Natural referencing in Google (also called SEO) is a priority for developing the visibility of your business. Sooner or later, you will have to work with a provider specializing in this discipline. But what criteria should be used to choose the best SEO services company?
Indeed, there are a plethora of natural referencing providers on the market, and finding the one who will be the right partner for the long term can quickly become a long road strewn with pitfalls.
I have lost count of the number of companies that have consulted us, tired of having to change their natural referencing agency every year. The reason is always the same: they are disappointed with the results obtained and the way the collaboration went. When we talk about it with our customers, it seems that the same questions come up systematically. And the same mistakes have often been made during the selection stage to choose your best SEO services company.
Over the past 3 years, we have seen around a hundred commercial proposals from SEO agencies pass through the calls for tenders that we have conducted for our clients. This experience allows us today to write this series of articles. The objective is to give keys to choosing the right SEO agency, the one best suited to your needs/problem.
Why is it essential to invest in SEO before all other acquisition channels?
Organic traffic is the acquisition channel that offers the best ROAS (Return On Ad Spend = return on investment) ahead of SEA and Social Media, and ahead of any other traffic acquisition channel.
While the ROAS of paid channels does not generally exceed the threshold of 10 in e-commerce (i.e. 10€ of turnover reported for 1€ invested), SEO can present a ROAS of 20, to more than 40, in a few years of work.
The average cost of SEO for small business service is under control. An SEO service is generally in the form of a fixed monthly budget, defined in advance with your SEO agency. Whether you make 5% traffic growth or 30%, the cost of your support does not vary, unlike SEA agencies who take a commission (between 10% and 15%) on your advertising budget.
The profitability of natural referencing increases over time as soon as your traffic begins to increase.
Finally, your visibility in Google does not disappear overnight if you stop investing in SEO, unlike paid search (SEA). It is therefore an investment that secures the sustainability of your business.
1. You need to know how natural referencing works
This is an essential point: to choose the right SEO agency, and to be sure to buy a service adapted to your needs, you must understand your job. By extension, you need to know the basics of how Google’s algorithm works. It is necessary to know the factors that positively or negatively influence the ranking of a page in the results of Google.
It is not a question of becoming unbeatable in SEO, but simply of being able to understand the speeches that will be delivered to you. You must understand the proposed work methodologies in order to be able to ask relevant questions and assess the quality of the answers provided. This article explains the fundamentals of SEO and gives you tips for deciphering the speech of your interlocutors.