1. Does your website rank at the top for most keywords in your industry?
2. Can you guarantee that I'm at the top of the search engine result page?
3. What is the most recent algorithm update released by Google and how will that affect my SEO?
4. Will you have to make changes to my website?
5. What is your strategy to optimize my website for SEO?

Scary as that sounds, SEO is super important for medical practice websites. Doctors websites need to be optimized for google search. .

Google reports that one in 20 searches on Google are health care related. So you guys, you want to make sure when people are making one of those searches, that they find your high quality website. and hat's what SEO will do for you.

It will optimize your website so when somebody searches, you come up high on the SERP. ( Search Engine Result Page), i.e. you show up near the top when someone searches for a specific service or protocol that you offer. That'd be awesome, right?

SEO will give you domain authority.

As much as we like to teach on how to implement, create, and run your marketing strategy in-house, we believe that SEO is something that is a good idea to outsource.

It is fairly complicated and time-consuming, and really you guys, that's what you're paying for, someone's time to implement and monitor the SEO strategy on your website, and to implement for everything Google, because Google runs the world when it comes to search.

So, let's dive into it. What are the five questions that you should ask an SEO company before you hire them?

The only exceptions to this is if they're new at helping businesses optimize for search, right? As you'll learn, SEO takes about three to six months to come into effect. So, if someone has a brand new website and they're new to helping businesses with SEO, then they won't be at the top, but otherwise, everyone else should be.

And you guys, just because they're new doesn't mean it's a bad thing. It might help you negotiate the price if they haven't done this for too many other businesses, but it doesn't mean they can't do a good job. But otherwise, everyone else should practice what they preach and be at the top of the search results.

If they say, "Yes," then you say, "Bye-bye." There should be no guarantees in SEO. It's impossible. There's too much room for a little bit of fluctuation. So, yes, you should get good results, but there cannot be a guarantee of position. They can't tell you you'll definitely be one, two, or three. That's not to say that if you're not happy with the results that you get month after month then you could walk away, but there will be no guarantees.

You guys, this is a little bit of a trick question.

Of course, you don't really need to know what the most recent algorithm is, but I can guarantee you that there was one and this company should know what it is and have to plan on how they will react to it.

There's some things that come out from Google that actually their website doesn't need to be tweaked for them, but this company that you're about to hire should be able to tell you what the algorithm is and they'll give you a date, an exact date that it came out and you can check that.

And then, you know, be able to tell you how it would affect your website and what they're doing about it for their clients. It's important that an SEO company stays up-to-date on all of the latest and greatest SEO information from Google so that your site can be optimized accordingly.

If they say, "No," then again, it's sayonara.

SEO company will have to make quite a few changes to your website, especially if it's never been optimized for SEO, to first of all really just to catch it up with any, of the latest algorithm changes that Google has released since your website was created, but also to add keywords and all sorts of things.

For sure, they'd have to change your website.

If they tell you that, "It's an industry secret," or if they can't release that information to keep with the competitive advantage, that's a red flag.

You guys, SEO, it's not magic. Google tells us what we all should do to optimize our websites. In theory, what Google says is that, "We should make our website amazing for users, "that it should be easy to navigate, "and should have great content "that's relevant to what I'm looking for."

That's all fine and dandy, right, but they also have like boatloads of manuals on how to do that, so basically every SEO company, it should do the same thing.

Now, the content that they add, that's a little different. That's where they can finesse it. But their strategy should for sure include these four things:

1. An SEO website or audit. They need to audit your website and see if there are any errors.
2. Keyword Research: There should be some keyword research involved. They should come to you and tell you what keyboards they think your website should optimize for.
3. On-page optimization. That just means they're going to fix any errors that might have problems on each page. So, on-site optimization.
4. A backlink strategy. A big part of SEO is getting other businesses to link back to your website, and a good SEO company will have a strategy to do this.

if you get great answers to all of those questions, then I think this SEO company might be great for you to work with.

Remember, it's not inexpensive, but there is a lot of up front work, like we talked about, all the changes that you need to make to a website, but what a lot of companies do for you is they'll provide you a monthly retainer, really to even out the cost.

Just know that they're providing a lot of the cost up front and there's not as much to do, so they make their money on the back end.

Say they're charging you $600 a month. That's covering all the cost at the beginning, but then in the end, they don't have to spend that much time each month to keep your website performing at an optimal level. So, if they offer you this monthly cost, say for 12 months, and you prefer to pay a lump sum at the beginning, just know that you can negotiate that with them.