How To Tell If the SEO Company You Hired Is Working

Did you hire a reliable SEO agency? How do you know whether or not your SEO company is effective? We've got answers.

As a small-business owner, you want to grow your customer base and increase revenue. One of the best ways to do this is to hire an SEO agency that improves your search engine results page (SERP) rankings, click-through rates, and website traffic. 

But how do you know whether that agency is pulling its weight? Are they working hard enough for your business, or is their strategy ineffective?

How to know if you hired a good SEO company

SEO was the second best-performing approach to gaining marketing-qualified leads (MQL), in 2022, according to Gartner.^[1]

It's therefore no surprise that many companies outsource services to SEO agencies to take advantage of their knowledge and experience, but it can be challenging to know if the company you trusted with your SEO is working hard enough to achieve your objectives and if their SEO strategies are working.

Here are some key things to look for as you assess your SEO company's performance.

It has deliverables and recommendations

Evaluating the services you receive will help you determine whether your company is providing good value for money, and working hard enough to improve your search rankings.

Common deliverables include:

• Website audits, which review how well your site performs according to SEO best practices. A good SEO company should identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website from a search engine optimization perspective (e.g., determining how crawlable your website is). 

• Keyword research, which is the process of choosing the most relevant keywords to include in your content based on queries from search engine users. Your SEO company might use the latest keyword research tools to find the best keywords to target for your industry and region. 

• Content creation, which involves creating content for your website, such as blog posts. An experienced agency will work with copywriters and editors to create SEO-driven content that resonates with your target audience. 

• On-page SEO, which involves optimizing various aspects of your website so it appears higher in SERP rankings. Your company should offer services such as link building, creating title tags, and coming up with the best URLs for content. 

• Off-page SEO, which refers to activities completed away from your website that improve your search rankings. These activities include writing social media posts and adding information to third-party review websites.

Deliverables aren't the only way to assess whether your SEO agency is working. The agency you hire should also offer recommendations on how to further improve your SERP rankings, such as:

• Using new-to-you social media channels to increase brand awareness and engage potential customers.

• Investing in new technologies for content creation, such as video and podcasts.

• Making technical improvements to your website, such as purchasing a new server to improve website loading times.

Agreeing to these recommendations might involve additional costs. For example, making technical improvements to your website can require considerable funds. 

Whether you approve these recommendations or not doesn't matter: the fact that your SEO company provides regular suggestions proves it is invested in your success. Your agency should ask frequent questions about what you want to get from your SEO strategy, showing a commitment to your ongoing partnership.

Measurable improvements

Of course, an SEO company can provide as many deliverables and recommendations as it likes. But, the best way to tell if your SEO agency is working really hard for your business is by seeing improvements in your search rankings. 

Your agency should provide regular reports (preferably weekly) about the status of your SEO strategy. These reports will tell you whether your rankings are improving for specific keywords and the number of people who access your website from SERP listings. While reviewing these reports is important, it's also crucial to check your SEO results for yourself.

Here are some of the metrics you can track or check using the same tools your company probably uses:

• Evaluate rankings for the keywords your SEO company targets using a tool such as Google Search Console to see whether these keywords perform effectively and drive traffic to your pages.

• Check the amount of organic traffic on your website that comes from search engines and whether it has increased from before you started working with your SEO company using popular, widely-available SEO tools and dashboards. 

• Evaluate click-through rates to see whether these metrics have improved since your agency started working for your business. 

• See whether you've picked up additional social media followers since working with your SEO company. If more people have started following you recently, that could be a sign your agency has improved brand awareness through SEO.

An example of performance tracking in Google Search Console

4 signs you hired an ineffective SEO company

You can also tell if your SEO company is working by assessing its weaknesses.

It doesn't share its techniques with you

How can you know whether your SEO is working if your company doesn't communicate properly? Perhaps your SEO agency doesn't tell you how it improves your search rankings or provides little information about the tools and techniques it uses. 

While this might not be a problem if you experience positive marketing results, it could indicate that your company uses outdated or black hat SEO methods that might jeopardize your reputation or cause search engines to penalize your site.

Black hat SEO techniques include: 

• Keyword stuffing: Using the same keywords repeatedly in content to try and manipulate search rankings. 

• Content automation: Creating content with AI tools and scripts.

• Link schemes: Using irrelevant or unnatural links in your content to trick search engines.

• Doorway pages: Web pages created specifically to manipulate search rankings. These pages often provide no real value to internet users.

Unlike white hat SEO, these methods violate SEO best practices, resulting in your website being penalized or even banned from search engines like Google.

There's an increase in suspicious or low-quality links

Backlink analysis tools determine the quality of links your SEO company uses on your website. If these links are low-quality because they include false or dangerous information, your site might be penalized on search engine results pages. 

SEO companies that integrate suspicious or low-quality links into your website either don't know what they're doing or don't care about the reputation of your company.

It has nothing to show for its efforts

Maybe you don't receive regular reports because there's nothing to show. Perhaps your search rankings haven't increased in months, despite the agency's best efforts to improve SEO. In this scenario, you should ask your agency why it isn't fulfilling its responsibilities. Communication is key to telling whether your SEO company is working for you.

Rankings or traffic drops

Search rankings can take a while to improve, especially for highly competitive keywords. In fact, it can take weeks or months for your company to build your search rankings and generate results.

However, if your rankings or traffic decrease after working with your SEO agency, there's something seriously wrong. If you experience a drop in SEO performance, your agency is probably ineffective.