There are so so many SEO companies out there. So many that promise you the moon and deliver nothing. And many of them are coming from offshore service providers that don’t show you really what they can do, and have very few real and verifiable testimonials. Then when they work for you, they bombard you with spreadsheets, and google docs, and all sorts of information, and long lists of URLs to show you everything that they did for you and how much work they put in. But at the end of the day, none of that matters, and none of that is a benchmark that matters. Want to know the only thing they care about?
The telephone.
Is the phone ringing? Are they getting more leads? Is their business increasing? That’s really the only thing that matters, the only real metric. And really, to be perfectly honest, that’s not the real metric either. The ONLY real metric is money.. Are they making MORE as a result of the SEO / Marketing company’s efforts? This is the one industry where you an literally draw a line directly from the work that an SEO company does all the way to the bottom line of the company.
An internet marketing company is really a lead generation company, and if they don’t talk about generating leads, then don’t hire them. Backlinking, SEO, on page, off page, those are all techniques, those are not the goal. It doesn’t matter how much they improve your metrics based on all the marketing tools and URL analysis tools they use, or what keywords they use. None of it matters. What matters is if they bring more business. It matters if the work that they do really makes your phone ring, and brings you more leads that you can close. More leads leads to more business, and more business leads to repeat business and referrals. Leads are the lifeblood of any business and without them, a business dies. They are the fuel that can change everything, and without them nothing grows and nothing changes.
So when you talk to an internet marketing company, check out your rankings in advance, check out your standing in the Google Maps (and the specifically, the top three, of course) and work with your marketing company to provide them what they need to increase your rankings, and be able to measure the effects of what they do.. They should increase your rankings, they need to get you to page one of the google organic listings, and they need to get you to the top three of the map pack for all of the most important keywords that people use to search for your business – and your internet marketing company should be doing an analysis of that before they do anything else, because if they get that wrong (and they rank you for the wrong keywords) then a lot of time will be wasted and your phone will not ring.
Meanwhile, here is an internet marketing company that cares about your business, and likes to make sure that their bill to you is the bill that pays all the other bills – because they generate revenue when they work. That’s what all internet marketing companies should do.
Right?