January 15

A Guide to Choosing the Right St Louis SEO Company

How to Choose the Best St Louis SEO Company for Your Business

If you’re a business owner or marketing manager in Missouri thinking about engaging an SEO provider, there’s a lot to be said for going local and finding a St Louis SEO company or, at least, one in the general area. Local SEO is vital to effective digital marketing, and a company that knows your locality will be able to serve you better than one that doesn’t.

Another good reason to choose a St Louis SEO company is simply to narrow the scope of your search. However, even if you google “SEO provider Missouri”, you’ll end up with pages of results, so how do you find the best SEO provider for your business among all the potential prospects out there?

In this article, I want to share some tips and advice for finding a diamond in the rough—the one SEO company in your local area that will best serve your own particular needs.

Check Out the St Louis SEO Company’s Own SEO

Since you’ll probably start your hunt for the right company by performing a Google search, it can be a good idea to assess briefly how well each company’s own SEO efforts are paying off. After all, if a company does a good job on its own SEO, at least that’s an indication that the firm’s people know what they’re doing.

Once you have a list of possible providers, search each company’s name on Google. The ones that are any good will show up as the first result in your search listings. Similarly, if you perform an image search on the company name, its logo should be one of the first results at the top of the page. Likewise with Facebook pages, Google + and any other combination of social media channel/company name. If any of your prospects don’t meet these criteria, you might want to strike them off your shortlist.

The only caveat to this is not to expect all of them to appear at the top of the results for a more generic keyword search such as “St Louis SEO Company.” Some younger companies might not appear at the top of the results, even though they may be very good providers. This is simply because it takes time to get to the top of these rankings, so the older, longer-established providers will always have the advantage in that regard. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are better than some of their competitors that haven’t been around as long.

Evaluate SEO Companies’ Portfolios

In his article (How to Find the Right SEO Services Provider?) for the Web Design Library, Swadesh Rohilla recommends that you check out the online portfolio of each company that looks like it might meet your needs. A genuine and reputable St Louis SEO company will proudly display details of past projects along with testimonials from satisfied business owners for whom it has worked.

However, I would also advise you to take this evaluation a step further. After looking at the portfolio, you should try to identify any of the company’s customers who are in your line of business or at least something similar. Then, contact those customers yourself and request their views on their experiences with the SEO provider. If you can get some positive first-hand feedback as evidence that an SEO company has done a good job for other businesses in your field, you could be onto a winner.

Investigate Pricing Methodologies

Hopefully, you will by now have narrowed your shortlist down to a few promising St Louis SEO companies. At this point, you can start to talk to them or at least examine the finer details they might provide on their websites.

One thing to establish is how they will charge for their services. While it may seem illogical, any St Louis SEO company that offers set prices, such as x number of keywords for $x, is probably best avoided. The reality of SEO pricing is that it’s complex and will depend very much upon what your specific objectives are and what elements of SEO are most important to you.

SEO specialist Trond Lyngbø explains this admirably in his article How Much Does SEO Cost? 3 Analogies To Help You Determine Its Value for Search Engine Land, stating that no genuine SEO consultant will state a fixed price per website or even offer any form of generalized or standard pricing.

Only after consultation and a thorough assessment of your needs as a customer will you get a quotation from a St Louis SEO company worth its salt. This leads nicely into my final recommendation—initial consultations with the two or three companies that should by now be left on your shortlist.

Arrange an Initial Consultation

As digital marketing writer Josh Steimle points out in his article for Forbes, titled 4 Tips For Hiring The Right SEO Firm, many SEO companies are prepared to offer initial consultations free of charge, in the hope of winning your business. This is your opportunity to discover whether you feel comfortable with the provider and believe you will have a good rapport, as well as to find out how well the representatives listen and understand what your business is about.

After this consultation, each SEO company on your shortlist should be able to provide you with a detailed proposal, correctly stating the services that you are requesting and giving comprehensive pricing details. At this point, you should have all the information you need to make an informed choice from among these final contenders.

Take a Long-Term View

Rarely is SEO one of those activities that can be broken down into transactional tasks. The St Louis SEO company you choose should be one you’ll expect to work with continuously over a lengthy term. It’s for this reason that taking time to be thorough and making the right choice for your business is paramount.

Changescape Web provides SEO services for businesses in St Charles, St Louis, and across the state of Missouri. If you’d like to know right now how your business’ search engine rankings compare with your competitors, just provide some basic information using our online competitive search rank report form, and we’ll provide you with a complimentary search rank report.


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SEO, SEO Company


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