Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to maximize your ROI with your SEO Company, you must first recognize that if you have a website, you should be doing SEO! In order to ensure that you are maximizing your ROI with your SEO Company, there are a few things that you should be open to communicating with your SEO Company in order get the best results from your investment.
1. What Are Your Short & Long Term Business Goals?
Where do you want to be this year? Where do you want to be in 5 years? It is important to have an idea of where your business is, and where you want to be. Defining these business goals, and communicating them with your SEO Company can help devise a strategy that works into helping develop your business to achieve your business goals.
2. Who Is Your Audience?
Have a clear and defined idea of the types of customers that you are trying to attract to your website. Your SEO Company can help assist with identifying the demographic and geographical characteristics of the audience that you are trying to reach with your strategy by using helpful tools such as Google Analytics. By defining your audience with your SEO Company, this will help you get in the mind of your customer and how you want them to interact with your site when they land on it (eg. Performing a site search, filling out a form, going to your product pages, etc.). Not only this, but your SEO Company should know what the value of a new customer means to you!
3. Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?
It is important to optimize your website for keywords to improve the SEO performance. When your website structure links and navigation work, and your website contains quality content your website can be easily identified by the Google crawlers to be relevant for searchers. After all, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, you want to make sure you are seen in search results! It's important to have a starting point of the types of keywords that are important to your business. From here, your SEO company will help you find a more extensive list of keywords that you should be ranking for - and therefore your website will be optimized as such.
4. Offline Marketing Strategies Are Just As Important
There is a world that exists in the offline world that needs to be tapped into. While online marketing strategies can definitely assist in bringing in new traffic, it is important to reach out in the offline strategies to help improve brand awareness. For example, advertising on bus benches, in newspapers to reaching out to local radio, TV commercials or TV interviews are all great strategies that can work hand-in-hand with your online strategies. Keep your SEO Company up to date with the offline marketing initiatives that your business may be undertaking to see if there are any online initiatives to compliment the strategies.
5. Produce Unique Content
Not only should your website have unique content to support your business, products and services, but you can help answer the questions that your customers & potential customers may be asking through blog content. With your guidance and feedback, you and your SEO Company can work collaboratively to come up with unique content that is relevant to your business, as well as carries search volume around keywords & questions that people are asking related to your products or services. A combination of keyword research as well as contributing some frequently asked questions can do wonders for your business! And why not take it one step further by engaging your customers through social media!
6. Engage Your Customers
Take the content that you are writing for your website and share on your social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram! You can also engage with your clients by asking questions, asking for feedback, contribute to discussions and more! A great way to assist in engaging your customers through social media is with a paid strategy similar to AdWords. Talk to your SEO Company to figure out a strategy that would work best to meet your business goals!
7. Introduce New Strategies...and Continue To Test Existing Strategies
There is always room for improvement! Ask your SEO company what you can do to expand on your existing strategies help your business grow!
8. Most Importantly ... Maintain Transparency With Your SEO Company
To make all of the above work, you must maintain transparency with your SEO Company to help your business grow. Your SEO Company wants to know when business is good, and when business is less than good so that revisions to the strategy can be made if required. Remember, with over 1 billion websites now existing on the internet, your SEO company needs assistance in knowing the above to ensure that your strategy will be providing a good ROI, and helping your business grow!