How to choose a SEO company ?

With hundreds of SEO companies all over the internet I can tell you its one of the most daunting tasks to choose the right one. When you want your brand to get a good online boost, an SEO Company might be the most sensible answer. That might be the easiest way out until you cannot figure out which SEO company to hire after seeing thousands of Google results when you searched the internet. 

Every SEO company will tell you that they’re the best and that they can do this and that. At the end of the day, you have the same list of pros and cons. So, how do you really find a good SEO company to work with? 

If you want to hire search engine optimization experts to help your brand but you don’t know why you need them, then you’re just wasting your money. You need to sit down with your team, and set your goals so you can tell the SEO company your expectations. A good set of goals include things such as aiming for more traffic from certain groups of users or consumers, boosting new sales and overall revenue, or perhaps boost market confidence on your brand. Remember more traffic, better rankings, or beating your competitor website are just short term goals that will not help you achieve your real business goals. 

I have lot of experiences where in I selected a company and kept paying their hefty fees with the expectation of a higher ranking over time. Now the average price of a SEO company can be anywhere between $200 - $400/month. Lets say for the sake of argument you selected the one with $200/month.
 

Any Search Engine Optimization(SEO) company will tell you it can take anywhere between 6 - 8 months to get your rankings improved. And to be honest this is true !! Now after 6 months where you have already spent $1200 you rankings are still the same. So that's a really messy situation you are in if every dollar counts for your small business. You have lost 6 months of critical time, no rankings improvement and $1200 gone.

There's nothing really you can do about the SEO company since they already told you it will take 6 - 8 months. And you have no clue whether they were actually working or playing cards all this time.
So choosing the right SEO company from the very beginning is more important than you think.
But how do you do that ?

Look for Pay for performance companies - Lot of companies these days have started charging the clients only when their website reaches a certain rank lets say top 30. The advantage with this approach is first you know they actually will work towards getting your site ranked or else they don't get paid. Secondly, you can get some free work done from them before they will actually charge you.
        
Keep track of your rankings yourself - If you don't see any change in rankings in 3 months then there is something wrong and you should check with your SEO company as to what's going on. Even if they are not charging you but you are losing time which in effect means losing business and eventually affects the bottom line.
     
Ask for monthly reporting - Always ask for monthly reports from your SEO company as to what your rankings are each month and keep on top of it. At the end of the day its your website and for the SEO company you might be just another client among several others. Plus the companies also pay more attention to clients who keep on top of things.
        
Choosing Small or Big Company ? - As far as I am concerned it doesn't matter as long as they are getting the work done in the right manner. I have seen some small companies doing great work since they are more dedicated than the red tape based big companies. Also, at the end of the day you can change the company based on the results.
    
No Contract - No contract company is ideal since you are not burdened by the 6 month or more contract and you might have to shell out money without seeing the actual results. With this type of company you know they are working for you or else they might lose you as there is no contract.
  
Pricing - Off course this is the most important thing. But then you get what you pay for. So its a catch 22 situation especially for small businesses who want to find the fine balance between money and services. But I would say anything between $200 - $400/month should be ideal for small businesses to invest in SEO.
   
Do I need SEO ? - Absolutely, since this is one thing that has a great return on investment(ROI). The only problem is time and it could be 6 months before you could even see it start to pay off. So unless you choose the right SEO company you might end up paying for something which never gave you any result.

Any SEO company can claim that they have helped a lot of brands get to the top of the search results and increase traffic from thousands of hits to millions but it will be nice to see the details. With case studies of brands similar to your, you will see concrete samples of how they get the job done. You will also be able to know how SEO experts handle different challenges and use different methods to overcome them.