Many companies struggle with two key things as they try to budget to afford the best SEO agency. UK companies often don’t come in with a plan of attack, and they rarely come in with a budget. The plan is key, as it helps to create a budget. After all, if you’re not planning, you’re letting what happens shape your company. A lack of planning means you’re losing time, money, and lots of opportunities. What can you do to make sure that doesn’t happen? These tips can help.
Stay In It For The Long Term
SEO takes a long time to work. Most people don’t quite understand just how long it takes when they sign up, but the reality is that you’ll barely see a dent in your SEO goals within the first four months. By month six, the meter will be slowly ticking upward. By month twelve, though, you’ll be reaping the results of your efforts. Wondering why? The first month means auditing, planning, and understanding what needs to change. The second month begins the slow process of implementing the strategy you’ve built over the course of the first month, but the search engines won’t notice right away. Results will be slow, but so will implementation. The key, though, is to stay in it for the long term. SEO isn’t a self-adhesive bandage. Instead, it’s reconstructive surgery to make sure your company’s digital marketing efforts are performing to the best of their ability, and that takes time. If you don’t understand that fundamental piece, don’t even begin to plan for SEO.
Create Your Plan with a Budget
Once you know that you’re not going to see those long term results, it’s time to begin planning. That begins with a metric. Understand what you plan to measure and why you want to work on that metric specifically. Most people will say, “I want to rank first in my industry.” That’s not a good place to start. Wondering why? Ranking first doesn’t really change anything for your company. Sure, it might put you at the top of a Google search, but is it the right Google search? After all, if you’re trying to get qualified traffic through your door so they can enter your sales funnel, you may not be choosing the right terms. Your metric, though, could be something like qualified leads or better sales numbers.
After you choose your metric, it’s time to create a measurable goal. What do you really want to see happen in the next twelve months? Do you want to increase the downloads of your signature whitepaper? Do you want to see an increase in sales? Figure out what you want, then figure out how much it’s worth to you to get to that goal. If you could increase your sales ten percent in the next year, how much is that actually worth to your company? When you understand the value of hitting that goal, you’re ready to create a budget. Obviously that budget can’t be more than you might actually make if you achieve that goal, but you should now have some reasonable numbers to work with so you know about how much you should spend on an SEO firm.
Begin Interviewing Firms
The last thing you should do is begin interviewing firms. Remember that simply searching terms like “Best SEO Agency UK Offers” probably isn’t going to get you the results you want. Instead, you’ll want to look for agencies nearby or those that offer services in your industry or services that are specific to the goals you want to achieve. There are lots of SEO firms out there that rank fairly high for those kinds of search terms but can’t really deliver on the goals you’ve already created. You may also want to talk to others in your network or even in your industry to see what firms they’ve considered in the past and which ones they’ve already worked with so you get a better sense of the companies that are already successful for search terms like yours.
Finding the right SEO team to help optimise your site isn’t easy, but it doesn’t begin anywhere besides your own company’s boardroom either. Look to your goals and budget, then choose the team that’s right for you.