5 things every CEO needs to understand when hiring an SEO company

5 things every CEO needs to understand when hiring an SEO company

There comes a time in business when we hit a crossroads when we start to become successful and trying to figure out what needs to be done about our SEO.  Most CEOs will make the decision to either bring on an SEO team so it's in-house or find the best company to do the work on a contract basis.  Sometimes a CEO will have unrealistic ideas of how SEO works, mainly because they aren't familiar with it in general, and that tends to create problems later on when the work doesn't seem to be doing what they had hoped.

If you're a CEO I hope you read through this entire discussion and get a better idea of what SEO is, how long it takes, and how detailed it is.  After you read everything I hope you have the patience needed for your rankings to get to where you wish they would be.  It's not an easy thing, we're not just sitting at our computers and typing up hyperlinks on facebook in order to boost your traffic, so I hope this discussion opens up your eyes a little bit   I've been in your shoes and know how painful it can be to wait for rankings, I'm a CEO and an SEO provider, so I can see this from both sides


Trying to manage what the SEOs are doing will delay results
I understand you want everything to work a certain way, but you need to understand that the SEO specialists working on your project have a detailed plan of attack and each time you try to change something it will delay the results.  think of it this way, would you change the foundation of a house you're building after you have the framing done?  No, because you would have to reframe the entire house and that increases the amount of time before you finish.  The same goes with SEO if you want to change everything in stage 1 and 2 but you're on stage 5, you're going to push the SEOs back and that's not only annoying but it increases the time in order for you to be ranked.

I've had plenty of SEO clients, a lot of them try to do this, and I will give them the explanation above and they will quickly understand that they shouldn't try to manage what I'm doing.  You may have an idea of how SEO works, but you're outsourcing it for a reason, so just let them do the work and try not to manage them.

SEO takes time to see results
All SEO providers know that it will take months before you start to see great results from their efforts.  All SEO providers also know that they will have to do a sort of damage control when you start to get angry because you're not ranked after 2 weeks.

Whenever I have a new client sign up for my monthly services I will always make them sign a contract saying they understand it takes at least 6 months before they'll see results.  I have it say 6 months because that's usually an average timeframe to have a decent amount of traffic coming in after doing dedicated SEO for a website.  Sure, you could see a lot of traffic coming in after just a couple months, but you're an exception to the 6-month rule and you'll likely be a happier client than the ones who take 6+ months.

Good SEOs won't give you a guarantee
Any SEO company that says "We guarantee you will be #1 in Google!" is only saying that so you sign up for their services.  No one will give you a guarantee to be on top of the SERPs because we don't work for Google.  Do you think someone that works for the Google search team is going to accept anything less than $500,000 a month for their knowledge of getting a website ranked?  Yes, half a million per month will likely get you some sort of guarantee because a good SEO team will just hire multiple teams to focus on specific parts of a great strategy, but you won't be able to get a legitimate guarantee from a real SEO company.

We can't give legitimate guarantees because we don't work for the search engines.  Since we don't work for the search engines, we don't know exactly what factors into top rankings, and that means a guarantee is worthless.

SEO companies will take the first week to do research
I get complaints from new clients all the time saying "We haven't moved at all this week!" and not only is it annoying because SEO takes time, it's annoying because good research takes at least a week to do and clients don't seem to understand that.

SEO isn't a LEGO type system where we can just input your domain and keywords into a machine and everything goes right.  We have to sit down and analyze your industry, your competitors, figure out where we can get the best links from, figure out how we can help brand while doing marketing as well as placing a link within an article to benefit you the most.  So if you complain after just the first week of research, you're not going to be happy when you figure out SEO takes months before you'll see great rankings.

Don't expect to rank #1 for everything after the first month
Top rankings are definitely in your future, but they won't be in the first week or even the first month, and some CEOs don't accept that.  If you think it's so easy then you would just do it yourself, but you're outsourcing the work to someone that knows what they're doing, and it takes even them a few months to boost you to the top of the SERPs.

I had a client that signed a contract with me for 6 months and they wanted to break it after just 30 days because they weren't making 5x their investment.  They said that they read something online saying SEO can increase your profits by 5x within 30 days, but they didn't think of how difficult their niche was and how bad their website was designed.  I told them this many times, they changed nothing, and their rankings slowing rose but not quick enough for their own timeframes.  If they had just listened to me and changed a few things or gave me hosting access for me to do the changes, everything would have been sped up and they would have seen better rankings.  Even with all the changes they wouldn't have been 5x more profitable after 30 days, and they still would have been upset, and I hope you're not like that because you'll quickly get annoyed with SEO lol.


In conclusion
If you're a CEO that needs some SEO you need to understand it takes time to do it right.  We need to study your competitors, figure out what works with your niche, see who would be willing to take guest posts and figure out where we can get the best links for your website.  That's just a quick example of what we have to do, so don't try to step in thinking you know what needs to be done, because you'll just push pack the timeframes with every email you send in or every phone call you make to ask us to change something


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Thanks!

Tommy Carey