5 questions to ask your new SEO agency

So let's imagine you've recently hired a new search engine optimisation agency to improve your organic position in the popular search engines.

Before you actually engage with them, here are a few important questions you should ask:

1. Does the SEO agency understand my business?
Or again more specifically, do the people actually working on my account understand what my organisation does, its products or services and what it's unique proposition or selling point is?
There will almost certainly be some initial familiarisation with your offering or processes, but first check that this agency gets what you do and has a firm understanding of who your competitors are.
Note: The counter to this issue however is when you hire an SEO agency that knows your industry very well and already has a number of your competitors as clients in this market sector... are they really able to provide you with a unique and perhaps innovative approach to on-page and off-site optimisation?

2. How much of my monthly retainer is for actual work?
Or more specifically, how much of what you pay for is agency 'padding' in the form of 'Project Management', 'Account Management' or even worse... 'Administration & Reporting'?
(Note, most SEO tools these days have quite decent automated reporting functions. So sending out a regular report is just a case of configuring the reporting service once).
In one situation I saw last year, where my agency won the SEO business, The outgoing agency managed to fill over 60% of its monthly SEO retainer with non-specialist staff. Nice work if you can get it....

3. Who is actually doing the work?
It's a pretty good bet that you had a smart(ish) new business person put together the proposal that you accepted. Or if the agency is a smaller one, then it may well be the owner or other senior person that wrote the document that won them the work. But will this person be the one actually working on your account day-to-day or will it be a junior person they may not even have mentioned in their credentials? My guess is that in most SEO agencies it will be the latter that does the hard graft most of the time (not the 'Head of Search' or 'Head of SEM Services' you were promised)
Note: If it is someone you never get to speak to, then reconsider hiring them. And if it's 'someone in their [not this country] office' then get concerned quickly, really quick....

4. What tools & techniques do you use?
Some SEO agencies like to keep the tools and techniques they use a secret to their clients. I guess they feel it adds an air of mystery to the complex art of search engine optimisation. As far as tools go, there are a few good ones out there that the majority of agencies use for most of their clients. Also make sure that you are not being charged extra for these tools, the costs for them should be included in your retainer.
Note: Some of these tools use propriety indexing technology to work, whereas others need to link to your own site's Webmaster Tools accounts. Neither is wrong, but be prepared to grant them access in the same sort of ways you've granted them access to your website analytics package.
As for the techniques used... you should have full transparency about what they are doing and the rationale for doing it. However, if they mention the act of buying links... run a mile!

5. What do you want me to do next?
Getting started with a new agency is usually a process of learning, testing, evaluating and refining. Expect the agency to ask to speak with other stakeholders or 3rd parties in your business (e.g. PR company, website development agency and product / catalogue managers if you have an eCommerce site). Having an SEO firm that is not just technically competent, but has decent organisational skills can be a rare find. Also make sure that you have regular review sessions booked in the diaries. Even if these are done over the phone / Skype or webex... your business, the competition and most definitely the search engines change all the time.

Ecommerce and SEO advice : what to leave out

In my latest opinion piece for The Drum, called 'Search Engine Optimisation fundamentals for e-commerce sites', I have spent several hundred words explaining how ecommerce sites can use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to improve their organic rankings.

This is my 5th article in my online column about eCommerce and rather than it be a subjective piece, I wanted to produce a more factual article and dip into some technical elements too. However, in writing it there was quite a lot of SEO topics that I missed out, mainly because I wanted the article to be understood by the majority of The Drum's readers, who are more likely to be creative and marketing types rather than those at the sharp end of online site optimisation.

So what did I miss out? Well here's some things I didn't cover:

1. Webmaster tools insights that are relevant to online retailing

2. Micro formats, such as the star ratings for products that can then get fed into organic results

3. Canonical references and robots.txt techniques to reduce crawl bleed

4. Multiple sitemap.xml files for content, catalogue, etc

Was I wrong not to include these? I don't think so. Besides, it would then have meant I couldn't write this article :-)

SEO and eCommerce Merchandising

At Ideal Interface we have various clients who have eCommerce websites. Having done SEO work for them, including strategy and implementation consulting, I thought I'd post on some ways you can leverage your online trading site to benefit your company's search engine optimisation efforts.

1. Give you products the names that people are looking for
   If you want to target search users who are looking for a "red patent shoe", then calling your product "scarlet platform brogue" isn't going to help as much.
2. Provide decent product descriptions
   The supporting content you provide on the page will help the search engine spiders to understand your page better. Also try to include alternative words to target the long tail of search (Hint: you might want to mention "scarlet platform brogue" here, but again only if people will search for that term)
3. Ensure your site navigation (and therefore your directory structure) includes keywords and that these are replicated in your page titles and breadcrumbs.
   E.g. footwear > shoes > smart shoes > red patent shoe
4. Use of on-site search for keyword research
   Take a look at the terms that users type into your on-site search and you'll learn a lot about what they are looking for. Obviously these will be different to the terms that users type into the major search engines (e.g. they don't tend to search too often for your site name in on-site search, rather your brands or products) but they will be terms that real users type in expecting to find things.
   You'll also find out (if your search is clever enough) the terms that bring up no products. (Hint: this could either be highlighting a problem with the way you describe products or be an opportunity in the making).
5. Optimise your entire site to ensure spidering and indexing by search engines
   As well as making sure every page of your site is coded to standards and that you're taking full advantage of Semantic HTML, you should use tools such as the Google Webmaster services that are freely available. 
6. Create a dynamic sitemap.xml
   If your product catalogue is constantly changing, then I  recommend the use of a dynamic sitemap.xml file. This is a technical file that sits in the root directory of your site and tells the search engines all the indexable pages your have. A sitemap.xml file should be created each time your website product catalogue is created and will save you effort of manually updating it

Does anyone have any further suggestions?