Choosing an SEO agency for your business can be challenging. So, if you have selected the SEO company of your choice, congratulations!
However, you need to ensure that this company suits your needs. Relying on the wrong SEO services for a long time will hurt your website and budget. Whereas, analyzing their performance over time will help you understand if you should work with them further.
This article provides the ultimate guide to evaluate their performance and decide if they are delivering the promised results.
When Should You Analyze the Performance
Everyone loves to rank on top in SERPs, but it takes time and effort. SEO is complicated, and using white hat techniques takes months to propel your website to the top. It might surprise you, but it’s not good news if your website ranks top within a few days.
Typically, SEO companies that bring your web pages to the top instantly use black hat SEO; it can harm your website in the long run.
Now, you might wonder, “So, when should I analyze the SEO agency’s performance?”
The right way is to let them do their thing for 3 to 4 months with continuous reports each month. Result-oriented SEO companies work on both on-page and off-page optimization using legitimate techniques. They can be time-consuming but Google-compliant and long-lasting.
Thus, asking them about regular updates and a detailed report every month is usually a good idea. In case you do not see any progress in 4 months, it’s suitable to look for another option.
But how do we judge their progress? Let’s tell you!
How to Evaluate the Performance of Your SEO Company
Ask their Goals
If an SEO agency does not have clear goals regarding your website optimisation, it might not deliver the results you expect. The best agencies always have clear goals, often broken down into smaller milestones. They usually derive these goals based on your business objectives and optimisation requirements.
You can also ask them about the milestones and the results they plan to deliver. While they might not be able to give you exact numbers, they should share the KPIs and strategies.
Analyze Communication
Besides understanding the milestones and strategies, seeing how they respond to your questions is important. Sometimes agencies do not appreciate frequent client meetings. Yet, the right SEO company satisfies your concerns. See how they respond to your concerns and how often they share the reports with you; ask them for a call periodically to discuss progress.
Analyze Transparency
Transparency is an important characteristic of a good SEO agency. Though the company might not give results instantly, they must be transparent about the process. If they try to find excuses for under-delivering, it could be a red flag. On the other hand, if they are honest about the progress, it’s better than no progress. Encourage them to work better, but appreciate their transparency.
Check Keyword Ranking
Besides the work ethics, KPIs and technical analysis also helps decide about the SEO company’s future with you. Keyword ranking is the foremost metric SEO services start working on. They research the right keywords and incorporate them into your website. Thus, it brings you traffic apart from PPC and Google ads.
The results show after a few weeks; you rank for a few keywords, if not many. At the same time, you must also assess how many keywords your site ranks for. Whether you are an e-commerce business, a blog site, or another business, ranking for multiple keywords is critical.
You can check keyword search results using tools like Google Search Console and Semrush’s Position Tracking Tool.
Analyze Organic Traffic
When your web pages rank for multiple keywords, they eventually boost organic traffic to the website. GA4 helps you analyze the visitors to your website and sessions by every user. The basics of the report are simple, and can easily check website traffic metrics.
Compare the current organic traffic with the previous months to see the improvement; it is one of the easiest ways to see if your SEO company is making efforts.
Check for Local Optimization
Local SEO is important to businesses with a physical location. And if you are targeting a local audience, your SEO company must focus on local SEO. It includes geo-targeting and ranking on Google Mapsb for better visibility. However, you’ll need to mention it to the SEO agency when they start working on your site.
Bounce rate
You can also study the optimisation results by analyzing the bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people going back immediately after coming to your website; they do not move past the first page they visit. While it is not a bad thing all the time, it might indicate that the users did not find what they were looking for.
Assess Backlinks
Obtaining backlinks from the best in the business is integral to SEO. SEO services focusing on backlinks from credible websites show they are working in the right direction. Thus, you can assess if your SEO company has gained any backlinks for your site in the past few weeks. Also, check the backlinking websites’ domain trust rates to determine their benefits.
Check Session Duration
A study by Semrush showed that the session duration is the second most important SEO KPI after website visits. If your SEO agency is also responsible for optimisng content to improve SEO, the session duration will show user engagement. Longer session duration shows that the visitors found what they were looking for.
How to Evaluate the Performance of a Long-term SEO Company
If you have been working with your SEO agency for around a year, you can assess them on further parameters. Some of the SEO factors that help evaluate their performance include:
- Improved keyword ranking
- Measure ROI
- Increased organic traffic
- Better visibility
- Increased domain authority and rating
- Better organic conversions
- Higher CTR
- Lower bounce rate
Key Takeaway
Evaluating your SEO agency’s performance is critical to assessing if they are bringing results. While analyzing the KPIs and reports in detail is an expert’s job, you can also evaluate their performance. The metrics include keyword ranking, organic traffic and conversions, and session duration. You should also analyze backlinks, local SEO, and bounce rates for further assessment. The right SEO company will also improve visibility, CTR, domain authority, and rating. Analyze your SEO service on these factors to see if they are delivering results.