Maintaining a strong online presence is necessary for every business organization today. Customers and clients demand that you are easy to find and easy to interact with online. Search engines are one of the primary sources of their search for information and any business organization that doesn’t make itself found will have a hard time tackling competition. It is very important for your website to be on the first page of the search engine results as people don’t tend to go beyond the first page to find what they need. Optimizing your website to search engines like Google thus becomes extremely important and organic SEO is the go to solution to win the search game.

SEO can either be done in-house or outsourced to an agency that specializes in search engine optimization. The benefits of outsourcing to an agency is that you gain access to knowledge, skills, experience and expertise that in-house teams can never deliver. Moreover, you will be saving your time and money by not hiring an internal team to do the needful. If you are looking forward to hire an SEO agency for your requirements, this article is for you. We will list out the characteristics and practices of the best SEO companies in Houston or anywhere else. We will also discuss the things you need to expect from an SEO company when you are planning to hire one.

1. Referrals

When you start your search for the best SEO company, the first thing you should expect from a company is that you get sufficient referrals recommending you to approach the SEO company. The referrals could from your friends, colleagues, partners, advisors, family, etc. If an SEO company/agency is being referred to as the best, it is quite believable that the company knows what it is doing and is good at doing what it does. You can proceed to contact the company with some background research without any hesitation when you have received a referral from a person/entity you can trust.

2. Previous List of Clients

Apart from referrals, you can also believe that an SEO agency is the best at what it does by looking at its previous list of clients. A good list of clients would include reputed brands, business organizations of all sizes, companies that are doing extremely well on their digital marketing initiatives and of course your competitors. If you find two or three names that you are impressed with, you can certainly make the next move of conducting a brief background research and contacting the company representative.

3. Realistic Assurances

When you are looking for the best SEO companies, another thing to expect from them is realistic assurances. Once you have shortlisted two to three agencies that have referrals and a good list of clients, you can contact them and set up a meeting on the telephone or face to face. You then brief your current situation and also ask the company do its preliminary research to know where your company websites stands on the search market. Avoid an SEO company that will give you false and unrealistic assurances like greater visibility, increased traffic, first position in the SERP and so on within a span of 2-3 months. SEO is all about long-term planning and execution, suggesting it will take a lot of time, at least a good 6 months to reach the top position.

4. Customization

Every business organization has its own set of requirements and search is not an exception to this. There are specific keywords you would want to focus on, specific objectives that you would want to meet, turnaround times you would define based on your requirements and so on. You should also differentiate from your competitors and do things that they are not doing to stay ahead in the race. The best SEO companies ensure to offer a customized approach to each of their clients by rightly assessing their requirements and hurdles that exist. When you meet the SEO company for the first time, expect them to conduct a brief study on your status quo and suggest you the options that they could offer to improve the situation.