What to Expect When You Hire an SEO Agency

If you’re here, it’s your first time hiring an SEO agency. 

Due to it being your first time, it can be daunting.

However, it doesn’t need to be, especially if you’ve chosen the right agency for your industry and budget. 

Mostly always, working with agencies is seamless. They have processes in place to onboard, monitor, scale, and report SEO performance, so you’ll always understand what’s going on. 

To get a better understanding of this, however, let’s break down what you can expect from an SEO agency if you hire one. 

Onboarding Process

Before you consider hiring an SEO agency, it's best to understand the onboarding process.

This will help you manage your time, resources, and how you coordinate your employees. 

Step 1: Initial Contact and Discovery

The onboarding process actually starts with you. You find the right agency, contact them, and start to build a relationship. 

Initial Contact Stage

This stage of the onboarding process is very similar to any online B2B interaction: 

1. You start by conducting research and finding a good agency for your needs.
2. Fill out a lead form on their website.
3. Provide any further general information about your business, your SEO goals, etc.
4. Book a discovery meeting to discuss goals and needs. 

You’ll likely have limited time to reach out to agencies. So, when filling out your information, be as concise and accurate as possible.

After you have arranged the meeting comes the more difficult part, where you must communicate your needs correctly and vet the agency. 

Discovery Stage

This is super important at the beginning of this process because you're able to converse with the agency in order to:

• Establish clear business objectives, such as website traffic, leads, or brand awareness.
• Discuss who your target audience is that you want to reach online and what keywords are relevant to your brand.
• Ask any questions or concerns that you may have about SEO or hiring an agency.
• Get a customised strategy and proposal from the agency that fulfils your wants and desires. 

Generally, the discovery stage is there to “discover” whether you and the agency will have a partnership in the future. 

Step 2: Contract and Paperwork

After a successful initial contact and discovery phase, the next step is getting everything discussed in writing - aka, a contract.

This will formalise your relationship with them.

Again, depending on the agency of your choosing, this process will vary, but you should expect at least the following terms at a minimum:

1. Scope of services – this is required so you have a complete understanding of what services your contract will cover.
2. Payment terms, any additional costs, projected length, payment frequency, etc.
3. Termination clause, in case there is a breach of contract.
4. Intellectual property rights, which is especially important if you plan to outsource content writing.
5. Manage third-party risks to prevent misuse if the agency accesses your website or publishing systems.

Once the contract is set, the next step is a deep website SEO audit.

During this time, they’ll also integrate their SEO tools on your website. 

Step 3: Setup and Website Audit 

The agency will first get you set up regarding tools and access.

Typically, they have step-by-step processes that you can follow. 

Some tools they’ll need access to, for example, include Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC). You’ll actually need to grant them access to this. The same goes for your website. 

When they have access to these tools, they’ll then integrate their third-party tools, like Ahrefs or SEMRush, etc., to your website, GA, GSC, and potentially more, like a CRM. 

After this, they have access to all your website data.

They can now perform a detailed website audit to see how your website is currently performing. With this information, they’ll then know what they need to do to reach your desired goals. 

Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit is focused, as its name implies, on the backend of your website. 

These are unseen parts of your page, which help search engines parse your content and rank it to how well it addresses a user search query.

Some areas looked at during a technical SEO audit include crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile friendliness, and more. 

On-page SEO Audit 

An on-page SEO audit focuses on “seen” elements, such as content. 

Some areas that are looked at during this audit include: 

• Title tags
• Keyword usage
• Image optimisation 
• Meta tags 
• Header tags
• Internal linking
• Content relevance 

Once the website audit is done and all setup is complete, the agency starts with SEO strategy implementation. 

Timelines for Results and Reporting

SEO is a slow process, without question. You need to be patient. And if you’re patient and stick to it, the results in the future can be outstanding. 

Short-Term (0-3 Months)

While SEO is a continuous process, you can get initial results within a few months. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll see something. 

In the first 3 months, the agency will likely be addressing urgent  problems. These will move the needle in your search results the most, therefore, providing “quick wins”. 

The reason agencies do this is simple.

They want to show you results fast.

The faster they show you their strategy is working, the more inclined you are to continue working with them. 

Some “urgent” fixes may be fixing error pages, removing keyword cannibalisation, optimising already-ranking low-hanging fruit keywords, fixing crawlability problems, and conversion rate optimisation (CRO). 

Medium-Term (4-9 Months)

Realistically, you should start seeing a return on your SEO investment now (unless there’s a big search engine algorithm update or something similar). 

During this time, you should typically start seeing more impressions, clicks, and sales (depending on your goals). 

Some changes that you’ll see happening are improved keyword rankings, higher volume of traffic, more targeted traffic, and, generally, a better-performing website. 

Long-Term (10+ Months)

Building on the medium-term consistent growth and improved rankings, you should begin seeing some rankings for highly competitive keywords. 

For the most part, these are short-tail keywords. Therefore, instead of a keyword like “Black 18-inch aluminium fence post with a 4-inch base”, you’ll start ranking for keywords like “black aluminium fence post”. 

As you can probably guess, the latter has a much higher search volume, so you’ll see a further increase in traffic and potential traffic. 

SEO Reporting

Throughout your SEO campaign, you’ll receive a number of reports so you can tell whether SEO is working for you. 

The number of reports you’ll receive depends on your campaign's size and goals. Therefore, it could be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even every half a year. Whichever it is, your SEO agency will communicate this. 

What they’ll report will vary also. It depends on the KPIs established when you initially contacted them. 

Either way, it usually consists of some of the following:

Industry Standards for Licensing and Ethical Practices for SEO

While regular reporting gives you insight into the progress of your campaign, it’s also necessary to understand what industry standards are regarding licensing and ethical practices for agencies. 

Licensing

A lot of people question, “Do SEO agencies require a license to operate?”

The answer is no. 

Anyone can start an SEO agency - me, you, your neighbour, and even your grandparents - there isn’t a special license required to start an SEO agency. 

That being said, however, general business licenses are still required. This, of course, changes on their location. 

Ethical Practices

With SEO, you have white-hat and black-hat SEO. White-hat SEO is, as you can imagine, the ethical one. 

When it comes to black-hat SEO, they don’t follow ethical practices (in the eyes of search engines). They buy dodgy links, cheat the “system”, and generally try to bend the SEO-friendly guidelines set by search engines. 

And sometimes, it works. You can get quick results. That’s why people want it, and some agencies offer it. The downside, though, is that if you get caught, they may just un-index your website entirely. 

Because of this, you need to be careful about what agency you choose. If you choose a white-hat agency, you’re safe but will get slower results, if you choose a black-hat agency, you’ll get quicker results (sometimes) but be much less safe. 

Final Word

If it’s your first time hiring an SEO agency, you won’t know what to expect. After all, it’s something you haven’t done before. 

The guide above, however, gave you some insights on what to expect.

And, as you can see, there isn’t much to it. Most of the work is carried out by the agency you hire. 

Honestly, the only thing you need to do is sit back, relax, and wait for the SEO results to come pouring in. 

Or, if you don’t want to leave things to chance, you could just hire us and make sure it’s done right from day one.

Your call 😉