6 min read
How To Get The Most Out Of Your SEO Company
Hiring an SEO company is a significant investment, but simply signing a contract does not guarantee results. The businesses that see the best return on their SEO investment are the ones that actively engage with their agency, set clear expectations, and understand enough about SEO to evaluate the work being done on their behalf. Whether you are a small WordPress-based business or an enterprise operation, knowing how to maximize the value of your SEO partnership can be the difference between transformative growth and wasted budget.
In this guide, we cover the practical steps you should take to get the most out of your SEO company, from the initial onboarding process through ongoing collaboration and performance evaluation.
Start with a Thorough Competitor Analysis
Before your SEO company can develop an effective strategy, they need to understand your competitive landscape. A thorough competitor analysis reveals who you are competing against in search results, what keywords they rank for, what content drives their traffic, and where their backlinks come from.
What to Expect from Your Agency
Your SEO company should provide a detailed competitor analysis as part of the onboarding process. This analysis should identify your top organic competitors (which may differ from your direct business competitors), evaluate their content strategies, map their keyword portfolios, and assess the strength of their backlink profiles.
What You Should Contribute
Share your industry knowledge with your SEO team. You understand your market better than anyone, including which competitors your customers actually consider, what differentiates your offerings, and which market segments you are targeting. This context helps your SEO company craft a strategy that aligns with real business objectives rather than just chasing rankings for vanity keywords.
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Search Console provide valuable competitive intelligence. Your agency should use these tools as standard practice and share the insights with you in regular reporting. For WordPress sites specifically, understanding which plugins and themes competitors use can reveal tactical opportunities for improving your own SEO performance.
Master On-Page SEO Fundamentals
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual web pages to rank higher and attract more relevant traffic. While your SEO company handles the technical execution, understanding the fundamentals helps you evaluate their work and contribute effectively.
Keyword Strategy
Every page on your site should target specific keywords that your potential customers actually search for. Your SEO company should present a keyword strategy that maps target keywords to specific pages, balancing search volume with competition difficulty. Short-tail keywords drive volume, while long-tail keywords drive conversions. A good strategy includes both.
Content Optimization
On-page optimization includes title tags, meta descriptions, heading structures, internal linking, URL structure, and content quality. Each element contributes to how search engines understand and rank your pages. Your SEO company should optimize existing pages and provide guidelines for new content creation that maintain SEO best practices.
For WordPress sites, SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math simplify much of on-page optimization. However, plugins are tools, not strategies. Your SEO company should be configuring these tools as part of a broader strategy, not relying on them as a substitute for one. Learn more about the foundations of effective on-page optimization in our guide on using SEO for business marketing.
Leverage Schema Markup and Structured Data
Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the context of your content, enabling rich results like star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, product prices, and event details directly in search results. These enhanced listings increase click-through rates significantly.
Types of Schema Your SEO Company Should Implement
- Organization schema: Provides search engines with information about your business, including name, logo, contact details, and social profiles.
- Article schema: Helps blog posts and articles appear with enhanced formatting in search results.
- Product schema: Displays pricing, availability, and ratings for eCommerce products.
- FAQ schema: Enables FAQ-style dropdowns directly in search results, increasing visibility and click-through rates.
- Local business schema: Essential for businesses serving specific geographic areas, enabling display in local search results and Google Maps.
Your SEO company should implement schema markup as part of their technical SEO work and verify it using Google’s Rich Results Test tool. For WordPress sites, schema-optimized themes and dedicated schema plugins simplify implementation significantly.
Demand Transparent Reporting
Transparent, regular reporting is the foundation of a productive SEO partnership. Without clear visibility into what your agency is doing and what results they are achieving, you cannot evaluate whether the investment is paying off.
Essential Metrics to Track
- Organic traffic: Month-over-month and year-over-year growth in visitors from search engines.
- Keyword rankings: Position changes for your target keywords over time.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of organic visitors who complete desired actions like form submissions, phone calls, or purchases.
- Backlinks acquired: The number and quality of new backlinks earned each month.
- Technical health: Crawl errors, page speed scores, Core Web Vitals status, and indexation issues.
- Revenue attribution: For eCommerce sites, the revenue directly attributable to organic search traffic.
What Good Reporting Looks Like
Your SEO company should provide monthly reports that clearly show progress toward your goals, explain the work completed during the period, highlight wins and challenges, and outline the plan for the upcoming month. Reports should be understandable to non-technical stakeholders and include actionable recommendations. If your agency’s reports are filled with jargon and no clear connection to business outcomes, that is a red flag.
Invest in Content Strategy
Content is the fuel that powers SEO. Without high-quality, relevant content, even the best technical optimization and link building will fall short. Your SEO company should either produce content as part of their services or provide detailed content briefs that your team can execute.
Effective SEO content strategy involves:
- Content gap analysis: Identifying topics your competitors rank for that you do not yet cover.
- Content calendar: A planned schedule of new content creation aligned with keyword opportunities and business priorities.
- Content optimization: Regular updates to existing content to maintain and improve rankings over time.
- Internal linking: Strategic linking between related pages to distribute authority and guide both users and search engines through your site.
For WordPress sites, the blogging capabilities of the platform make content creation straightforward. Combine your SEO company’s keyword research with your industry expertise to produce content that is both search-optimized and genuinely valuable to readers. If your site benefits from community interaction, building an online community around your content creates additional engagement signals that benefit SEO.
Understand the Timeline
SEO is a long-term strategy. While some improvements, particularly technical fixes, can produce results within weeks, meaningful ranking and traffic improvements typically take three to six months to materialize. Understanding this timeline is crucial for setting realistic expectations and avoiding the temptation to switch agencies prematurely.
A responsible SEO company will set realistic expectations during onboarding and provide a projected timeline for results. Be wary of agencies that promise first-page rankings within 30 days or guarantee specific outcomes. These promises are either unrealistic or rely on tactics that risk penalization by search engines.
Maintain Open Communication
The most productive SEO partnerships involve regular, two-way communication. Schedule monthly strategy calls where your agency presents results, discusses challenges, and proposes adjustments. Use these calls to share business updates that might affect SEO strategy, such as new product launches, market shifts, or changes in business priorities.
Do not hesitate to ask questions. A good SEO company welcomes client engagement and sees it as an opportunity to educate and collaborate. If you do not understand something in a report or recommendation, ask for clarification. Your understanding of the strategy makes you a better partner and helps the agency do better work.
Summary
Getting the most out of your SEO company is a collaborative effort. By contributing industry knowledge, demanding transparent reporting, understanding fundamental SEO principles, and maintaining open communication, you create the conditions for a partnership that delivers real business results. The investment in SEO compounds over time, and the businesses that treat their agency as a strategic partner rather than a vendor are the ones that see transformative returns.
Schema Markup And How To Get Started With It?
Related reading