Once you have decided to hire an outside firm, you need to go through some sort of selection process. This can be daunting if you are not already familiar with the space and if you don’t already have some understanding of SEO on your own. There are many solid and reputable companies, but unfortunately there are a large number of bad ones as well.
In addition, there are many different types of projects you may want them to work on. For example, you may have a local SEO-focused project in mind. This obviously becomes one of your major requirements, and you need to find a team with the right type of experience. Similarly, you may have specific contract requirements that will impact which firm is right for you.
Just like a bad hire can be a very expensive proposition, so can engaging the wrong consultant or firm through a haphazard process or by simply relying on a gut feel. Here is an outline of steps for a more methodical, disciplined search for outsourced SEO expertise:
- Start with your goals
Connect with your team and make sure you have a good idea of what you want to accomplish by working with an SEO expert. Sometimes it’s as simple as an audit to make sure you’re following best practices; other times it’s training for your marketers and content builders to get them up to speed on how to actively promote the site. If you have a solid list of things you want completed at the end of an engagement, you’ll be better able to judge the eventual results.
If you don’t really know what you want, that’s OK, but it does make the SEO practitioner’s task a little less structured, and it means you need an exceptional level of trust in him. Sometimes an SEO expert can help you define your goals—to get the best of both worlds, you can ask him what he thinks your goals should be and combine those with your own list.
- Connect with your social network
The people who can best assist you in finding a good match are those who know you well. Talk to friends, fellow business owners, SEO bloggers, and personalities that you know and trust.
When you talk to your network, make sure you share a little bit about the project and the goals. The more information you can share, the better folks are able to assist. At a minimum, if you have geographic considerations or want a company versus a freelancer, this is good to include in the request.
- Get advice from SEO-savvy people you trust
Look seriously into familiarizing yourself with forums, blogs, and sites related to SEO and the people behind them whom you respect. It’s easy to establish a relationship by asking for advice on which SEO company or consultant to hire. As a rule, SEO experts are incredibly friendly about referring business to good companies and good people, and if your network has already given you a few names, running these by the professionals can get you valuable insight on potential winners versus lemons.
- Make sure the person is available
This is a fairly obvious step, but many people do not put this at the beginning of the communication process. Ask the person whether he is available at the start, and then continue the conversation if applicable (there is no need to waste energy on folks who can’t help, though you should always ask for a referral). Your time (and theirs) is precious, so don’t waste it.
A well-written RFP can significantly improve the overall process. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both parties. A lousy RFP can discourage a busy SEO firm from even responding—which is a very unfortunate outcome, since it takes the best firms out of the running.
In addition, some top SEO firms are reluctant to participate in an RFP process because RFP responses often require that the SEO firm provide a substantial amount of free consulting just to bid on the job. So, it can sound like a good idea to ask for a lot of great information in the RFP, but this can become an undue burden on the RFP respondents.
Many companies intuitively “know” what they want but are challenged structurally to “ask” for it in a way that is clear, succinct, informative, and constructive. If written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides understands the purpose, requirements, scope, and structure of the intended engagement. By following a few key steps in the beginning of the RFP process, you will be able to rest easy, knowing that you are going to get what your company wants in the way that is best for you.
One of the most challenging concepts for any large company with multiple working parts is to determine the end goal of the engagement. Often, marketing departments may voice different wants and needs than IT departments; even when they are asking for the same thing semantically, they are not using the right language to communicate what they are looking for.
Every successful project needs a champion who is invested in the project’s success and can pull together the disparate groups that have a stake in the outcome or a role to play. Without that person at the helm, the project will struggle. By nominating that champion as the SEO firm’s “point person” even before you send out your RFP, you will ensure a steady flow of information throughout the process so that internal and external expectations are met.
RFP recipients will understand that you aren’t the SEO expert, and therefore you aren’t going to be able to adequately define the scope of your desired SEO engagement. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Just try to be reasonable when formulating your needs and wants and recognize that the RFP recipient may know what you need more than you do.
In addition to disclosing to the SEO firm the basics such as your objectives, your site’s conversion event (e.g., online purchase, newsletter subscription, white paper download, etc.), target audience, constraints, and so forth, in all fairness you will also need to clearly spell out the criteria for which you will evaluate the SEO firm’s suitability. This means you will need to define these criteria in advance.
SEO firms know the selection process is usually governed by gut feel, so any RFP recipient who does not have a preexisting relationship with you is automatically inclined not to respond because he knows the deck is stacked against him. This is further exacerbated when you send the RFP to multiple SEO firms. You can allay this concern by candidly sharing with the firms your biases and the clearly defined criteria by which you will be evaluating them.
You should map this out into in a decision matrix, which is simply a chart listing the attributes you are looking for in the SEO firm, a weighting factor for each attribute, a score from 0 to 10 for each, and the weighted score (e.g., the score multiplied by the weighting factor). The weighted scores are added to arrive at a total score.
Judging criteria that are both quantitative and qualitative brings objectivity into a subjective process, which will aid you in managing expectations internally. And by sharing your list of criteria and the weighting factors with the RFP recipients, you increase the likelihood—as well as caliber—of responses.
Now that you’ve identified what you are looking for in an SEO firm, it’s important to let the firms know how you will measure the success of the engagement. Some firms can report on SEO health metrics well beyond just rankings (e.g., page yield, keyword yield), thus facilitating troubleshooting and reviews of program performance. Others will rely heavily on your own analytics package to track the program’s success.
For example, you might pose this question internally: “What are your KPIs?” SEO firms often use KPIs to prove the value of the services they provide; online retailers often get caught up with conversion, a metric that isn’t really under the SEO firm’s control. If you aren’t sure which KPIs your company would like to use, think about baking that request into the RFP, stating something such as, “Do you offer monthly program performance reviews indicating the program’s growth? If so, please elaborate on the deliverables of such reviews.”
An SEO firm can easily examine your existing website—the on-page factors (title tags, navigation, HTML)—to gauge project scope. But other factors will influence your rankings during the engagement, some of which won’t be immediately obvious or known to the RFP recipient without prior disclosure. Does your company have other domain names, subdomains, or microsites? Is a massive redesign of your website in the works? Do you employ a third party for your site’s internal search, and if so, who is it? By disclosing as much information as possible, you spare the SEO firm the time and expense of discovering these things on its own.
One of the biggest deterrents in any RFP is the confusion over when a project should be completed and how much it might cost. A company hiring an SEO firm may not know how much time it takes to complete an SEO audit, but it may have pressing internal matters that require a specific deadline.
Retail sites may want to schedule new launches around a particular theme or season; for example, if you want your site launched in time for back-to-school, be sure to write that in your proposal. Not only will an expected deadline save your company time in looking for an appropriate firm, but it also serves as a professional courtesy to the SEO firms you are querying.
Budgets often coincide with a project deadline, depending on how your company conducts its business. Consider assessing a budget based on a range of services; that is, instead of saying the project absolutely has to cost $X, say you are willing to spend within a range of $X to $Y. Budgets may or may not be included as part of the RFP, and there are benefits (and drawbacks) to both approaches. Even if you do not provide an SEO firm with your budget in the RFP, we recommend determining a budget beforehand because the money you are willing to spend will help you determine a target ROI.
Now that you’ve gathered the preceding information for your RFP, you’re ready to sit down and write it. You can structure an RFP in several ways. Here is a brief outline:
- Section 1: Summary and overview
This section is where you will introduce the challenge you are having and provide the SEO firm with an overview of the rest of the RFP. We also recommend outlining how you would like SEO firms to respond to your RFP. Think of this section as an executive summary, where you will provide the highlights of the RFP without the technical details.
- Section 2: Technical summary
Often, SEO firms need gritty details to determine how they can best help you. In the technical summary, this is where you will provide key pieces of information relevant to your project, such as technical requirements, a description of technical issues with the project, your site’s current platform, and so on. The technical summary might originate from your IT department, as this section is often for an SEO firm’s programmers and delivery team.
- Section 3: Administration and management
By describing who will be involved in the project on your end and what the timeline is for completion, you are finalizing the framework of the project.
- Section 4: Project expectations and delivery
If you’ve done your homework, this should be the easiest section to write. From outlining your evaluation criteria to outlining what monthly deliverables or training you would like to receive to assessing your KPIs, this section helps an SEO firm determine its cost to complete your project, as well as its suitability.
RFPs can be pretty daunting to write, but if you think about it, there are several benefits to creating one. Not only will your company identify potential barriers to project success, but you’ll also facilitate great internal communication, develop better budgets, and identify what types of SEO firms you’ll want to work with.
When you write an RFP, keep in mind that the purpose of an RFP is to hire an expert SEO firm that will propose its recommended actions for your company’s website(s) to achieve the greatest chance for success. Sometimes an SEO firm’s feedback highlights other potential issues that you may not have considered, which may change the scope of your project entirely.
If you don’t know what the best solution is for your web properties and have only a vague idea, you can submit a Request for Information (RFI), which is typically not contractually binding but allows you to ask questions about an SEO firm’s products and services.
You should also plan to talk to candidate SEO firms. This is your opportunity to dig a little bit deeper and move beyond the RFP. If you are a smaller company and have bypassed doing an RFP, you will still need to be in direct contact with your prospective SEO firm. Here are some things for you to consider during this stage of the process:
- Ask for a list of past success stories (not just clients)
Let the company tell you where it has helped someone be successful. You can ask for a client list, but be aware that a failed client engagement does not necessarily mean the SEO firm failed. Many times clients don’t implement the SEO practitioner’s recommendations, or they try to, but do it badly.
You can use this to your benefit. Ask them for a case study of a client failure, and then ask them why they think it failed. This can provide some great insight into what they require from their clients, because the failure they disclose to you will inevitably be due to the client not providing them what they needed.
- Talk on the phone or (if possible) get together
Email is a great initial communication medium, but a phone call or in-person meeting gives you a real sense of the team you’ll work with. Make sure you’re not talking to a salesperson (if you go with a big company), but rather to the person who will be interacting with you throughout the contract execution process. There’s nothing worse than getting sold by a charismatic, knowledgeable SEO leader and then being passed on to a junior team for management.
In the phone call/meeting, be sure to establish a rapport. If you can’t feel comfortable on a personal level, don’t dismiss it—brilliant SEOs are great, but if you can’t work well together, the project is unlikely to succeed. Everybody works better with people they like and people they get along with. There’s the additional pressure of not letting down someone you’ve developed a relationship with, and it extends subconsciously and consciously into every part of the work you do together.
- Present a few initial issues over email
Some SEO consultants won’t engage in any work before a contract is signed, but you should at least get them to talk about how a problem can be approached, whether it’s an issue, and what strategies they might recommend to fix it (even from a broad level). If you are an SEO practitioner, put a few examples of things on the table for the potential client. It builds trust in the SEO practitioner’s knowledge and gives you insight into how he solves problems and what the work relationship and advice will be like down the road.
- References
Asking for references is a good idea. Make sure you qualify the reference as part of the process. You want to protect yourself from people who might get some friend of theirs, instead of a real client, to act as the reference. It is helpful if the reference the candidate provides works within a well-known business. Make sure you include an understanding of the relationship between the SEO firm and the client provided as a reference.
Once you get the reference on the phone, you should try to learn what the SEO consultant was asked to do, and what he did. Get specific details on this. If you want someone to perform link building for you but he did not do link building for the client, the value of that reference is decreased. Then see whether the reference will provide you some input on the benefits they received from the work of the SEO consultant (e.g., increases in traffic, conversions, or other metrics of value).
Also, think about conducting your own sleuthing. The Wayback Machine can show you prior versions of the reference’s site, including client lists. Call ex-clients the candidate firm didn’t give as references. In addition, ask about good and bad experiences with the company in forums that cover SEO, such as Google Webmaster Groups.
Regardless of whether you have done an RFP or used a more informal process, make sure you understand the process you will use to make a decision. Here are some tips on how to do that:
- Get a written response from two or three vendors
Don’t get an RFP response or quote from just one vendor, even if you’re sure you’re going to use them. Multiple quotes aren’t just a best practice, they’re a good way to learn about pricing and scope discrepancies. The quote from the vendor you don’t like might have some pieces that your preferred vendor overlooked. Pricing is harder because it fluctuates so wildly in the search marketing world.
However, don’t choose an SEO expert on price alone (or even make price the biggest part of your decision) unless your budget is a real problem. SEO is usually an incredibly high-ROI activity. Companies that spend larger amounts on SEO services tend to make it back in a matter of weeks or months from traffic and conversion increases (remember that more targeted traffic means higher conversion rates too).
Thus, going with an SEO expert who costs a lot less might seem like a good idea, but if you don’t work as well together and you think he might not do as good a job, you’re hurting yourself in the long term. Of course, don’t get fleeced by an exorbitantly overpriced firm (watch out; some of the biggest SEO companies have some of the most ruthless pricing models because they know that Fortune 1000s will work only with consultants who’ve done work for other Fortune 1000s), but be aware that a few thousand dollars is not the best reason to choose a different provider.
- Have smart, sensible people review the contract
Lawyers are great, but sometimes legal folks get overly concerned with liability and risk management details and overlook big-picture business items. Make sure your savvy business/ROI-focused personnel get a good look too. If there are legal issues that cause a rift, it can even be wise to get some C-level executives involved. Sometimes the folks from legal won’t budge on an issue that’s going to be a deal breaker, but if the CEO says do it anyway, you can get around the more problematic demands. Also be aware that different things are important to different firms. For example, some SEO companies will walk away from a deal if the client insists on a no-publicity clause.
- Go with your gut
When you finally make your choice, go with the team you feel will bring results. Making a matrix of price versus service versus reputation versus estimated productivity is fine if you’re into that, but consider going with your initial gut feeling. If you don’t feel like there is a correct company at the time, go back to the table, get more information, and even try to get another bid or two. When you do find the best choice, things just “feel” right. How do you know?
The way they talk about search engines makes sense and the advice they’ve given lines up with the best practices you’ve seen expressed on SEO sites you trust.
Their level of familiarity with recent trends at the engines and the links they send or news they cite is timely, relevant, and logical.
They use the engines like pros, rapidly combing through site queries, link information, and analytics data to unveil the underlying problems that are hurting rankings or causing the competition to succeed.
Their interactions with your team “fit.” The team members like the consultants and are eager to implement their advice.
Remember, an SEO business relationship is a relationship nonetheless, and if the two parties involved simply speak different languages professionally and/or culturally within their organizations, no amount of SEO expertise—and no amount of SEO budget—will make the relationship work. It is much smarter to work with people you like than to pay begrudgingly for expertise you need that comes in a package you don’t care for.