9 Steps To Choose The Best SEO Agency In 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.