Digital Marketing Blog

You are thinking about hiring one person to look after your website's search work, rather than a firm. That is a reasonable way to buy SEO, and so is hiring an agency. They buy you different things, and the difference is worth knowing before you sign up for either. I should say where I stand, because it affects how you read the rest. I work as an SEO consultant, and Capron Media is my agency. So this page is not going to tell you that one arrangement beats the other. It sets

If you typed this, you wanted a shortcut: somebody else has already sorted the SEO companies, and you would like to start from the top of their list. That is a reasonable thing to want. The trouble is not that the lists are wrong. It is that a ranking of companies is a document somebody made, for a reason, using a method, and the page in front of you may not say which reason or which method. This page is about how to read one, and about the single check that works on any name

You have two or three quotes in front of you and the numbers do not agree. One looks reasonable, one looks high, and one is low enough that you are wondering what is wrong with it. The number on each quote tells you what it costs. It does not tell you what you get, and that second thing is the only one you can compare. This page is about the second thing. It also covers the case where the right answer is to buy nothing yet. For some readers that is the honest answer, and a pa

A company that sells web design and SEO together is selling you two things with very different shapes. One is a project: it has a start, a finish, and a thing you can look at when it is done. The other is a habit: it has no finish, it produces small changes every week, and it stops producing them the moment it is not being done. Putting both on one quote is not a trick. It is convenient, and it is how a large part of this market is organized. The difficulty is that a single n

Good is a judgment you have to make before you have any evidence, which is the awkward part of hiring anyone for search work. The results arrive months after the money does, and by then you have either chosen well or spent a season finding out you did not. So the useful question is not which company is good. It is which tests you can run today, on a company whose work you have not seen, and whose answers you could score yourself. There are more of those than you might think,

Local SEO is one phrase covering about a dozen separate jobs, which is why two proposals using the same two words can be selling you very different months. This is the list. For each item there is what it is, and then the part that matters more: where you can go and look at it yourself, today, without buying anything. This is worth more than it sounds: of 92 findings we recorded on websites we looked at, 81 were things you would not notice just by reading the page, such as a

If you typed Google SEO services pricing into a search box, there is a fair chance you were looking for a rate card from Google. There is not one, because Google does not sell the thing you are pricing. The organic results, the ordinary blue links below the ads, are free to appear in and Google charges nobody for a place in them. Every figure you are about to compare belongs to an independent company selling you their time on your website. That sounds like a technicality, and

SEO provider is one label covering about six different businesses, which is why comparing two of them can feel like comparing a plumber to an insurance policy. They are priced differently, they fail differently, and they oblige themselves to show you different things. Before you shortlist anyone, it is worth deciding which kind you are actually shopping for, because that decision narrows the field faster than any ranking of firms. We will walk you through each kind, with an h

You searched for a Google Partner SEO agency, which means you are doing the sensible thing: looking for a credential before you hand anyone money. The badge is real, Google issues it, and the requirements to hold it are published. The part worth knowing before you shortlist anybody is what those requirements actually measure. They are about Google Ads, the paid results at the top of the page, and none of the three has anything to say about the organic results underneath. The

Search for what you do plus your town and look at the page Google returns. Near the top there may be an ad. Below it, a map with a short list of businesses beside it. Below that, the ordinary links. Those are three separate surfaces. They are filled in three different ways, you get onto them by three different routes, and a service called Google local SEO might be working on any one of them. Knowing which is the difference between a fee that helps and a fee that misses, so we

An agency has shown you its software, or you are looking at what one uses before you hire them. The screens look convincing and that is what they are built to do. The question underneath is simpler than which tool is best: a tool produces a list of findings, and a list of findings is not a change to your website. Somebody has to read it, decide which items matter for your business, and then make the change. That gap between the output and the act is where the money goes. We u

Launch day is the end of one job and the start of another, and the second one is the part that tends not to appear on the quote. A new site arrives looking right, loading fast, and with its pages in order, and that state is a snapshot rather than a setting. Your business changes, your competitors publish things, the results page rearranges itself, and the site that was correct in March is merely old by September. The months after launch are the part we work in, so this page i

Two local SEO quotes land on your desk and one is well under the other. Before you read that as a bargain or a warning, there is a plainer explanation to rule out: local SEO is two different jobs sold under one name, and a quote does not have to say which one it covers. Until that is settled, the two figures may be measuring two different jobs. The one question below tells you which half you are being quoted for, and it is the question we would want answered if we were in you

Consultancy, agency, and company get used almost interchangeably on the websites you are reading, and underneath them sit two genuinely different purchases. One is advice: somebody examines your site and hands you a plan. The other is execution: somebody examines your site and then changes it. A consultancy is built around the first. Whether it also does the second is worth settling before you agree to anything, because a plan pays off only once somebody carries it out. We se

You are after a number, and what you will find is four different shapes. One company quotes an hourly rate, one quotes a figure per month, one quotes a project, and one quotes a fixed scope at a fixed price. Those are four different purchases, and the digits on the end are the last thing to compare. They divide the risk differently and they oblige the provider to different things, so the first step is to put them into one unit. We will do that with you here, one shape at a ti

You typed best local SEO company for Google hoping that somebody with authority has already done the sorting. That is a reasonable hope, and we would rather tell you straight where it stands: Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO does not point you to a list of approved companies. It tells you what to ask, and to be wary of any company that claims a special relationship with Google. The lists you land on were compiled by someone else, for their own reasons. They can still be

You are comparing SEO companies and one of them calls itself an enterprise SEO marketing company. The word reads like a grade, as though enterprise work is the better version and everything else is the cheaper version. Here is what we would want you to know before you call: enterprise describes the size of the customer, and the standard of the work is a separate question. The word tells you who a company is built to serve. Whether the work is good, and whether it is the right

On-page SEO is the part of the work that happens on your own pages, which makes it the one part you can see for yourself. This page turns it into eight checks you can run on your own site tonight, with your phone, your editor and your own Search Console, which is free, and nothing else. Each one says how to check it and what a visitor would notice if it is wrong. If someone at your business can fix what you find, do that; you may not need to hire anyone. If nobody can, you wi

You are paying, or about to stop paying, for SEO, and you have landed on enterprise SEO software wondering whether a tool could do the job instead. That is a fair question and the honest answer has three cases, one of which is yes. This page says what agency-grade tools actually do, which half of that you can already get free from your own Search Console, and the one thing no tool decides. Where we sit in it is near the end, under its own heading, and you can skip that sectio

If you buy SEO from your web designer or your marketing agency, the work on your site may be done by a company you have never spoken to. That arrangement has a name, white label, and it is an ordinary way for a business to sell a service it does not perform in-house. It is not a trick, and you are allowed to ask about it; a good agency will answer. What this page covers is what changes for you when there are two companies on your account instead of one, and the four questions