Is My SEO Company Doing a Good Job?

Trusting any part of your business to someone else is a challenge, and one you should expect a good return on investment for. At least, that’s the way I feel about it. At Lifted Logic, we’re not just here to take your money and plop a shiny new website loaded with keywords in front of you. It takes more than that to deliver results with great SEO practices. If you’re wondering whether your SEO company is doing a good job, keep reading for insights from someone who’s been in this business for a long, long time. 

Let’s dive right into the habits of a good SEO company in Kansas City.

They clearly define your business interests

What the hell does that mean? SEO companies get you higher on Google search, right? Why do your overall business goals matter? If you get more “likes” or rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP) but don’t get more leads, it’s not accomplishing anything for your business unless your only goal is to have more exposure. 

When you go to the doctor and explain your symptoms, you want them to ask follow-up questions. You want them to gain a deeper understanding of your symptoms in order to put together the full picture of your health. If you complain about stomach aches, and they don’t ask about your diet and instead prescribe you a pill, are they really helping? Nope. 

At Lifted Logic, we’re all about honing in on your goals, your brand, and what your business believes in. Armed with this information, we can discover what you want to accomplish.

So how do we clearly define your business interests?

They ask the right questions

Knowing the right questions to ask lets us find the root cause of why you need an SEO company. The need is usually for more business. Every company needs to increase revenue in order to stay afloat. You may think you can get that business from Facebook likes, but that’s rare.

Do you remember the story of the Instagram influencer with more than 2 million followers who couldn’t even sell 36 shirts? Her followers were real and her posts got genuine engagement, but she couldn’t sell shit. Her marketing wasn’t adequate, and she didn’t understand her audience. You can have all the social media clout in the world, but it will not translate into revenue without some work. In fact, studies have shown that search beats social media by more than 300% as a traffic source.

A good SEO company is going to find out exactly how to translate your digital marketing into leads and revenue for your business. We ask the questions and come back with our own ideas, suggestions, and recommendations to help you achieve your goals. 

Even more important than ideas is accountability.

They think of ways for the client to measure their performance

The team at a good SEO company is constantly asking themselves, “How can the client measure our efforts? How can I help the client measure us?” That’s what it’s all about. If you’re not measuring, you don’t know what your outcomes are.

Imagine you’re trying to run a faster mile. So you buy yourself a fresh pair of running shoes, run a mile in them, and then ask yourself, “Did that feel faster?” Maybe you felt faster, but you don’t actually know if you were because you weren’t measuring anything.

If you want results, you need your SEO company to use its expertise to find out how they’re measuring, what they’re measuring, and how that develops into increased revenue for your business.

Only once the goals and ideas are fully understood should the conversation turn to controlling expenses. Basically, you should know what you’re paying for before you talk expenses.

They give you deliverables

Okay, let’s say you’ve gotten past the first meetings. You feel comfortable with the number of questions your SEO company has asked you, they’ve talked through expectations with you and you’ve come to a mutual understanding about what your goals are and how to execute. SEO improvement doesn’t happen overnight, but there are some things you should expect when you’re getting started. 

Lifted Logic helps you find how your website is performing with analytics reporting. We also do keyword research with the goal of understanding the intent behind the search. We do SEO audits to see how well your site is already optimized and make suggestions for improvements. A good SEO company will also help optimize the content on your existing site. 

Not only can our content gurus put their brains to the task, they’ll teach you how to do it, too. There’s a reason it says “Content Optimization in Kansas City” at the top of that linked page. And there’s a reason I linked it there in the first place!

The thing about good SEO content and practices is that it’s beneficial for your business (more hits when people are searching for ‘content optimization near me’ when they’re around KC, and encouraging readers to visit more of our website to see more of how awesome we are) AND it’s good for the user. The user knows exactly where we are and doesn’t have to hunt around or do any extra Googling to find that specific service I linked to.

A good SEO company is going to teach you all about that. Which leads me conveniently into my next point.

They teach you what they’re doing

Nothing we do at Lifted Logic is a mystery. We explain everything and teach you how to do it all yourself. It all comes back to our goal of increasing your success. It doesn’t help your business if your SEO company keeps its methods a secret. Different companies have different approaches, and if they’re not willing to keep you informed of what they’re doing along the way, you probably don’t want them handling your business. 

We encourage our clients to check in monthly to evaluate how their SEO campaign is going, and we train them on how to use and understand paid search tools. 

They don’t over-rely on automation

Automation is the easiest way to cover up issues. Say you’re getting a ton of new traffic to your site, and they’re all filling out forms and submitting requests for quotes and yadda yadda yadda. That’s outstanding, that’s exactly what you want. But if every single person who submits a form is getting some canned “Thanks for your interest, give us a call when you’re ready to get started!” response with no followup from you, you’re not really getting any value out of those leads. You must call and follow up and reach out to these people instead of relying solely on your automation. A good SEO company is going to explain how to approach different leads.

Because a good agency should deliver multiple kinds of leads in a specific way, it’s going to require a more hands-on approach. For me, a lead that says “I’m looking to start in the next month” versus “I’m looking to start next year” is a higher quality lead. So I should call the first lead back ASAP compared to the one who wants to start next year. 

Relying too much on automation can cover up successes and, most importantly, failures.

They focus on failure (in a good way)

Okay, just follow me on this one. When I was growing up, my dad was an entrepreneur. And after 50 years in business, you can imagine he went through a lot of economies. It’s easy to make money in a good economy, because for every screw-up there are more positive outcomes. But in a bad economy, every transaction is that much more valuable. Opportunities are worth more. 

For me, the value of bad leads is where a great SEO company can really make up the difference. Back to our running example—you want to run a faster mile and you know your pacing is great, but your breathing needs work.

If you’re running a mile and manage to improve your already great pacing, it will help you make a better time, sure. But if you fix the issues you have with your breathing, it’s easier to make up more time. You see massive opportunities when you focus on the things you’re not doing well and clean that up. Each gain there is exponential versus linear. 

Consider this. There are two ways to make money in business: increase revenue or decrease expenses. If you make $100,000 and it costs $50,000 to make it, you’ve earned $50,000. If you can lower expenses by $30,000, you’ve now made $80,000 profit. To make that same profit at a 50% profit margin, I would need $160,000 of income. That’s clearly way more work. Reducing expenses (i.e. what can I do better to spend less?) is easier than drumming up twice as much business out of nowhere (i.e. doing more of the things that got me business to begin with).

Because you can’t improve upon number one 

How can you optimize a first-position blog post to be higher than first? You can’t. You focus on your negative, which is another blog post that didn’t rank as well. If you rank first for “plumber in Kansas City” but you also provide the service of main drain clean-outs, how do we follow up on that to increase your ranking for “main drain clean-outs in Kansas City” in order to pull in more specific leads? 

If your SEO company focuses on what they’re doing well on every call, you’re not with a great company. On most of our calls, we discuss what we need to do better.

If you listen to a professional coach for the NFL, you would think the people they were coaching were the worst players in the world. You don’t hear the coaches just sitting there fluffing the players’ egos because that’s not what someone who excels focuses on. The way we improve is by focusing on where we’re not doing well and by letting you know what you need to work on, too.

Sometimes it’s because you’re not following up on leads. Maybe you’ve gone in and made too many changes to content that was important for your users. Maybe you need to be more engaged with your reviewers on Google. SEO results can depend on how well you’re operating, and if you don’t know how well you’re doing, it’s a good SEO company’s job to tell you.

So, if your SEO company is not working with you to explain what you need to do better on your end, they’re not doing right by you at all. It isn’t like there’s no time for a pat on the back for small successes along the way, but if you only focus on what’s going right, you’re missing out on major opportunities to hit goals.

They set goals, then meet them

This is what it all comes down to. If your SEO company understands your business, has worked with you to develop specific goals and tools with which you can measure success, and then meets (or exceeds) those goals: congratulations, you’ve got a great SEO company. 

Clear goals and ways to measure them give context to where your marketing dollars are going. Say you increase revenue by $10,000—that’s awesome, right? Not if you had to spend $1 million to reach that goal. You want the right value in the cost per acquisition. 

Is your SEO company doing a good job?

Learning about our clients, setting goals, and reaching them is what our entire team does every single day. We’ve done business with companies like Tesla, Cerner, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and with tiny startups alike. For those who already have an SEO campaign, we offer a free one-hour discovery meeting to go over the performance of your strategy and see what needs improvement. 

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Answering Your SEO FAQs

We get it. Marketing and SEO optimization can feel like a whole new world, complete with a language of its own. Below, we’ve answered a few common questions our clients ask when navigating a new relationship with an SEO company.

What ROI can I expect from a partnership with an SEO company?

In Kansas City, we work with each client to achieve their definition of success. That means defining these goals is your #1 priority.

These goals might include brand awareness, lead generation, growing your team, or opening a new location. By establishing the metrics you value most, we can map out a path to achieving your short- and long-term goals. The executed timing also shapes the marketing spend you should allocate towards these efforts.

When planning your marketing budget and estimating your potential ROI, you should consider:

• Your marketing strategy: informed by your location, industry, target audience, and local competition
• The expected turnaround time: when you want to see results
• The lifetime value of your customers: how much a single client spends across their entire relationship with your business

Your customer’s lifetime value is especially crucial when benchmarking your ROI, directly influencing how SEO companies like ours manage, convert, and nurture your leads. All these insights help hold you and your marketing team accountable as you work towards your goals.

How do you conduct keyword research?

At our SEO company in Kansas City, our content strategists get into the nitty gritty with advanced SEO tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner. We use these systems to evaluate search terms that align with the topics you want to cover on your website.

When researching and selecting keyphrases for your blogs and webpages, our team assesses:

• Search Volume: This metric measures how often users look up a keyphrase within a certain timeframe. We typically prefer a sweet spot of more specific, medium-demand KPs generating 100 to 1,000 monthly searches. This lets us know users are genuinely interested in finding answers.
• Competition: Keyphrase competition reflects how hard it is to appear on the first page of search results. When a user searches for something, the search engine immediately populates pages of results. The higher up you place on the first page, the better.
• User Intent: It isn’t just a matter of whether your KP matches a user’s query. Today’s search engines also identify if a KP aligns with the user’s intent, or the motivation behind their search. This reasoning helps us understand if they’re looking for information, hoping to find a specific business, researching a certain product, or booking a service. We use these insights to shape your content strategy.

However, that means you have to outperform other high-authority sites using the same keyphrase—and the higher the search volume, the more competition you’ll face for that KP. That’s why we aim for medium-demand KPs where competition and user interest align.

If you’re ready to hand off the heavy lifting, we’ve got your back. As a leading SEO company in Kansas City, you can trust our experts to hand-select keyphrases that resonate with your business and your audience.

What is a Google SERP ranking?

SERP stands for search engine results page. These results populate after you enter a query into search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The SERP is not unlike a digital library, chock-full of AI overviews, ads, local results, suggested searches, and more.

Modern search engines rank these results, sorting the “good” content from the “bad.” The higher you place on the first page, the more likely users are to click.

Google determines your SERP placement using an algorithm that analyzes your:

• Content relevance: Does your content contain up-to-date, relevant information? Does it answer the user’s question(s)? Does it feature sentences AI can use for SERP overviews? Are you implementing your keywords wisely?
• Smart linking: Does the page or blog use internal and external links? Does your content include quality, relevant information that builds trust? Is it content other sites might link to?
• User experience: Do your webpages load quickly? Is it easy to navigate your website? Is your site mobile-friendly?

Constantly tracking your position on search engines can feel overwhelming. But you don’t have to sweat this stuff on top of your busy schedule. When you partner with our SEO company in Kansas City, our strategists can track all this information for you, optimizing your Google SERP ranking to better connect you with your target audience.

What makes an effective marketing strategy?

Identifying your marketing strategy and budget takes serious thought—and quite a bit of competitive analysis. Digging deeper into your surroundings lets you know what you’re up against and how you can best tackle it.

• Location, location, location. Your locale shapes the potential market for your products and services. For example, trying to sell swimsuits in Canada should look completely different from peddling the same wares in Australia. Taking your geographic location into account enables you to better tailor how you address your audience and how you speak what you’re offering.
• Industry. The industry you’re in can affect your strategy and spending. For instance, you’d budget and plan differently for a construction company with zero local competitors compared to a med spa in a saturated metropolitan market. Your industry might also come with a busy season and an off-season, both of which can further shape your marketing efforts.
• Audience. How well do you know your target audience? Researching users’ likes, dislikes, and other personal tidbits helps you predict how pricey they might be to target. For example, delivering content to a younger audience on social media is often cheaper than serving Google ads to an older generation. The same goes for your audience’s locations; bigger cities with more saturated markets typically have more competitors vying for attention.
• Competition. If your market is full of businesses trying to sell similar products and services, you need to match this level of competition with high-quality content that lets your offering shine. That means crafting KP-optimized deliverables that meet users’ needs and give them information they can trust.

But you don’t have to navigate this path alone. Armed with best practices and marketing know-how, you can always turn to our SEO company in Kansas City for strategic guidance.