When it comes to hiring the right SEO professional, it’s crucial you do it right. Otherwise, your business could end up being in a worse situation than it’s already in and, even more important, could be penalized by the search engines in the most severe ways.

Before you hire an SEO company, ask them what steps they take to give your business the best chance of competing in the search engines. They should come back and outline the below steps.

Learn About Your Business

One of the first steps that an SEO professional will take before executing their ideas is to learn more about your business and what it does to provide solutions to consumers. This not only gives them a chance to better serve you, but it also gives them a chance to know everything there is to know about your business, to ensure they get their detailed plans in order. Of course, learning about your business isn’t the only thing they’ll need to learn – they’ll also want to know about the type of people who look for products/services like yours. This is one of the most important steps to determine what SEO route is the best and most effective to take your digital presence to the next level.

Prepare a Plan

Once they’ve learned about your business and demographic, they’ll now need to brainstorm and come up with ways to ensure they get their marketing agency techniques right. They’ll come up with various tactics and may well even compare your business to another client to give them a better chance of producing the best results. They will come up with a plan at this stage and will go over it multiple times, adding more details to give them a better chance of being a success in the search engines.

Execute the Plan

Once all parties are happy with the plan, it’s time to put that plan into action. This is one of the most time-consuming steps, as they’ll need to follow the plan in great detail, but also adapt if they feel there are better opportunities to take your business forward. This typically involves all the common marketing methods you’ve heard of, like content marketing, building backlinks, and even altering your website in some way so it’s better for the search engines to navigate.

Measure Results

Once the plan is in full motion and you’re already seeing results, an SEO professional will now look at the insights to see what’s working and what can be done better. They’ll use all the tools they can get their hands on to ensure their plan is working. This usually means sieving their way through as much data as they have access to. Data speaks a thousand words when it comes to SEO – it’s the difference in being successful or a failure.

SEO is always going to be important to your business, especially today when you’re already likely facing thousands of businesses in competition. If you do hire an SEO artist, however, you can be sure you’re going to be in safe hands, and they’ll do all the dirty work so you can concentrate on what really matters.