Backlinks
The best way to verify an SEO companies’ integrity would be to find out why they’re ranking on Google. An easy way to do this is to check their backlinks. Backlinks is a common way to manipulate page rank in the SERPs. Your SEO company should definitely not be doing it on their own website. If they do, well, then they simply don’t deserve to rank on Google.
Now that you know a bit more about backlinks, we’ll show you how to check an SEO companies’ backlinks. You can also follow this sam process if you would like to see who is linking to your competitors. There are many tools available to do this, one free tool you can use is Neil Patel’s Uber Suggest. Simply visit his tool, enter the URL of the SEO company’s homepage and see what pops up. So let’s help you make sense of the results.
After you’ve run the tool, at the bottom left, click on the Backlinks tab. This will show you all the backlinks that the page or domain you’ve entered has. You can then go through a few backlink results and analyse them.
- If your SEO company has good backlinks, the websites you visit will be legit and part of their industry. Those websites will also have good relevant content.
- If your SEO company has bad backlinks, websites linking to them will be part of completely different industries and the website’s linking to them will be very low quality. One way to identify the quality of a website is to read the content and see whether it makes sense or not.
The quality of backlinks to your SEO companies’ website should be a major factor in your decision making process.
Here’s why:
If you’re looking for a good doctor, what do you do? You ask friends and family for referrals, correct? People that have had past experiences at a doctor and can recommend their services. So consider this fact, who would you rather trust as a referral to a good doctor, a nurse friend who works in the medical industry or a person from your local café? Well, I’m sure, as we all would, you would trust the nurse friend. Purely because they’re reputable in that industry and they should know what they’re talking about. Backlinks work in the same way, if a website has many backlinks from irrelevant industries, it’s a sign of cheating with SEO.
Why would a website offering tours, link to an SEO company for any good reason? You only link to other websites because they might contain resources or information that you don’t have. That’s almost the whole idea of the internet.
Strategy
Okay, enough about backlinks, let’s talk about strategy. An important question you can ask your new SEO company is “what strategy they’ll be following”? SEO companies charging low rates and have loads of clients, simply don’t have the time to setup a proper strategy for each client. “If they fail to plan, well, then they plan to fail”. – Benjamin Franklin
But setting up a strategy is very important, your SEO company needs to be in constant contact with you about what they’re going to do next and how they’ll reach certain goals. Their strategy should also be in line with what you have in mind for your business.
If you’re running a campaign for Black Friday, your SEO company should know about that and have a page ready. Otherwise you won’t rank on Google when the time comes.
Ranking
How quickly do you rank when signing up with an SEO company? Ranking very quickly is a bad sign, unless you have a very niche market and a great launch campaign, you’re not likely to rank very quickly. There’s an estimated 30 trillion websites on Google. Adding another one on there won’t really make a big difference, would it? So, unless, as mentioned earlier, you have a niche market and you fill many content gaps, your website could take more than a year to start ranking organically.
It takes time for people to link to your website and find it’s content. Google also look at factors like pages/visit, speed, mobile usability, etc, before ranking your website. So a lot of focus and effort should be going into those factors. Focus on keeping the visitors you receive on your website so that Google can realise, hey, there’s something to be found here.
Creating Backlinks
How will the SEO company create backlinks for you? Manually going to forum sites and posting questions and answers is most certainly not the way. Those are low quality links and will actually do you more harm than good.
Good backlinks influence your domain rating. You can read more about domain rating here. You’ll quickly realise after reading the link that backlinks on forum sites are actually negative for your domain rating and should not be the bulk of links to your site. Forum sites link to too many other sites, so their links are almost worthless.
If you generate amazing content on your site and you truly fill content gaps in the market, you’ll automatically get backlinks from other people as time passes.
Bounce Rate
We’ve heard this one too many times. If you’re asked to open your Analytics and navigate to the bounce rate tab, immediately be alert. Bounce rate is not entirely what you might think.
Consider this example. A user Google’s for “bed sizes South Africa”. They visit your site and within seconds they find a result. They then leave your site and continue doing whatever they were doing before the Google search.
Did the user bounce because they didn’t visit your website for more than a minute? Well, no, they didn’t, because they found what they were looking for. The default bounce rate setting on Google Analytics might not be optimal for your website. There are ways to adjust it in order to count certain users as “not bounced”. One way is to include scroll percentage as “not bounced”.
So make sure not to believe everything you’re told about bounce rate.
