Why You Might Need an SEO Agency

As a business owner, you're always looking for ways to enhance your online presence, increase profitability, and bring in new customers. 

If that’s you, you’ve likely thought about SEO and the question: 

Do I really need an SEO agency? 

The answer, while seeming obvious, is actually more complex than you may think. 

As you know, it’s a pretty big deal when you decide to invest in or outsource SEO work, and careful thought must go into it. 

Failing to find an agency that can drive results can cost time, money, and even opportunities. The good news, though, is that hiring the right agency can work wonders.

Do I Need an SEO Agency?

To answer the question of whether you need an SEO agency, a good place to begin is to look for specific issues within your business.

• Do you lack the time, the tools, or the manpower to handle the SEO for yourself in-house?
• Are you fighting to make the first page of Google?
• Have you added a blog or several other content pieces in a bid to try and climb up that page rank?
• Is your business slowly but surely falling behind in terms of rankings?

If so, then having someone else take care of optimising your web content might be an investment worth pondering.

Common Signs Your Business Needs SEO Support

Before trying to figure out whether SEO agencies are worth it, a good place to start is by checking for specific tell-tale signs that your business needs one. 

Sign 1. Organic Traffic is Depreciating

This is absolutely self-explanatory, but any drop in traffic could be a result of your content getting pushed lower in search engines due to poor optimisation. 

Sign 2. No or Few Backlinks & High Bounce Rate 

While these two can appear separately, together, they might point towards poor keyword targeting (targeting the wrong keywords), poor content creation, or generally a poor user experience. 

As a result, websites don’t link to your website (backlinks), and visitors don’t stay on your website, thus causing a high bounce rate. This, in turn, showcases to search engines that your website isn’t optimised for SEO or users. 

Sign 3. Over-relying on Paid Ads 

Ads, while an essential part of your toolkit, you can't rely solely on paid advertisement, as good SEO content can generate traffic for years if done right. 

Think about it like this. Search ads, though great, only fulfil short-term goals, SEO, on the other hand, fulfils long-term and often sustainable goals. 

Sign 4. Low Conversion Rate 

This could be tricky to pin down to bad SEO, but chances are you are not targeting the right audience or user intent. 

Sign 5. Duplicate Content, Keyword Stuffing or Poor Site Structure

These fall in the more technical category but will definitely hurt your online visibility. From a search engine perspective, it makes your website appear unorganised, unmanaged, and unprofessional. 

Why Use an SEO Agency?

A quality SEO agency that specialises in your industry or location can provide you with organic traffic that’ll actually move the needle in your business. They know how to optimise websites in your niche and drive results that matter. 

Benefits of Working with an SEO Agency

Whether you’re a large or small business, working with an SEO agency means you’ll get: 

• Hands-off SEO: They’ll do all the SEO work for you, from on-page SEO and off-page SEO all the way to technical SEO. 

• Access to Experience: They’ve most probably generated results for businesses like yours before, so they’ll have plenty of experience. 

• More Time to Work on Your Business: Over the month, SEO can take days and sometimes weeks, you get all this time back to work on your business. 

Something else worth mentioning is the new perspective, learning, and knowledge you receive from having experience working with an SEO agency. 

You also naturally start strategising at a higher level of consciousness with regard to managing your online content (once you learn how SEO works).

Measuring ROI When Outsourcing SEO

To determine if you can get a good return on your investment (ROI), you need to do proper due diligence on the cost and time compared with the prospective upside of your investment. 

Step 1: Determine Your SEO Investment

The cost of your SEO campaign would be all fees paid to the agency, any extra costs incurred in creating content, and finally, any internal resources allocated to the project. That means a monthly retainer, project-based fees, and all other expenses for the SEO campaign.

Step 2: Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Clearly define the desired outcomes. Desired outcomes may range from increased organic traffic, improved keyword rankings, better conversion rates, or generation of leads, among others. 

Whatever outcome you want, try to relate it back to monetary value. For example, if you know one lead is worth $100 to your business, that’s a good start. It’ll then be much easier to measure the ROI of SEO in regard to lead generation. 

Plus, you need to be realistic. Though the ROI of SEO is higher (compared to other advertising channels), it still needs to be reasonable. The agency you choose may even be able to help you with this step. 

Step 3: Track Important KPIs to Calculate ROI

Monitor KPIs that are directly related to your business objectives. These may include organic traffic, website rankings, bounce rates, time on site, conversion rates, leads generated, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Step 4: Apply the ROI Formula

This will determine the net profit from SEO after deducting all costs of the SEO campaign from the increased revenues it brings. 

A simple formula used to find it is:

If it’s profitable, great, an SEO agency will be worth it. On paper, you’ll be able to get a return from them, they now just need to put in the work. 

Are SEO Agencies Worth It?

The “Worth” of an SEO agency really comes down to your business and the results the agency can bring. 

Some businesses perform better in SEO than others, for example, e-commerce - that’s just how it is. However, including this, some agencies, well, of course, are better than others also. 

From a business perspective, though, SEO agencies are forth it for: 

Remember that this is just a general pointer, as every business niche is unique and vastly different in both demands and requirements. 

Exceptions to the rules can also be made, sometimes, even small businesses, for example, can see huge benefits if they start applying basic SEO optimisation. 

Tips for Choosing an SEO Agency

If you search “SEO agency near me” or something similar, you’ll likely get hundreds of options (subject to where you live). 

This, as you can imagine, is overwhelming. You now have to pick one of the hundred options and hope it’s a good one, almost like gambling. 

Unlike gambling, though, the odds are in your favour, especially if you follow the below tips: 

Important Considerations

When evaluating potential agencies, make sure you look for a reliable and effective partner: 

• Expertise & Transparency should be clearly discussed, stated and understood by both parties.
• Look for an agency with industry-specific experience, a proven approach and a good track record.
• Beware of unrealistic promises like guaranteed top rankings; Google even states that no one can guarantee #1 rankings on Google. 
• Focus on data-driven strategies, clear communication, and measurable results, more importantly, know what metrics you need to measure and understand why.

Due Diligence

After you have shortlisted a number of potential agencies, it is time to look deeper into their practices and history. 

• Review case studies and client testimonials, take your time, if the agency doesn't have high-quality data-backed case studies, move on.
• Inquire about their tools and processes (e.g., Ahrefs, SEMrush).
• Discuss budget and pricing options; be careful not to get upsold for something you don't need at this time.
• Wait for results to show before you consider a more expensive plan.
• Verify their communication practices and reporting frequency, and allocate more of your employees as communication end-points to ensure a smooth execution.
• Ensure they provide detailed road maps and realistic expectations, and check if they offer money-back guarantees.

Asking the right questions during negotiation or your first meetings will determine the quality of the execution 100%. Learn more about the questions to ask here. 

Final Word

Whether to hire an SEO agency or not depends on your business goals, resources and exact needs. 

It might sound easy to Google an agency and book their services, but you have to do due diligence and be careful with promises of quick returns.

Selecting the proper agency could provide your business immense value, so take time to assess their case studies and pricing.

By doing this, you’ll select a team that really cares about your business and its goals. A team that’ll drive the organic results you’re searching for.