For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on London as London has small local companies all the way through to large corporates and a large variety of different industries. It also has small one man band companies through to specialised SEO companies. What applies to choosing an SEO company in London will generally apply to your location.
Choosing an SEO company in London can be a difficult task as the SEO industry is not the most transparent. Many agencies work on 6 month or 12 month contracts so the potential loss can be substantial. This short article talks you through what to look for when choosing an SEO Company in London.
The first step in choosing an SEO company in London is to understand what your online goals are as this will have a huge effect on the SEO campaign and therefore the agency that you choose. If you are a plumber for example and work in West London, the SEO work required will be very different to an online store that sells nationwide or even globally and therefore the SEO Company in London that you choose will be different.
You must understand what the SEO companies that you are looking at are offering. Some agencies offer a complete SEO campaign while others only do certain aspects. Typically a web design company that offers SEO will only do the onsite SEO work. Other SEO agencies only do link building, also known as offsite SEO. Obviously most SEO campaigns require both onsite and offsite SEO if they are to be successful. The difficulty with buying link building packages is it is generally sold on volume and not quality. While you can get the onsite work done by a web design agencies and then go and buy link building packages, you have no control on the quality of links being built or the keywords being targeted. A SEO company in London that offers a complete package is accountable for their work and should ensure both the onsite SEO and the link building is done to a high standard.
Typically local campaigns target longer keyword phrases known as long tail keywords which are less competitive and are location specific. Often a Google local business page and good onsite SEO will suffice and bring ample traffic. This can be done by most good web development agencies and a specialist SEO company in London is not required. Local SEO campaigns tend to be a one off project and therefore local SEO campaigns are not overly expensive.
National campaigns in competitive markets require significantly more work and normally require a specialist SEO company in London. For competitive keywords, onsite SEO is not enough and a large amount of link building needs to be done. Link building is very much like voting. The more high quality links the better. If you can imagine, one thousand links from one domain is not as good as one thousand links from a diverse number of domains as it cannot be easily manipulated. Ideally you want to build a large, diverse number of links regularly. This requires on going SEO work.
A specialist SEO company in London will have the capability to build a diverse number of links regularly for relatively little cost. A smaller SEO company that outsources the link building does not have any control on the quality of links being built which is hazardous for obvious reasons.
It is recommended that you choose an SEO company in London where you have your own account manager that you can contact. Monthly reports are paramount and monthly marketing meetings are certainly a big plus point.