Things to check before selecting a WordPress SEO company for your business

Wouldn’t it be great if your website popped up amongst the first few results on google if a user searched for products or services your business offers? 

If you don’t understand how important that is, understand 49% of search traffic goes straight to the top results presented on the search engine results page (SERP). Sure, that’ll mean a lot of traffic for your website and eventually increased sales and revenue. 

Now, you must be wondering why we’re showing you this dream. Of course, if it was that easy, wouldn’t you be nailing it already? We’re here to inform you that these hopes we’re giving you are not completely unrealistic. You may be able to give your website the boost it needs to compete in search engines by hiring a professional SEO agency for WordPress.

Choosing the right WordPress SEO service provider can do wonders for you in the SEO game. But how do you know which WordPress SEO company is the master of the trade? To help you with it, we’ve compiled a checklist of 6 things that you must check when looking for a WordPress SEO service.  However, let’s not skip the basics. 

What is SEO and Why is it Important for Your Website?

If you don’t already know what SEO is, it’s important you get it before we dive in!

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a set of strategies to increase traffic on your website by ranking high in the organic results provided by search engines such as google, yahoo, bing, etc. 

Search engines drive 53.3% of all website traffic, so think how many potential customers you’re missing out on simply because you don’t appear in a search. 

Additionally, if your SEO game isn’t strong, your website would be amongst the majority (90.63%) of websites that don’t get organic search traffic from Google, the shepherd of most internet traffic.

So how do you be a part of that remaining 9.87% of the crowd? The first recommendation from us, switch to WordPress!

Why is WordPress the best CMS for SEO?

A CMS is a content management system that helps you build a website even when you don’t have all the technical know-how. 

If you want your website to operate with an SEO-friendly CMS that gives you all the resources to rank at the top of Google SERPs, WordPress should be your choice.

From the day it was released in 2003, WordPress has had unstoppable growth. In fact, the CMS showed the fastest growth for more than ten years.  If you don’t believe us, check out the stats below:

Awesome, right? 

If these stats weren’t enough to convince you to switch to WordPress, let us point out some main benefits of using WordPress as your CMS for search engine optimisation: 

1. The WordPress CMS ensures you can focus on the User Experience. How? It offers around 60,000 plugins, 10,000 free templates, and 11,000 paid ones. So when you build a website with WordPress, it is visually appealing and greatly functional.
2. With the help of SEO plugins for WordPress, like Yoast SEO, you can better help search engines understand the relevance of your site by optimising its metadata with keywords. 
3. Did you know images can be optimized for search engines? With WordPress, you can do that by adding the relevant alternative (alt) text. 
4. WordPress offers various plugins that increase the loading speed of the website, and as we know, page speed is one of the factors for ranking high in mobile searches.
5. You can integrate WordPress with almost any software tool, be it Google workspace or Google analytics.

Now that we’ve made a point about why you should be choosing WordPress for solid SEO implementation let us throw some light on the reality. 

WordPress offers a wide range of features and plugins that you must use correctly to benefit in terms of ranking high. 

We know it’s difficult and time-consuming to work with code-heavy themes and learn each feature to use them in building your website. For the same reason, our next advice is to partner with an SEO agency for WordPress that is knowledgeable and experienced in using the WordPress CMS. 

The best WordPress SEO service can help you with everything required to increase your visibility amongst users by ranking higher in the SERPs. But how do you know which WordPress SEO service to hire? Don’t worry; we’ve got a checklist for you!

6-point checklist to pick the right SEO agency for WordPress 

When it comes to hiring someone for their services, there are a few common things that one should check for. These things are their time in the industry and experience and their reviews and success stories. So these two pointers are at the top of our list:

• Time in Business and Experience

Ask the agencies you’ve been considering, “how long have you been in the business of developing websites using WordPress?” 

The response will quickly help you understand the level of skill and experience they possess. 

WordPress has been around for two decades, constantly evolving with new features, plugins, and themes. Additionally, the SEO trends and how Google prioritises website content on SERPs have changed over the years. There are several elements to take care of, such as 

• keywords, 
• backlinks 
• permalinks, 
• mobile friendliness, 
• Speed optimisation 
• On page SEO 
• etc.

When you’re looking to hire a WordPress SEO service provider, you don’t want to work with a novice. You want to find someone who’s got a long experience working with the growing CMS, knows the ins and outs of WordPress and understands the changing SEO trends.

When an entity or business has established itself as an SEO company for WordPress over time, they possess strong insights into the market. They are even capable of predicting changing trends to a certain level. 

So an experienced SEO agency will not only know what plugins are the best to get a specific result, but they can also understand what will work the best to help your content stand out long-term. Making our point, we always encourage you to look for a solid portfolio and experience if you are really looking to invest in boosting your organic traffic.

•  Customer Reviews and Success Stories

When you buy something on amazon, do you check reviews of that product? Yes, right? Then why would you not look for reviews for a service to help you grow your website? 

Do your homework on the agency’s WordPress SEO skills and experience before signing a contract. Find a company with a history of success in SEO and only then decide to hire them.

Personal reviews are great, but if you don’t have friends or acquaintances who can guide you to a good SEO agency for WordPress, we’re sure you’ll find a community online to help you. In fact, stats show that 79% of people put their faith in online reviews. And, of course, the internet has an opinion on everything! 

If you want to know what kind of work to anticipate from a specific WordPress SEO agency, ask them directly to point to some clients they’ve worked with and share success stories. You can easily cross-check their references and judge the agency’s work ethic, professionalism, and dedication to its customers based on their reviews.

Once you’ve asked them these general questions, it’s time to understand some technical requirements for WordPress SEO. 

• Speed Matters in SEO, Can They Provide It? 

For a few years now, page load time has been considered an important component in search engine rankings. In fact, Google released its “Speed Update” in 2018, according to which it ranks websites and results in the mobile search based on their loading time. So the quicker your loading speed, the higher it will rank when your content is highly relevant and high quality.  

From our years of experience in this field, we know the significance of your site’s SERP ranking will continue to depend on your website’s loading time.

How do we know? The loading speed of a website is directly related to the user experience. Just think of your own experience – how long would you wait for a website to load? 

As per recent research, any website that takes more than 3 seconds of loading time loses a quarter of users who click away to choose a different result over yours. You can see in the graph below how the number of lost users increases as the loading time increases: 

So, when you’re choosing a WordPress SEO service, you want to know if they can ensure a speedy, responsive website on all devices. You can ask them questions such as:

• How do you ensure that the WordPress loading time is minimised? 

Some of the answers you’re looking for here are running 

• performance tests, 
• choosing quality providers for web hosting, 
• avoiding unnecessary plugins, 
• regularly updating the WordPress versions and plugins, 
• using the latest PHP version, etc.

An experienced SEO company for WordPress often pay attention to details such as optimising images and reducing the size of CSS and JavaScript files. 

• What kind of plugins do you use to optimise the website’s speed? 

One of the first areas to tackle if you want a simple and fast solution to enhance the performance of your WordPress website is data caching. While caching is a common technique used to speed up websites, it is not a built-in feature of the WordPress CMS. 

Manually configuring caching on a WordPress site requires some coding knowledge, which when done incorrectly, could lead to site breakdowns and errors. Thankfully due to some great plugins, like  WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache, the process may be automated to boost your website speed. 

So when you ask this question to test your WordPress SEO service provider, make sure you find out which of these plugins do they use to automate the caching process.

• What kind of themes do they use? 

As we mentioned above, WordPress provides a wide variety of themes. However, it’s possible that your active WordPress theme with beautiful visuals and abundant features is slowing down your website’s performance.

Although visually impressive, themes that are overloaded with high-quality photos and effects may drain the performance of the website because a large amount of coding could be used for more elaborate effects.

Competent SEO services will tell you they use simpler themes that provide the necessary features only and add effects with custom CSS and additional plugins.

Once you’ve asked these questions, it’s time to understand how they provide their services. 

• Do They Provide a Dedicated Person to Work on the Website?

The website’s quality and functionality can’t be taken for granted because what if it’s working fine one day and crashing the other day? This is a very common scenario for rookies!

Hiring an in-house expert or a dedicated person from an outside website management company to handle website strategy and updates may cut down on wasted time and effort on your end.

What’s the need, you may ask? 

If you’re working with a popular WordPress SEO service provider, you can’t expect to be their only client. To get things done in a fixed timeframe, you need someone who specifically understands your needs and focuses on them without prioritising other projects.

Given our experience in this field, we always outline the benefits of having a dedicated person to work with our clients. We’ve listed them below so you know what to expect from your SEO agency for WordPress.

• A dedicated person for your WordPress SEO will maintain a record of your objectives for your website and maintain strategies to stay on focus.
• They ensure regular updates for plugins and security so that you can avoid the risk of lagging performance with development.
• You see your edits for design and content implemented on a timely basis, as your website is their priority.
• If you have a dedicated person to manage your website, you’re freed from the burden of web maintenance to focus on the core business.

• Timeframe, Reporting, and Frequent Communication

Knowing when to expect results is your right as a customer. Time is money, and rightly so because the faster you implement WordPress SEO, the earlier you’ll show up ranking higher on the SERPs and the quicker you’ll drive traffic to your website. So you can’t compromise on it!

If you want to employ a WordPress developer and have them finish the task on schedule, you need to determine how long the project will take. Here are some relevant questions you can ask your shortlisted agencies for WordPress SEO:

• What will be the roadmap for achieving the objectives of the project on time? 
• What can I expect in the first few weeks after handing the project over to you?
• When can I see the results of your work? 
• What is the backup if our strategy does not provide desirable results?
• How frequently will we be communicating for updates? 

A good SEO company for WordPress should provide you with honest answers to your inquiries, even if the responses are something you don’t want to hear. Communication is going to be the key to the success of this project, so you want to ensure a regular reporting schedule to stay on top of the pace of the project and productivity. 

A reporting schedule for updates on your website doesn’t have to be a face-to-face meeting every time. It can be daily emails, with detailed calls and meetings once in a while. A structure and schedule for this is something you and your agency have to come up with.  

Remember, the right agency for you will be the one that makes communication easier for you and keeps you up-to-date on progress.  

• Tools They Use

One of the main reasons you’re hiring a professional WordPress SEO service overdoing it yourself is their access to tools and knowledge to get things done quicker. 

The process of WordPress SEO is not as simple as it sounds. Before creating a strategy for development, your SEO company for WordPress must first examine the requirements. They then decide on the right themes, after which development comes, and plugins may be added. Before delivering the finished version, the developer has to conduct a thorough testing procedure to eliminate any remaining flaws.

A competent WordPress SEO service provider will be able to tell you all about the tools they use throughout these processes, such as specific plugins, design elements, analytic tools, office suite, etc. You can judge the competence of the SEO company for WordPress based on the confidence they exude about using these tools.

Dominate WordPress SEO With The Best WordPress SEO Service 

SEO is crucial for any website that aims to rank amongst the top results in the SERPs, and there’s no better way of staying ahead of this game than hiring professionals to take care of it. We at Anglara understand the importance of a great WordPress SEO service provider, which is why we’ve given you a complete checklist to help you choose the right one for your project. 

Anglara’s experts will surely check all these requirements to provide the best custom websites powered by WordPress. We’d be happy to answer all these questions for you and provide solid support as your choice of SEO company for WordPress. Simply reach out to us on our website to get started on driving organic traffic for your website.