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Hiring an SEO agency can be extremely beneficial to your business as SEO is a long-term commitment. Unless you or a member of your team internally has time dedicated to implementing and managing your SEO efforts, it is recommended that you outsource to a trusted agency.

Before signing a contract, however, it’s always important to ask these important questions to make sure you are in the loop on what they are providing you.

What services do you provide?

Digital marketing is a machine and within this have a lot of cogs that work together, so when looking to work with an agency it’s important that they have knowledge of all things digital marketing – not just SEO.

By asking what services they are going to be providing you, you will be able to identify who is responsible for what and what tasks you and your team need to do in order to aid their work and maximise success.

As SEO and PPC work hand in hand, it could be beneficial to recruit an agency that has experience in both.

Do you have any case studies?

If you have found an agency online but they don’t have any case studies, run for the hills!

A reputable digital marketing agency will have a catalogue of case studies for each of their services detailing important statistics such as:

• Increase in traffic
• Increase in conversion
• Increase in rankings

Case studies are the evidence behind talking a good game, if an agencies client hasn’t wanted to give them positive feedback it’s likely because they did a poor job.

What are your link building practices?

In today’s SEO scene, understanding how your agency is building links into your website is crucial. A lot of changes have come into play over the past decade and you want to make sure that your agency isn’t using old, black hat techniques that will get your website penalised and removed from the search results.

Any mention of bulk directory submissions is a big red flag!

What is your reporting process?

Reporting varies from agency to agency, but all agencies should send you updates and figures on your progress in order to justify their cost. Reports are commonly sent monthly to give you a summary of the months’ work, but some agencies send reports weekly or fortnightly.

What results should I expect to see in 12 months?

SEO takes time, so it’s unlikely you’re going to see results overnight. If any agency promises you position 1 rankings in a week, it’s a lie and frankly – impossible. The truth behind Google algorithms is still top secret so they can’t make guarantees like that.