People comparing SEO companies are usually after one of two things, and separating them early saves a shortlist. Distance matters enormously for a business serving a geographic area, and it matters in your own listings and citations rather than in an agency’s address.
Sell nationally or online, and proximity has no bearing on rankings at all. We are an Irish company working with clients across the United States, and the work is the reason to pick us.
How to Compare SEO Companies
Judge on measurement, because that is the part that survives contact with a finance director.
Ask how the work will be measured, then ask whether the measurement would still stand if you stopped paying for it. Rankings and sessions describe activity. Tracing an enquiry to the channel that produced it describes revenue.
When Hiring Locally Is the Right Call
Sometimes it genuinely is, and it is worth naming.
Where your marketing depends on somebody walking your premises, photographing your work, or interviewing your staff for content, a local agency does that better and cheaper. Where your organization decides things in a monthly room, someone in that room earns their fee.
Where neither applies, distance costs nothing and the shortlist comes down to measurement.
What We Run
Search. E-commerce SEO where the catalog is the constraint. Local SEO for real locations you actually operate from.
Paid. PPC and paid search, billed as a flat fee rather than a percentage of spend. Paid social, which interrupts rather than answers.
Content and conversion. Content marketing from the questions your sales team already answers. Social media, usually one channel done properly. Email marketing, the one channel where you own the audience. Conversion rate optimization.
Among ppc management companies the percentage-of-spend model is standard, and a flat fee is what lets us recommend spending less.
Attribution Is the Whole Argument
Which channel produced which enquiry, and which of those became money. That is a data engineering problem rather than a marketing one.
We build the pipeline, the definitions and the reporting ourselves, on the stack described under data and BI. Most seo firms subcontract this, and it is the part your CFO will ask about first.
What We Commit To
Links earned, never bought. Digital PR into real outlets, so the profile holds through an update.
Forecasts from your own data. Ranges built on your traffic and conversion history, then reported against every month.
Content written by people. Drawn from what your sales team explains on calls each week.
Reporting is monthly, against what you said mattered at the start, with the raw data available rather than compressed into a slide. When a number moves down, the report says so.
Among seo optimization companies that is a low bar, and it is still the one most worth checking. The SEO companies worth a second contract are the ones whose reporting you could hand to an accountant. Tell us what a customer is worth and we will size the channels against it.
Related Services
Where the site has to be rebuilt for speed, that is web development. Where attribution needs a pipeline behind it, that is data and BI, and where hosting, DNS and email authentication need fixing first, that is infrastructure.