Would you hire a mechanic to do an oil change for your car if you didn’t see “oil change” listed among the services offered?
Would you feel any more reassured if you asked the mechanic if the shop offered oil changes and the crew seemed not to know what you meant?
Or would you just go elsewhere?
Think of hiring an eCommerce SEO agency, at least metaphorically, as the same kind of animal.
The one difference here is that you can quite literally see proof of an agency’s capabilities of implementing an SEO strategy for an eCommerce website before you hire.
Search engine optimization is, literally, a collection of practices that gets a website, or one of its pages, to rank organically in the search results.
This is literally also something you can check for yourself before you ever hire a marketing agency. You should never hire one that does not populate the organic search results somewhere.
If you cannot find the agency or at least one of its pages in the organic search results, do not hire that agency for your online store – they are not eCommerce SEO experts.
It’s possible that the company can do what they say they can, but the proof of it is rankings. You have nothing to gain by gambling on it.
Now here’s the one caveat. There is no specific subset of keywords the agency needs to rank for. But they do need to rank for something, and it has to be relevant somehow.
Don’t panic if you can’t find the agency ranking on page one for “eCommerce SEO agency” or “eCommerce SEO services.” With that said, if you can’t find them anywhere except the Google ads, it is a problem.
One of the best things to check for are industry-related keywords. If you can’t find an agency or its main pages in the SERPs for “eCommerce SEO,” then drill down a bit.
Let’s say you need an agency for fashion SEO services; try some related keywords for that vertical. A full-service SEO consultant should be ranking somewhere.
For instance, try searching for “eCommerce SEO for fashion companies,” “fashion SEO services,” or “SEO services for online boutiques.”
Come up with some iteration of keywords that’s relevant to your niche and see which agencies are ranking for those.
There should be at least a few for which the agency, or at least a page on its website, ranks in the organic search results.
Now here is why this is such a big deal. You’re literally purchasing SEO services, and you want your website to show up in the organic search results.
An eCommerce SEO agency that has results in the organic search results pages offers the proof of their capabilities.
If their website, or at least a page on it, shows up in the organic search results, it means, at a minimum, that that company knows what it’s doing.
It means they know how to do keyword research and optimize a website or at least a page to get it to show up somewhere in the organic search engine results pages.
And that is the very thing for which you’re looking to sign services – that is the problem you wish to solve, or at least it should be, if you are actually looking for an eCommerce SEO agency.
At the very least, if you can find a web page from that agency ranking in the SERPs, you know that under some circumstances they can do what they say they can.
The good news is that this phenomenon is entirely unique to this digital marketing channel. Now all you need to do is put it into practice.
Hopefully it will help ease your search for an eCommerce SEO agency.
