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5 top tips to help evaluate your SEO service

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Are you paying for a good SEO service?
It’s far too easy for SEO agencies to blind new or existing clients with science, random terminology and techie talk. Our SEO team at Coast Digital apply a best practice approach to SEO, and like all the other services we provide we make sure our work can measured. We believe that clients paying for a managed SEO service deserve to see a return on their investment at any point during the management period.

Here are 5 tips to help evaluate paid SEO:

1. Do you have agreed goals/targets?
Discussion with the client to understand what they want to achieve from SEO is vitally important. Agree suitable keyword targets using a variety of the free tools available online.

The more the SEO agency can understand about the product/service offering at this stage, the better.

2. Are you tracking traffic correctly?
Being able to track how much traffic or revenue comes from a particular keyword is vitally important in proving your worth as an SEO agency.

There are many forms of website tracking available on the market (most of them are free) and all clients paying for SEO should be able to use and read these stats packages to evaluate the service they are paying for.

3. Were you sold a promise to be on page 1 in no time?
There are no guarantees when it comes to SEO. If you are currently waiting for your keyword to appear on page 1 in Google because you’ve been promised it will be there in 2 months – you may be waiting for a long time!

Expectations should be set from the outset. Any experienced SEO exec would say: it’s not how long it takes you to get there; it’s what you need to do to get there.

4. Regular reporting & discussion
Good communication between client and agency is key to effective marketing – but even more so with the practice of SEO. It’s too easy for clients to think SEO is being dealt with by their agency – as they perceive SEO as being very technical!

This is the wrong attitude; clients should take an interest and be inquisitive, perhaps even to the point of obsessive. Using a personal approach, i.e. an account manager who’ll speak to the client regularly about what’s being worked on; ideas and reports; adds value to the service.

5. Innovation. Are you getting this from your existing SEO agency?
Why pay for the same thing month-in-month out? Especially if stats begin to plateau and you’re on easy street. Innovation brings more success; this should come naturally if you are paying for good SEO.

Any doubts about your existing SEO agency? Talk to us today.

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