Do not hire an eCommerce SEO company through a PPC listing or any other sort of paid ad.
Read that line again. Now take it to heart. Write it down somewhere.
This is one of the few areas in life before you can see the results of what you’re buying before you commit to the purchase.
Getting your car serviced? Getting your landscaping done? Accepting a treatment prescription from a doctor or dentist?
There’s always a little risk there. There is in digital marketing, too, but with SEO, you can literally see if the company can do what they say they’re going to do before you buy.
And it all comes back to checking the organic search results for eCommerce SEO services before you sign up for an SEO marketing strategy.
Why the SERPs Are the Only Promotional Materials You Should Accept from an eCommerce SEO Company
When you type something into Google, say, in this very case “eCommerce SEO company,” then you’re going to get a handful of results, even for full-service SEO strategy providers.
Some of these will be paid ads. Those listings have been bought, not earned by eCommerce SEO experts.
What shows up in the organic search results, below the ads, were earned through effort and knowledge of how the search engine algorithm and its ranking factors associated with high-quality target keywords work.
These listings can’t be bought – at least according to all the information out there. If you want a listing to show up in the organic SERPs, you need to work for it through genuine SEO efforts.
Now, the truth is there are a lot of SEO “agencies” that really don’t perform and which predicate their position in the market on smoke and mirrors.
They look good, they sound good, and they say what they need to say. But when it comes to showing up in the search results, they don’t perform, and they won’t be able to for your online store.
But you’re literally going to hire this company to get your company to show up in the search results.
How is that agency going to get your eCommerce website to show up in the results if they can’t even get their own domain to show up for the very thing they’re selling?
It’s not a trick question. The answer is they won’t be able to. This is why it’s so important for an agency to demonstrate that it can rank on its own, without any help.
This is the “proof of the pudding” that shows that an agency knows what needs to be done, from keyword research to implementation, to show up in the search results.
Granted, you don’t want to check for one search term, because there’s only one page one list of results for that search term.
You might want to proliferate to give that company a fair shot. Try looking for other search terms that contain SEO as a seed keyword.
Try “SEO services,” “SEO for (your industry)” and “eCommerce SEO.” You should also try some industry-specific keywords to see if they rank for that.
If you can’t find that SEO company anywhere on page one, unfortunately, you need to pass and find a new one, even if you really like the rep you’ve been working with.
They might sound nice, but when it comes to walking the walk, there’s a low chance they’re going to be able to deliver.
Getting Started with an eCommerce SEO Company
Now that you know the one thing you absolutely must square away before you hire an eCommerce SEO company, get started looking.
The agency for you is out there (and they’re ranking at the tops of the search engine results pages). You just need to find them. So get started looking and put in the time and effort today that will pay off over the next few years.
