Today's marketing increasingly relies on search traffic to create a distinct brand reputation and increase awareness, and search engine traffic also relies on strong, relevant backlinks to targeted pages.
While link building is the cornerstone of a good SEO strategy, the field is dynamic and ever-changing, and only a handful of seasoned professionals can boast of being experts. How can you tell the difference?
Questions To Ask A Link Building Agency
Questions to Ask a Link Building Agency
Low-quality link building services combined with fake guarantees and a better price point than they offer is an increasingly common occurrence – business owners and marketers who are less knowledgeable about SEO are bound to fall into this trap.
Outsourcing link building to an SEO agency is no small task and buying bad links will not only yield poor results but will also have a negative impact on your web presence as Google penalizes such spammy tactics.
This article lists some questions you as france telephone number data a business owner should ask when hiring an agency.
1. What Is Your Link Building Process?
If an agency wants their link building efforts to bear fruit, they must customize the entire process to suit their industry demographics.
From onboarding to strategy development to strategy implementation and reporting, customization is key. Popular backlink techniques like guest posting and broken linking require a true understanding of the customer niche to be successful.
Question the potential agency about their entire link building process as a whole: how they identify your target audience, how they find relevant websites to get broken links from, and what their preferred guest posting forums are.
Knowing a little bit about SEO will help you understand the entire process better and achieve your goals more intelligently and effectively.
The agency should be able to answer whether their tactics are compliant with Google’s Webmaster guidelines , what their process is for evaluating potential linking sites, and what their criteria are for a successful project. A solid foundation and understanding is the foundation of a successful project.
2. What are your credentials?
Generating organic traffic through a solid web presence is a long-term goal. Link building in particular is not about short-term gains, but about gradual and sustainable growth.
If you haven’t established rapport and trust with the agency, this could be detrimental to your quest for a well-developed web presence. You’re hiring an agency that will be responsible for providing a primary source of traffic – at the very least, you can expect an honest and candid conversation that reveals the human side of the partnership.
Questions that connect on a personal level are great icebreakers:
How long have you been working with the agency?
What is your experience with SEO?
Has your agency worked in my industry before?
The questions should go beyond SEO — you want to make sure this is a partnership and not just a sale they want to close. And like all partnerships, this will be a two-way street, so expect some questions in return.
The agency will only want to work with businesses that it finds mutually beneficial. You should be able to answer questions such as:
What is your current market situation?
What are your most important keywords related to the industry?
What is your background in SEO and link building?
Is there another initiative that will affect SEO rankings instead?
This exercise not only builds valuable trust between two potential long-term partners, but also develops a general understanding of each party's specific roles and the goals they are trying to achieve through this coalition.
Overview of Website Traffic Sources
3. How Do They Analyze Results?
Link building, as a measurable process, can be viewed as time-consuming as search engine rankings only increase over time.
Unless the problem consists of some obvious technical issue that can be fixed overnight to put the website in a respectable ranking, it may take weeks of careful data application to show an upward trend in SERP rankings.
The agency will need to come up with meaningful KPIs that showcase positive indicators of success and growth. Meaningful KPIs require extensive communication to define indicators that both parties agree on.
Evaluate these based on what results would allow you to consider this project a success for your business? What can be measured as a conversion for your site?
