9 Steps To Choose The Best SEO Agency In 2024

9 Steps To Choose The Best SEO Agency In 2024

Posted on
January 10, 2024

In this day and age, there are many ways you can earn a living. One of those ways is to write and post blogs and articles on the Internet. Now, it begs the question: how to choose an SEO agency that is perfect for your needs and will make your articles successful? It is already a fact that with the right keywords and backlinks, you will be able to rank high in Google’s search results and by default, get more clicks and revenue if you are subscribed to a pay-per-click advertisement deal.

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization has been of great importance for the last couple of years. There have been many YouTube videos, articles and much more telling you how important following SEO rules is, from using the most common keyword in a given topic, ranging to how many times you have to use said keyword per paragraph in your article. This has tapped into a new job market- SEO agencies. These agencies analyze Google’s search results algorithm and give you ways to tweak your articles and writings in such a way that your work is one of the first links that users can see in the search results.

Freshboost can help you in your journey with no loss from your side. Get a free audit for tips to improve your Google ranking in 48 hours.
Let’s see some criteria for how to choose an SEO agency.

9 Priority Criteria for Choosing a Result-Driven SEO Agency

There are a lot of SEO agencies out there that advertise their services. As a result, you’ll be spoilt for choice, unsure of what and how to choose an SEO agency which will not be a total sham or just doesn’t suit your needs. Here are the 9 main criteria you’ll have to look out for while searching for an SEO agency.

HIGH PRIORITY

These are the ones you definitely have to look out for when you ask the question: “How to choose an SEO agency?”

1. SEO Strategy Execution Framework

One of the first things to look for in a good SEO Agency is their transparency about how they conduct their business and how they research the best keywords and backlinks for your website to be ranked highly in Google Search results. This is one of the most important criteria when thinking about how to choose an SEO agency. When an SEO agency openly shares how they boost your website's Google ranking, it builds trust. It's crucial to ensure they only use effective and ethical methods to help your site gain visibility online.

2. Client Testimonials Validation

When thinking about how to choose an SEO agency or any product, most of us look for reviews or “client testimonials'' which detail the use of a product and how good or bad it has been for them. Client testimonials also show how they’ve used the product and give you an unbiased view of the product.

This is true when it comes to choosing an SEO agency. Any SEO agency readily showing their client testimonials is a good agency.

3. Exemplary Portfolio Showcase

One of the criteria on how to choose an SEO agency is to view their portfolio. If they have an exemplary portfolio, which is proof of their previous works or deals, it means that they are an experienced and reliable company with whom you can partner.

Freshboost has quite an extensive portfolio when it comes to providing services for SEO. For more, you can go through their portfolio here.

4. Check Agency Reviews on Crowd Platforms

When trying to find the best business or product from a company, it is recommended to check the reviews of an agency. When researching how to choose an SEO agency, getting the opinion of a neutral third party is a big plus. You can go to dedicated communities in Reddit, Stackoverflow and many other community-centric platforms to see some reviews on the agency that you have in mind to choose whether you go with them or not.

MEDIUM PRIORITY

Now that we’ve gone through the most important criteria that should influence you on how to choose an SEO agency, just a bit more effort will really shine through especially when it comes to success. You can also look through some options that may not be the gospel to answering your question on how to choose an SEO agency, but they still play an important role. Here are a few criteria you can look out for.

1. Holistic Service Delivery Beyond Reporting

One of the many ways to encourage customer loyalty, even in E-commerce sites is to focus more on the client as a human. It is encouraged to keep professional contact with the client that includes other aspects other than simply business. This encourages existing clients to stay loyal to your company and its services and they will also go on to get more customers for you. When factoring criteria on how to choose an SEO agency, any customer specifically mentioning an employee’s name in their reviews and also reports on being friendly and inclusive fosters a place for holistic well-being, which also increases the efficiency of the SEO agency.

2. Specialised and diverse team composition

Any agency that gives you not only SEO services, but also analytics for your website, historical analysis of your content and also gives you a benchmark of how much you will earn for pay-per-click advertising services most suited for your convenience has a diverse team of not only SEO specialists, but business analysts and financial analysts to maximize your profit. Such services are only possible if the agency boasts of a multi-disciplinary team with teams working on different aspects of SEO analysis. This is also a criterion you should look out for when researching how to choose an SEO agency.

Freshboost takes pride and acknowledgement in their diverse team working tirelessly behind the scenes to get the best tips and positions of high-intent keywords for your website to pop off.

3. Industry-specific Thought Leadership

Any agency led by or has thought leaders as employees will always have an edge in the SEO game. These thought leaders are always up to date with the newest SEO practices available and don’t back down from challenges. With new SEO trends down to a tee, these thought leaders will be along all the way to your success in marketing your product. Such a factor, while not an important thing, should be considered when you want to know how to choose an SEO agency.
Freshboost developers work with known SEO experts who are great thought leaders to provide you with the best experience you have. Click here to learn more.

LOW PRIORITY

When it comes to knowing how to choose an SEO agency, going the extra mile to find the perfect fit for your content works wonders down the line. Even though these pointers are not high up the list on deciding how to choose an SEO agency, these criteria will still help you decide on an SEO agency.

1. Transparency

In earlier points, you read about how important it is for a service/agency to be transparent about how they conduct their business. If there is nothing shady for them to hide, they will be transparent about their products/services to you. These companies will also attract many customers which will also prompt the business to improve their services to cater to them accordingly.

Transparency of a business should be an important aspect when you are thinking about how to choose an SEO agency. Good transparency guarantees great communication between the agency and the client

2. Clarity in Cultural Dynamics

One of the most important things when deciding on how to choose an SEO agency is to choose your target audience, be it cultural or area-wise. With clarity on the culture and knowledge of SEO trends, agencies can generate organic backlinks. Freshboost was able to generate about 4000 organic, legitimate backlinks within 1 year. 

Just as these criteria are important to give you a guideline on how to choose an SEO agency, you need to look out for fake websites that advertise themselves as SEO agencies but scam you by stealing your money.

Red Flags to identify a fake SEO agency

When you are looking at how to choose an SEO agency, you will come across many fake agencies that promise you many things but will fail to deliver. It is crucial to differentiate between real and fake SEO agencies so that those who aren’t as knowledgeable will not fall into a trap and get scammed. Here are some red flags you can identify from the get-go while looking at their website. 

1. Guaranteed top rankings

It is very difficult to predict Google’s search engine algorithm. Without intensive and rigorous analysis and knowledge, it is difficult for even experienced SEO agencies to guarantee the top-most ranking in the search results. So, when agencies “guarantee” the topmost ranks, you can consider it a scam.

2. The Illusion of Overnight Success

Many people are not immediately aware of how SEO and page rankings work initially and are under the assumption that they will make a breakthrough in a very short time. This is, however, far from the truth. Most of these “agencies” will guarantee success in an unrealistically short time.

3. Quantity over Quality backlinks

In a bid to appear at the top when you search on how to choose an SEO agency, many “agencies” will try to stay at the top with many black-hat practices such as link-farming or keyword stuffing in your work. If you see any of their portfolios and you can see some words that do not make sense in a paragraph, it is probably keyword stuffing. These “agencies” will have link farms (fake links with no meaningful value to them) and do keyword stuffing to artificially boost the website's ranking in the search results.

While the practice may be tempting, Google will penalize you if it catches along. There are some preventive measures to prevent scam websites or websites of little value from taking the top spot in Google’s search results. Google takes this position very seriously.

4. Unbelievably Low Prices

It goes without saying that following SEO trends, researching keywords, and generating organic backlinks is a very resource-intensive process. If you are going for a budget, avoid going for very cheap offers for SEO marketing strategies. They might try black-hat practices or unethical ways to artificially boost your site’s ranking which will get you penalized down the line.

Instead, consider using a free audit from Freshboost, with no strings, no payment and a single-usage guarantee to get tips and tricks to boost your site rankings.

How to work with an SEO Agency?

Once you’ve answered the question: “How to choose an SEO agency?” you need to know how to work with the agency to bring out the most desirable results which will benefit both the agency and you.

1. COMMUNICATION AND REPORTING

The key aspect of a business’s success is the ability to communicate and report accurately and concisely.

1.1 Establish Clear Communication Channels

It is important to be in frequent contact with your agency. Schedule frequent meetings (depending on the schedule) once every two days to hear about the progress of the work or any significant updates.

1.2 Review Reporting Metrics

One of the most important aspects of a project is to analyze KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and receive actionable reports from the agency on the progress in KPIs and the status of each pipeline.

1.3 Ask Questions and Receive Feedback

To improve your website’s rank metrics in Google’s search results, you’ll need to ask the right questions to the trusted agency and apply their feedback to your final product before releasing it to increase your chances of success.

2. PERFORMANCE AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Working with an SEO agency to kick off your website is essentially a project. A project has several workflows and pipelines and its path to completion is generally not straightforward.

2.1. Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

In every project, there is an indicator to determine the status and progress of the project. It is a measure of the feasibility of the project. With good reporting metrics and communication along with responses and feedback, you can accurately track the project’s KPI, improving your professional relationship with the agency.

2.2. Review Project Deliverables

When the blueprint of the project is given, all the possible outcomes, including the hypothetical ones are given. All of these outcomes should be checked and reviewed by you so that you can decide on the most relevant goal and work with your agency to achieve that.

2.3. Adapt and Adjust Strategies

Every project activity has an estimated shortest time and an estimated longest time to be completed. If an activity exceeds the longest time, you and your agency should be ready to cut corners in other activities and adjust your plan of attack.

3. MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIP AND TRANSPARENCY

One of the most popular success mantras when it comes to a coalition project is to maintain a professional relationship between both parties (the SEO agency and you) while also being transparent with the conduct of business from both sides.

3.1. Provide access and resources

Both parties shouldn’t hesitate to provide access to their data to perform analysis to get better results. Sometimes, finding high-intent keywords and organic backlinks may go over the budget and hence, you shouldn’t be sparse with your resources either and try to help the other party as much as possible.

3.2. Openly discuss challenges and opportunities

One of the main aspects of transparency between parties, especially an agency and its client, is to discuss not only the pluses but also the caveats that come along with making a specific decision related to the SEO Analysis project. By opening discussions, you can brainstorm together to reach a solution.

Choose the Right SEO Agency to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

If you want a test run of how you can improve your website’s ranking in Google’s search results, you can partner up with Freshboost and get a free audit once for your website. Freshboost not only gives you a comprehensive document detailing some factors but also provides you with a video essay on how to improve your business website and will provide you with services for it. Freshboost provides you with solutions to stop your website from leaking leads, and also fix technical SEO issues you may have in your blog/article.

Freshboost developers work with resident SEO experts to improve the position of high-intent keywords in your website. It has the distinct achievement of tripling the number of backlinks in a single quarter. Within a year, Freshboost was able to generate over 4000 backlinks. Freshboost has regularly been able to capture 1-3 SERPs within a month. From this, you can see how Freshboost can play an important role in your business.

Conclusion

We know that to be ranked at the top of Google’s search results, SEO is indispensable. Not many people are aware of key SEO strategies and how Google’s search engine optimization algorithm will rank the pages based on them. One is the number of keywords in the article and the other most common way to introduce organic backlinks. Due to the complex nature, SEO agencies have popped off, helping you build optimal SEO strategies.

Join Freshboost for a free audit. If you’re satisfied, you can avail further services with them.

Description

Pricing

Webflow plans cost

Webflow has varied plans depending on your requirements.
The lowest plans start from $14 and the highest can go above $300/month for enterprise sites.

Developer cost

Most custom web-flow websites require additional HTML, and CSS code to change the appearance and this will require a developer. 
$25/hour to $150/hour depending on regions

Designer cost

The custom Webflow site will have a custom design, which will require a design.
Starts from $50/hour and upwards depending on Region

Integrations

Webflow uses integration to work with third-party data sites or apps like Zapier.
Integrations like Zapier start at $19.99/month.

Site Type

E-commerce sites are heavy, while small business sites are light.
A small custom site can range from $3500. Whereas, ecommerce sites will start from $10,000 and above
Conference
When
Location
Sydney SEO Conference‍Mar. 1, 2024‍Sydney, Australia‍
WTSFest London‍Mar. 8, 2024‍London, UK‍
PubCon‍Mar 4-6, 2024‍Las Vegas, US‍
SMX Munich‍Mar. 12 & 13, 2024‍Munich, Germany‍
SMX Paris‍Mar. 14 & 15, 2024‍Paris, France‍
Friends of Search‍Mar. 21, 2024‍Amsterdam, Netherlands‍
SEO Mastery Summit‍Apr. 9 - 11, 2024‍Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam‍
BrightonSEO‍Apr. 24 & 25, 2024 / Oct. 3 & 4, 2024‍Brighton, UK‍
Mozcon‍Jun. 3 & 4, 2024‍Seattle, US‍
WTSFest Berlin‍Jun. 7, 2024‍Berlin, Germany‍
LondonSEO XL‍Jun. 13, 2024‍London, UK‍
SEO on the Beach‍Jun. 14 & 15, 2024‍La Manga, Spain‍
WTSFest USA‍Sep. 19, 2024‍Philadelphia, US‍
Chiang Mai SEO Conference‍Nov 22 & 23‍Chiang Mai, Thailand‍
International Search Summit‍Nov. 14, 2024‍Barcelona, Spain‍
BrightonSEO (US edition)‍Nov. 19 & 20, 2024‍
San Diego, US
UPDATE SUMMARY
DATE
DURATION
November 2023 reviews update8 Nov 202329 days
November 2023 core update2 Nov 202325 days, 21 hours
October 2023 core update5 Oct 202313 days, 23 hours
Ranking is experiencing an ongoing issue5 Oct 202326 days
October 2023 spam update4 Oct 202315 days, 12 hours
September 2023 helpful content update14 Sep 202313 days, 11 hours
August 2023 core update22 Aug 202316 days, 3 hours
April 2023 reviews update12 Apr 202313 days, 2 hours
March 2023 core update15 Mar 202313 days, 7 hours
February 2023 product reviews update21 Feb 202314 days

Don’t search far away, When Freshboost’s Free Trial is on your way!

Murali
SEO Analyst
Murali
SEO Analyst
Get a free SEO audit. Turn your website into a revenue engine
Audit my website now
Signup for our blog
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Frequently asked questions

Is SEO important for eCommerce platforms?

Yes, SEO is crucial for eCommerce platforms. It enhances visibility on search engines, attracts potential customers, and improves the chances of higher conversion rates, ultimately boosting online sales.

How to increase eCommerce sales with SEO?

To boost eCommerce sales with SEO, focus on keyword optimization, create high-quality and relevant content, optimize product pages, improve website speed, utilize social media, encourage customer reviews, and invest in a mobile-friendly design.

How Is SEO for E-commerce Different?

SEO for E-commerce differs in product-focused optimization, dealing with large inventories, optimizing product pages, handling duplicate content issues, addressing seasonal fluctuations, and focusing on user experience to encourage conversions. It's a specialized approach tailored for online retail.

Which Ecommerce Platform is Best for SEO?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento offer good SEO capabilities. The best choice depends on your business needs, content management preferences, and technical expertise.

What are the benefits of SEO for eCommerce Platform?

SEO for eCommerce platforms brings increased organic traffic, higher visibility in search engine results, improved user experience, enhanced credibility, and better chances of converting leads into customers, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Frequently asked questions

Is pay-per-click advertising worth it?

PPC advertising offers targeted reach, measurable results, and fast outcomes, making it valuable for businesses. It allows precise audience targeting and provides detailed analytics for performance tracking. While it delivers quick results, it requires ongoing investment and time for management. Additionally, competitiveness in certain industries can raise costs and pose challenges.

How is ranking different when comparing PPC vs SEO?

PPC: Paid placement based on bidding and ad quality for immediate results and precise targeting.SEO: Organic ranking influenced by website quality and content relevance, takes time to build and maintain.

How Is SEO for E-commerce Different?

SEO for E-commerce differs in product-focused optimization, dealing with large inventories, optimizing product pages, handling duplicate content issues, addressing seasonal fluctuations, and focusing on user experience to encourage conversions. It's a specialized approach tailored for online retail.

How do SEO and PPC work together?

SEO and PPC complement each other by improving online visibility and driving traffic. PPC provides keyword insights for SEO, while SEO informs PPC strategies. PPC serves as a testing ground for SEO keywords, enhancing organic optimization efforts. Together, they increase SERP visibility, optimize landing pages, and improve user experience and conversions. Additionally, PPC data informs SEO content strategies, resulting in better online performance overall.

How much do PPC agencies charge?

PPC agencies offer services to assist businesses in handling their PPC campaigns, with costs typically ranging from $350 to $5,000 monthly or 12 to 30% of ad spend per month.

Frequently asked questions

What criteria should I consider when selecting an SEO agency?

When looking at how to choose an SEO agency, you’ll need to go through any available client testimonials that’ll be available in their website. Also, check if they’re transparent about their business approach to you and whether they possess a multi-disciplinary team.

How can I assess and evaluate the capabilities of an SEO agency?

When you research how to choose an SEO agency, you can evaluate their capabilities beforehand by going through their previous sample works, going through client testimonials and also going through community forums to check for reviews regarding the SEO Agency you’re looking out for.

What factors should I weigh when choosing an SEO specialist?

The factors that influence your question of how to choose an SEO agency should be to check if their portfolio is diverse, and whether they have good client testimonials, and they don’t guarantee you top ranks in Google’s search results.

What steps should I take to pick a local SEO company for my business?

Go through the company’s portfolio that is publicly available. Also, while looking for pointers on how to choose an SEO agency for your business, you can go through your local SEO agency’s client testimonials and research the company’s cultural dynamics.

Frequently asked questions

What is Plastic Surgery SEO?

Plastic surgery SEO is a specific type of search engine optimization (SEO) focused on attracting potential patients to a plastic surgeon's website. It involves various tactics to improve the website's visibility in search engine results for relevant keywords.

Why SEO for Plastic Surgeons Is Important?

SEO is an essential tool for plastic surgeons seeking to increase online visibility, rank high on SERP, attract qualified leads, and ultimately convert them into patients.

How long does it take for medical SEO to work?

Based on SEO strategies and the quality of content, initial improvements can be expected within the first three months. Achieving top positions in search results and driving traffic typically takes an average of six months.

How do you get plastic surgery leads?

Utilize 3D visualizations, Content Marketing & Webchat, patient-focused blogs, testimonials, mobile optimization, and SEO to generate plastic surgery leads.

Frequently asked questions

What is manufacturing SEO?

Manufacturing SEO involves optimizing a manufacturer's online presence to improve search engine rankings and visibility, attracting potential clients and enhancing brand awareness.

How does SEO benefit a manufacturing company?

SEO benefits manufacturing companies by increasing online visibility, attracting targeted leads, and establishing credibility, ultimately boosting brand awareness and facilitating business growth.

How can manufacturing companies improve SEO?

Manufacturing companies can enhance SEO by optimizing website content, incorporating relevant keywords, improving site speed, and utilizing quality backlinks for a stronger online presence.

How do you get plastic surgery leadsWhat is the main mistake of SEO that manufacturing companies make??

The main SEO mistake manufacturing companies make is neglecting to focus on industry-specific keywords and failing to regularly update and optimize their online content for search engines.

freshboost-semrush-agency