When working with a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agency it’s important that the relationship is smooth for your campaign to be successful. Here are ten factors worth knowing when you work with an SEO agency that will facilitate the relationship and result in a successful campaign.

1. Expectations; having realistic expectations that are related to your budget are vital if the campaign is to go well. If you want your site to be top for highly competitive generic phrases such as ‘life insurance’ or ‘houses for sale’ then you’re going to need a large budget, it’s probably  going to take the agency a lot of time and so you’ll need a fair amount of patience as well. The sites that are top for these phrases have been optimising and working on their sites for years and if you’re just starting, you’re playing catch up.  Alternatively choose phrases that are quicker with which to achieve high positions, and match your budget better.

2. Understanding; this point relates to the one above. Good optimisation is in two areas, on page and off page. Much of the activity that SEO agencies do is in off page e.g. creating content and promoting a site to build back links to it. This takes time and can’t be done too quickly. This is because if Google sees say tens of thousands of back links to a site created over a very short period of time, it simply doesn’t acknowledge them as it’s not natural for this to happen. So there’s a degree of gearing involved and your back link building has to be natural and be seen to be so by the Search Engine spiders.

3. Planning; when beginning with an agency, it’s important to discuss your strategy and objectives at the beginning of the campaign and how these are going to be achieved. It’s also important to discuss with your agency how these objectives are going to be measured. Although planning should of course be carried out at the beginning of the project your plan and strategy should be revisited and refined as the campaign progresses.

4. Budget; this is a touchy subject in SEO but whether charging by what they do, by time, by link, the higher the budget the more that will be able to be done by the agency and therefore the better the results should be. If the price you’re quoted is much higher than you expected, then ask further questions as to what the budget covers before making a decision. If it’s much lower than you expected and seems too good to be true, then it probably is and if you do move forward on this basis, do so with great caution.

5. Time; this is another sensitive area in SEO. SEO shouldn’t be considered as something that’s carried out for a while and then stopped. This is because if stopped early then it’s unlikely that the work the agency has done will have had time to take affect. If the campaign is stopped after a few months or even later then it’s likely any positions gained will gradually be lost. This attrition is often not quick but due to your competition gaining ground will almost certainly happen.

6. Roles and responsibilities; clarifying these at the beginning of a project is very important. Who is going to do what, by when and what will they need to do it? Sometimes a good SEO campaign requires significant input from you or other third parties and if this is the case, then everyone needs to know what their roles and responsibilities are.

7. Technical; often you will contract your SEO agency to review the site and often you will then want the agency to work on it. If it’s the former then it’s important to align your technical people with this. If it’s the latter then you’ll need to supply your SEO agency with any necessary access details so that it can carry out the work.

8. Content; a good SEO campaign needs lots of well created content regularly, whether this is text, graphics, videos or widgets. This should be included as part of the planning process. If your agency is going to be doing the writing then they need a good understanding of your business and details of your approval process. If your internal team or a third party is going to be writing much of the content then it’s important that they have an understanding of how to write content that is search engine friendly.

9. Knowledge share; your agency should be happy to talk to you about SEO and share knowledge. Although it’s not necessary for you or your team to be experts, if you know about the topic, then discussions, meetings and reports will be more valuable. When working for you an agency should be happy to explain to you what they’re doing as well as discuss and tell you about the methods they’re using.

10. Measurement; at the beginning of the campaign, it’s important that your SEO agency know the level of detail of reporting that you want. Some of these can be provided by access to analytics or reputation management tools, some can be provided through reports directly from the agency. The content and frequency of these reports will need to be agreed. It’s likely that if you want a daily or weekly report from your agency you will be paying more than for a monthly report so this will need to be factored in as well.

I hope you’ve found the above useful in understanding some of the factors that help making client relationships work when using an SEO agency.

Posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 1:41 pm in SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.