For companies doing business in the great state of New Jersey, SEO might become more and more important to your company’s marketing plan this year. As it has been for the last decade, search engine optimization (SEO) continues to become a fire-hot tactic to increase sales and ROI and isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Combined with paid search engine marketing (SEM), you may find yourself spending a nice chunk of change every month to achieve the performance goals you’re looking for – and if you find the right SEO company to hire, you’ll have no problem spending that budget at all (because you’ll be profiting!) But what separates the best from the rest? When looking to outsource you’re SEO, or hire a consultant to train your team, be on the lookout for these 5 important criteria:
Focus on Real, Actionable Business Goals
When we’re talking about SEO, there’s always a lot of metrics and numbers being thrown into the conversation. Ranking position, organic search traffic, domain authority – these are just a few SEO related metrics you will have to get yourself familiar with. However, are these the most important numbers that your business should be focusing on? SEO and traffic numbers only matter if they have an impact on your company’s bottom line.
Does your digital marketing and search strategy track sales and conversions that are a result of these marketing efforts? Whoever you put in charge of SEO, make sure they understand your business goals first, and that all other marketing efforts are being put into place to help move the needle in a positive direction.
Demonstrate Success Through Reporting
If the focus then is on business goals, then how is your SEO company demonstrating their ability to achieve results? This should be done by proper reporting, and more importantly, by being able to explain what reports and analytics is showing about your campaigns and where efforts are showing either positive or negative impacts on your business. As we discussed earlier, many SEO companies will focus on JUST the SEO-jargon metrics like keyword rankings and supply you with related reports.
But what does ranking for XYZ keyword have to do with sales or leads being generated from your website? Reporting should show a clear correlation from both paid and organic SEM efforts and how they are impacting website conversions, and if possible how much ROI you’re getting based on those numbers.
Real SEO & Paid Search Experience
This might sound pretty obvious, but in there is a new SEO consultant or agency being born every day. Does that mean they have actual experience in implementing SEO, and have they achieved results? I know this because I too was once an “SEO Consultant” that had only “studied” SEO – it took many years later of getting my hands dirty with dozens of projects to be able to confidently launch campaigns for clients knowing they would achieve positive results. Now 13+ years later I know the difference between being “SEO Blog smart”, or being someone who knows a lot about SEO from reading articles and blog posts about the subject, to being someone who’s had both success and failures in SEO, someone who’s worked on hundreds of campaigns, and someone know knows how to rank based on actual achievements in SEO and not just reading a blog and thinking I know what works and what doesn’t. Make sure whoever is in charge of your company’s SEO has the RIGHT kind of experience too.
The Process of SEO and Building Authority
Now it’s time to discuss the “nitty gritty” of SEO, and what separates the cheap not-going-to-help software and service solutions from the large investment, real-marketing types of SEO services. To simplify the conversation for the sake of this article, SEO is broken into 2 facets: technical and “on-page” SEO (changes to your website that makes it more accessible to Google and a better “candidate” for ranking) and link building “off site” SEO (which in a nutshell takes a ton of effort and resources to work in your favor).
If you’re talking to an SEO consultant and all they have on their to-do list is making on-site changes without any understanding of building your domain authority, then their plan is very one-dimensional. That doesn’t mean that on-page SEO efforts alone can’t help your rankings in a big way, but when it comes to putting your SEO strategy in the hands of a so-called “expert”, make sure they understand the importance of both “sides” of the SEO conversation so that they can implement campaigns that impact both.
Understanding the Customer Journey and User Experience
Finally, a good SEO is going to talk about the most important part of all of this: the customer! Understanding how the design and navigation of your website impacts the user experience or “customer journey” is also understanding what Google’s ultimate goal in ranking web pages is all about: proving the most up-to-date and correct information that a web user is looking for and to solve their problem in the most efficient way (so they keep coming back to Google for future information and problem solving).
This is why over the years Google has make user interaction with search results and taken metrics related to how they interact with a web page (especially with Mobile becoming our preferred method of searching and navigating web pages into consideration). Your SEO should be concerned with far more than just keywords and search results – it should be looking at how a visitor interacts with your site, and how to grab those visitors and turn them into leads and sales. All of these things come full circle to help improve SEO and as we’ve mentioned earlier – your business goals and ROI. Make sure your SEO team is on board with that mentality and you’ll ensure success in your on-going digital marketing efforts!
The post 5 Things to Know About Hiring a NJ SEO Company in 2017 appeared first on Digital Media News & Training.
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