How can someone tell what the difference is between a good and bad SEO company? Is it results, reviews, or how much they charge? The more important question you should be asking is, what are my results, and what are they doing for me? We believe that most SEO companies have a good general knowledge of SEO and how to get websites ranked. What you will find is that there are limitations on rankings if not all 3 core aspects of SEO are done, and done properly. We will go over what a good SEO company does and the right questions to ask before picking your provider. 
Customer First Keywords
The strategy is everything when it comes to any campaign and picking the right keywords is number one when mapping out your strategy. What does “customer first” keywords mean? It is quite simple, it means you and your SEO company are putting yourselves in your customer’s shoes. What is your potential new customer typing in the search engine to find you? A good SEO provider will have all the proper tools and wisdom to find these keywords.
Technical SEO
With your keyword strategy in place, you need to make sure that the foundation of your website is clean and sound. The wonderful keywords you just picked won’t be picked up by the crawlers if you don’t place them in the right spots on your website. In addition to making sure that crawlers pick up these keywords, a good company needs to make sure that your website is running efficiently by monitoring these aspects of technical SEO.
- Site Speed – Although it’s been debated if site speed is a ranking factor, it most definitely affects your user experience.
- Broken Links – If you’re linking to another site or another page within your site, if those links are broken, it affects your rankings and user experience.
- 404 Errors – Dead pages are bound to happen on every website but if your company is not monitoring and fixing them, they can kill your rankings.
Unique High-Quality Content Production
Another important aspect a good SEO company is to provide is high-quality content. Content production should be much more than just writing blogs:
- Long-Form Content – Normally categorized of anything over 4,000 words, this type of content can really show your knowledge in the industry while telling a story at the same time.
- Digital Assets – These can be any form of content that is more visually appealing than just regular text. These can consist of: infographics, comprehensive guides, etc.
If your SEO provider is good, they will offer these types of content for your campaign to take it to the next level.
Link Building
One of the most time-consuming parts of SEO but definitely one of the most important is link building. This is one of the aspects of SEO that can really set a campaign apart from others. When it comes down to how Google ranks websites, the quality and quantity of the links hold a large amount of weight. Your provider will be able to find out what your linking profile looks like compared to the competitors that are outranking you. From this, it makes increasing website rankings happen quicker since some of the guesswork is taken out.
Reporting
One of if not the biggest differentiating factors between the good and bad SEO company is reporting. Business owners who invest in their marketing want to see results at the end of the day. A good SEO company will be able to report out on all of their deliverables and results so all the ins and outs of your campaign are transparent.
