined structure:
- The issue
- The suggested improvement
- An estimate on the overall investment
- An estimate of the business impact
- A plan for iterating and improving on the implementation or experimenting and failing fast should results not meet expectations
In addition to the above, we also recommend the following advice:
- Ask your SEO agency to show them their methodology flowchart and get them to walk you through it step by step. By doing this indicates that they have a robust system in place to conduct SEO improvements and it is a signal that they have implemented it many times over
- Don’t be afraid to get into the nitty gritty details of your SEO project requirements in the very first meeting. A competent SEO should be well-versed enough to answer most if not all questions. For the questions that they might not know on the spot (which there could be, especially with complex websites), they should at least be upfront about it and then tell you that they will get back to you with a solution or a next step. If they start to waffle on, then it is a sign that they might not have the right capability that you seek
- If you are in a dilemma where you have on hand several good SEO agency candidates, then to separate the wheat from the chaff, ask them the following two questions:
- What is your strongest area of capability within SEO? (every agency has a strength be it content marketing, technical SEO, local search etc.) and
- What makes your agency different to others?
If you follow the above, then you will be in much better stead to engage with the right SEO agency for your organisation.
Please read more on the InternetRetailing article at https://internetretailing.com.au/google-breaks-long-standing-seo-policy/
