When it comes to presenting your business to the online world, SEO and digital marketing becomes critical for your success. Having the most extravagant website in the world with no visitors or traffic is a waste of money. An SEO expert can not only provide a relevant and consistent traffic to your website but also bring in new customers for free.

For this reason, you need to understand the difference between the good digital marketing providers and the average or bad SEO providers. Hiring an ineffective digital marketing provider may cause you to lose a lot of money. Here is a 6-point guide to hiring a good SEO provider for your business.

1. Digital marketing is an investment: It should not be seen as an expense, but it should be a part of your business strategy to enhance your presence in the industry. It should be looked as hiring an employee for your company who knows your company well and cares for it. He should be clear about the business objectives and should work in favor of achieving them.
    
2. Aim for the first page: How many times have you searched something on Google and went on to visit the second page of the search results? Hardly anyone does that, right? People trust the Google search results so much that they hardly ever visit anything apart from the first page.

   While hiring an expert to boost your search engine rankings, your objective should be to feature on top of the first page. Any position lower may waste your money, as there are lower chances of visitors clicking your page.
    

3. Think of smaller keywords: Your business may specialize into something very specific, but people do not search for adjectives or specialization. They generally search for smaller keywords, which are more common and known to many. Hence, your first page generally should have smaller and common keywords followed by the bigger ones in the coming pages.

   A good SEO provider needs to research those smaller keywords well so that your website features on the first page of search engine results. He should also incorporate keywords which generate high search volume and are also relevant to your business.
    

4. Stay ahead of the competition: Search engines never guarantee that your website will feature on top of their search results, it is actually the job of the SEO expert to do so. Search engines have their specific requirements for featuring websites in their searches. If your website complies with them, you improve your chances of getting featured on the top rank.

   There are many competitors’ websites which can prevent you from featuring on top. A good SEO provider needs to research well the competition for the keywords. Some keywords will be easy from ranking perspective while others will be difficult. Your SEO provider should enable you to beat the competition for keywords. Once these differentiating keywords are identified, they should be implemented as per the principles mentioned above.
    

5. On page and Off page SEO: SEO has 2 major components – 1. On Page SEO elements which include keywords, headers, usage, internal and external links.
    
6. Off Page SEO elements including matters external to your website, like citations, references, back links, sharing, feeds etc. While most providers can work on Off page elements easily, not many can help you on the On page elements. This is where you can differentiate an expert SEO provider from the novices. On page elements are generally handled by web designers and if your SEO provider can advise you on them, it is a bonus!

An SEO provider is not a marketer: SEO providers’ job is to bring consistent and relevant traffic to your website. Converting them into paid customers is your marketing job. Good SEO provider knows where to draw this line and restricts his purview to bring your website on top of search results and thus bring relevant visitors to your website only.