The SEO agency you hire decides the fate of your website. If you choose an inexperienced SEO firm, your website would never reach the top of the search engine results page.

Here’s an essential checklist for hiring a Houston SEO agency.

More Than 5 Years of SEO Experience

Several SEO agencies in Houston call themselves expert who is seldom true. The first roll-out of SEO update shook the SEO industry, and many websites that had achieved higher rankings through black hat SEO techniques like inappropriate link building, spamming, and keyword stuffing suffered greatly.

Before you hire an SEO agency, find out their years of SEO experience. You can ask questions like how a company survived the Penguin and Panda search engine updates and how their clients were affected. You can also ask what steps the agency took to help their clients survive the search engine algorithm updates.

If the SEO agency is relatively new in the business, they would not have any satisfactory answers to your questions. The company you plan to work with should know about the latest updates inside Google and also have experience in working through these updates.

The SEO experience helps the SEO agencies to survive within most complicated situations in SEO and ensure they help their clients reach their SEO goals despite the difficulties.

Provide Results to Their Clients

It is quite easy for an SEO agency to draw an attractive SEO plan for their clients. But the big question is can they deliver results. If the SEO firm is not confident about its SEO strategies, there is no point in working with such an SEO agency.

A good Houston SEO agency would provide portfolios and sample work they have done for its clients. They would provide you with a proven track record they have earned over these years. The agency might not have a perfect ten in all their SEO activities, but they should have a decent number of successful SEO initiatives and happy clients.

Understanding of Advanced Level of SEO

SEO has a broad scope. Just creating content with target keywords is not enough. The SEO agency you select should have a deep knowledge of three important elements of SEO.

On-page Optimization – it refers to SEO measures directly performed within the website like smart ways of internal linking, quality content, and HTML and meta-tagging. In simple words, on-page Optimization refers to making your website SEO friendly.

Off-site Optimization – it refers to external SEO practices like link building to optimize your website.

Technical areas– the agency should know technical issues that can affect the website’s search engine rankings. A good SEO agency would be able to identify technical issues with the structure of your website and configure your website in a way that is easy for search engine bots to index pages.

Adheres to Best SEO Practices

No matter how popular or expert an SEO agency is, if it does not follow guidelines of the search engines, your website will go down sooner or later. SEO agencies have no control over SEO guidelines, nor do they have any idea about SEO algorithm updates that might be in the pipeline.

The only thing SEO agencies can do is adhere to best SEO practices so that new search engine updates do not affect their clients’ websites much. A good SEO agency would be proactive to search engine updates and adapt to the new guidelines whenever introduced.

You should stay away from SEO agencies that promise higher rankings in a short period.  Such SEO firms are more likely to use black-hat SEO techniques that provide faster results, but the success is short-lived.  Search engines are known to penalize websites that follow black-hat SEO techniques, and the worst can happen to your website as your website is removed from the search engine index.

Send Consistent Reports

Search engine optimization takes time, and you may have to wait for weeks/months to see the results. A good SEO agency would send you consistent reports that mention SEO activities performed for a given period and things that are planned for the near future.

Long story short, choosing the right Houston SEO agency, would effectively promote your business online and generate sales.