Are you in the process of hiring a SEO company or an SEO professional to optimize your real estate website? Hiring an SEO for your website is one of the most challenging tasks because some of the normal questions that are posed to them during the short listing and selection process do not really bring the required responses that will help you find the best SEO company for your real estate SEO website.
One of the most frequent questions that website owners ask their SEO is the list of keywords for which they have managed to get rankings for their customers’ websites. The next question that follows is whether the SEO company or the SEO consultant will be able to provide a list of references that they can contact. If that is what you have in your list too, then it is high time that you strike them off and try to review the skills of your SEO professional and his or her ability to come up with strategies that will help your website.
Past Rankings and References Are Futile
You must know that as a company or as a consultant who wants to win your contract, if you were to ask some one about the keywords for which they have ranked websites, they are very unlikely to show you their failures. Moreover, success stories presented out of context of the customer requirements will make no sense. No company or no SEO professional will share their customer requirements when they share the success stories as they are bound by non-disclosure agreements.
Search engine ranking is a very complex factor and each website is different. It is just not the SEO professionals efforts that bring success or failure of a website’s online presence. The nature of the website itself has a lot to control. So all rankings cannot be considered equal. Rankings on the first page or #1 rankings in the top search engines do not tell anything to us as far as the success of your real estate website’s SEO is concerned. Success stories should always be accompanied by the effectiveness analytics and no SEO company will share with you this information. Therefore, your questions on past rankings do not help you in any way in identifying your SEO consultant.
Coming to the next question that people ask, it is about references. What do we hope to find out by asking for references? By asking for references we are hoping to find out about the quality of the services offered by the company by talking to their past customers. No SEO in their good senses will list references that will put them in trouble. You can be 100% sure that only happy customers of the past will be supplied to you as the list of references. So here again, you will be just wasting your time asking for the list of references and contacting them. Contacting references will make sense if you are going to track them by yourself and contact them.
It is interesting to note that every real estate website owner understands these dynamics well and not that these are new insights. Despite our understanding, all of us find ourselves asking these questions to our SEO companies before hiring them. If these are not the right questions to ask your SEO company, then how should one assess their SEO company before hiring them?
The best way to hire your SEO company
Before you set out to hire your SEO company, you must make sure you understand your needs first. You must have a basic understanding about SEO only then you will know what to expect of your SEO company and what results mean with regard to SEO. In other words, you should be a well-informed customer. After educating yourself about the basics of SEO, you should start taking to the SEO companies to learn about their understanding about the real estate market, the competition involved in the real estate industry etc. They should be capable of understanding your business model to effectively promote your website online. Rather than asking about the past rankings and references, you can ask them about the strategies and tools that they would be using to promote your website.
