7 Questions to Ask Your SEO Company

You’re looking for an expert SEO company in a pit of hundreds self-professed experts. How do you pick the right company to get more traffic and sales so you don’t waste time or money? You ask the right questions!

A lot of SEO companies have a minimum 6-month contract so discovering an unwanted surprise in the first month of the relationship can be costly. Due diligence can be hard. Everyone claims to be good at SEO when all they do is read some blogs, change title tags, and sprinkle a few keywords into content. The good news is you can dig deeper with the right questions to discover how much air is in the head of most agencies.

I’ve delivered good SEO results to companies for over 10 years. I am tired of hearing stories from prospects ripped off by bad SEO companies who decreased their client’s visitors.

The article will give the most potent questions you can ask so your aligned with your SEO agency. I could give you more questions, but they do not amount to much. Wisdom knows what matters. These 7 question will help you through the nuances of SEO to reap the rewards of doing SEO right. Anyone who asks these questions will communicate authority as the person you speak with thinks “this person knows what they’re doing.”

Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.Anthony Robbins

1. “Will you share with me all that you do?”

It’s common for SEO companies to hide what they do to keep a mysterious aspect to their work. They do not share what they do because they either do very little or engage in unethical tactics like black hat SEO.

A company should track the pages where your links are built, pages they’ve edited, content written, videos created, and other completed tasks.

Each month when working with Digital Darts, you get a report containing details of what was done. Emma Filliponi from Australia’s online fashion store Blue Bungalow loves this about working with us. “What I like most is the transparency in terms of what work is actually being done,” says Emma in her testimonial video. “It’s so common that people would work with a freelance SEO specialist who doesn’t want to have any face-to-face contact and you actually don’t know what’s being done to achieve those results. With Digital Darts, we’re in contact frequently during the month. I know exactly what’s being done. I can see the tangible results. It’s just so easy to work together and there’s no set contact hours that we have to abide by. I would recommend anybody who has a Shopify website who is wanting someone who is open and honest to work with Digital Darts.”

2. “Who will make technical changes to my website?”

You need to clarify who will make technical changes to your website since multiple parts of a website can affect SEO. Technical parts of a website that affect SEO include:

• HTTPS security certificate
• Image size, alt text, and file names
• Site speed
• Meta tags for indexation
• Canonicalization tags
• Schema markup
• Hreflang tags
• Title and meta descriptions
• Redirects
• Broken links
• Sitemap optimization

Most of these changes require a web developer. A lot paid social, SEO, or SEM companies are unable to make these changes or will charge extra to do them. Not knowing this before entering into an SEO contract can leave you feeling disappointed that your SEO agency is failing to deliver you tangible results.

The biggest mistake I see companies make in SEO is treating it like its own channel, such as Google Ads. The best performance in SEO comes when multiple teams or individuals across different roles work together. For example, your SEO guy who crafts a strategy with a writer on your team and later reviews each piece content to maximize it for SEO.

A company able to make most technical edits for SEO demonstrates expertise they understand the platform. I’ve heard many stories from Shopify merchants who spoke with search engine optimization experts that have head knowledge of what to do in Shopify, but struggle to do it. SEO consultants may not know the intricacies of Shopify, leaving you unable to execute.

Moreover, being aware of who makes the changes lets you make a better apples-to-apples comparison when judging the price of agencies.

3. “How will you talk with me?”

Are you after weekly updates? Maybe a monthly update works for you? There’s no right answer to this question.

What matters is you get on the same page with communication so your expectations are met. Clarify what reports you’d like.

If your expectations don’t align, talk it through with them. Like a good relationship, you may end up shifting from your original position to meet in the middle as you learn something you requested will only take time, lead to nothing fruitful, and detract from the deliverables.

4. “Do you do black, gray, or white hat SEO?”

Black hat SEO is a set of practices that are in violation of Google guidelines. The practices can cause Google to penalize your domain in search results, making it impossible to rank on the first page. Not many agencies are in this bucket, but I’ve seen a few large ones do black hat.

There are harmful on-page and off-page tactics.

On-page black hat tactics can involve doorway pages where a large numbers of pages are created while the only variable changed is a keyword or two. Doorway pages are common in businesses that target cities who’ll duplicate the same piece of content across pages but swap out the name of the city. Another on-page black hat tactic is hidden text links. A large number of links are added to a page for either link exchanges or internal link building. To avoid harming the user experience, the link color is made the same color as the background to hide it.

Off-page tactics are more common than on-page in black hat SEO. The off-page ones to avoid are link schemes such as public blog networks, low-quality directories, and link exchanges. Google says if you pay for links, identify them with the rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute.

Aside from black, there is gray hat and white hat. The terms evolved from Western movies where a white hat differentiated the good guy from the bad guy who wore a black hat.

Gray hat SEO describes ill-defined strategies in the eyes of Google. It is slightly risky because of its unclear nature, but not necessarily wrong. 500 Google algorithm updates a year can bite gray hat tactics. Not many will tell you they do gray hat and instead label it has white hat.

White hat SEO is seen as pure. It involves a lot of high-quality content creation, community management, and marketing strategy. Expect to pay four-to-five figures a month for this type of SEO.

All black, gray, and white tactics can work. The question is: what risk do you want to deal with? If you want to build a legitimate business that lasts, avoid black hat SEO to help you sleep at night knowing your business online is safe. Know what type of SEO you’re getting into and its risk.

5. “What’s your best link building method?”

“You do link building, right?” A link building strategy is essential to rank your website on the first page of Google for popular search terms.

Links in the eyes of search engines are like votes. A store with more quality votes has a greater chance at improved ranking. Not all links are equal.

Answers to be careful for include forums, article directories, and directory submissions. These are okay to do when done together as part of a whole strategy, but if that’s their best link building method, they’re living in 2008.

There are wrong methods of link building, but no one best method. Look for ethical methods that make sense to you. Ethical methods are good ways for your SEO company to attract links to boost your rankings.

Link building methods I like to use for clients include: reaching out to manufacturers to get listed on their stockist pages, public relations with journalists, directory submissions, blogger collaborations, and outreach to webmasters who manage resource pages.

6. “How do I recover from the penguin update?”

This is more so a tactic rather than a specific question. Once you’ve filtered through a list of SEO companies, organize to meet those you hope to work with. Be respectful by going through their sales process otherwise a sales person may not respond. Once your happy with how things are progressing, ask to speak with the person who would provide the service. Ask SEO questions like:

• “What’s the difference between 301 and 302 redirects?”
• “How would you handle on-page SEO for a multi-lingual site?”
• “What influence does meta descriptions have on rankings?”

Know the answer beforehand so you can judge their response. Listen for uncertainty, but don’t mistake it for nerves.

Many call themselves SEO experts but cannot answer these questions. They may give you an excuse then get back to you once they do online research. It’s fine if they don’t know the answer to a question. You can do great SEO without knowing everything off the top of your head since it is a large discipline. What matters is this piece of the conversation becomes another part of your due diligence.

7. “What SEO results have you achieved for clients?”

The most important question to ask is the results the agency has achieved for their clients. This can save you tens of thousands of dollars in a relationship that goes nowhere.

When you ask about the results achieved for clients, listen for the type of results. You want to hear results that are specific and measurable like increases in organic traffic, sales, and rankings. “We loved working with [x]” is a positive comment, but not one that shows results.

Another way to trust results more is if they are shared by the business owner in a video. Videos are a verifiable proof that the business owner stands behind what they say since they’re speaking. It’s why we spend thousands to shoot videos with clients. Anyone can makeup a text comment for a testimonial on a website, and unfortunately, many agencies do even though that’s illegal.

You can take the question to the next level by contacting past clients of the agency. Be aware that their clients or ex-clients may get contacted a lot so not everyone will reply.

Another variant of the question that takes it to the next level is finding when a project hasn’t gone as planned. Any revelation to this question is the tick that they’re transparent.

I hope these questions help you avoid the common pitfalls business owners make in working with SEO agencies. Ask the questions to select a good partner so you spend your marketing budget wisely. You can generate an enormous amount of sales from organic search.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have about SEO and Shopify. Get in contact.