It really depends as SEO isn’t always something we recommend. Book in for a free consult and we’ll be happy to discuss.

Bold claim right?

I’ve only met a handful of SEO marketers who I’d genuinely consider to be better at search engine optimization than our team. 

None of them are in the business of servicing, local clients. And like those elite SEO’s we didn’t start our SEO career by selling services to other businesses. We learned SEO by building our own companies, projects and websites. If our SEO wasn’t working, we weren’t making money. That turned us into scrappy SEO’s.

We understand that if not we’re driving clicks for high intent keywords we aren’t doing our jobs. We understand the full scope of an SEO campaign and which levers to pull when rankings are stuck.

Our bread and butter is SEO for local service businesses (eg: HVAC) and SEO for local professional services (eg: eye doctors). However, if you have a unique SEO challenge we’re the company to hire.

There are a few inherent benefits to only providing only SEO services to one industry eg: HVAC contractors or eye doctors. You can build links that would be difficult for others to build between clients (although, it’s rare to see most SEO agencies do this). You have a slightly better understanding of how competitive any given market is.

The downside? When rankings get stuck they have a more limited tool belt. Having worked across dozens of industries for over 10 years (e-commerce, home service businesses, brick and mortar smbs, informational websites, B2B, SaaS etc.) we have seen it all. 

1. Overselling. SEO should be a part of the marketing strategy. If an agency is promising to blow your doors down with new business, they’re probably a sales agency.

   What is a sales agency? They’re not really in the business of providing SEO services, they’re in the sales business. They know they probably won’t be able to provide value necessary to retain you as a client and so they oversell to get you in the door. They’ll use a 6 or 12 month contract to lock you in and explain away why the results stink.

   Those SEO agencies are built to replace clients. Churn, replace, churn, replace and repeat.

2. Long term contracts. We always tell our clients if you cancel the service before six months you’ve effectively lit your money on fire. SEO takes time and anything under six months is likely not long enough to get solid results. That said, we never make our clients sign a contract.

   Not happy with the results? Give us 30 days notice and we’ll wrap up the campaign.

3. Ask for a sample report. If they don’t provide any reporting that is a major concern. If they provide an eight page document that is also a concern. You want a local SEO service provider who is transparent (provides reports) but isn’t wasting your budget on unnecessary, lengthy reports. 

4. Pricing. It’s very hard to do anything with less than $500/month. Certainly, below that number you aren’t building any quality links. But one shouldn’t confuse price for quality. There are plenty of sales agencies (see point 1) that charge $4 or $5k/month and do very little. In fact the Yellow Pages offers large SEO contracts and have a pretty poor reputation. 

5. When SEO companies use the number of keywords tracked as a selling feature. You don’t work on individual keywords. Sure you can build pages to target a cluster of keywords or links with a specific anchor text but you work on an entire site. 

6. Does the monthly work include links (and not just directories and press releases!) and content? If not it’s time to find a new provider.

Yes, all of our SEO packages will include a review and optimization of your Google Business Page. Depending on the business and the SEO package we may include posting content to your Google Business Page as well. 

A lot of SEO agencies tend to over complicate the process. We prefer simple over complex.

There are only three broad categories of work that can be done to improve your websites odds of showing up on the first page for the search results.

1. On-Page SEO.

This includes all the content on your website.  The content on your homepage, service pages, location pages and blog content. 

2. Off-Page SEO

This includes anything done on other sites to send signals to Google that your site is credible and trustworthy. This includes your google business page,  link building, directories, PR (podcasts, articles on other websites, business features etc.), reviews, social profiles, videos on third party platforms.

3. Technical SEO

This includes anything done on your website that isn’t content including the host you choose, site structure, sitemaps, URLs, internal linking, site speed, core web vitals, redirects, SSL certificates etc.

That’s the complete list. And if you want to take it a step further. Once the technical SEO is shored up (local businesses aren’t enterprise sized websites) all it really comes down to is links, reviews, citations and content.

We track a range of metrics and report on them monthly.

• Keyword rankings
• Organic traffic
• Conversions
• Impressions

Setting reasonable expectations for any given search engine campaign is vital. We do that from the outset so our clients understand what SEO results should look like.

What is the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEM refers to paid marketing activities such as Google Ads. These ads are displayed at the top and bottom of the page when you search a query. When you use SEM every time a potential customer clicks on your ad, you pay a certain amount for that click.

SEO refers to the organic results. This includes the local SEO map pack and the organic results below that.