Would you hire a plumber without asking some questions about what ideas he/she/they had to fix your plumbing issues? What about hiring a lawyer without knowing how many cases he/she/they had tried? Would you hire someone to remodel your kitchen without seeing pictures of previous work?
We hope not.
Before you know how to evaluate a digital marketing agency, you need to know what questions to ask them. Here, we’ll list some of the best questions to ask before you sign up to work with a digital marketing agency.
- What problems do you see with our current website and mobile site?
- What would you do to fix these problems?
- How long does it take you to produce results?
- What do you know about new developments in AI and data security?
- Do you offer any sort of free trial so I can see what you’re like?
Table of Contents
What We Do at SEO Design Chicago
SEO Design Chicago is a Chicago-based digital marketing agency (although we work on websites worldwide). We provide hundreds of online and mobile services, including:
- Web design and development
- Website maintenance
- Content creation
- Search engine optimization
- Web, mobile, and social analytics
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click strategy and creation
- Social media content creation and advertising
- Consulting and training
Within each of these main categories, we offer dozens of services. You can pick and choose what you want us to help you with. We can start you off or maintain the service for you.
We want you to ask us what we know about these areas. More importantly, we want you to ask other digital marketing companies the same questions. We’re confident that we can answer your questions better and make you more comfortable working with us.
Now, let us answer the questions we mentioned above about how we do things at SEO Design Chicago.
What Problems Do You See With Our Current Website and Mobile Site?
This is among the most important questions to ask a marketing agency. If the agency says, “Everything about your site is great,” that should be a red flag. After all, if your site is so perfect, then why are you hiring anyone?
What We Typically Recommend
We often recommend web design changes. Plus, trends in web design constantly evolve. That’s why our team starts our days reading journals and studies about the problems people encounter when using websites, why they don’t follow through on purchases, and more. Then we apply these findings to our client’s websites.
The second thing we often see is that business owners could be making their lives 1000x easier by letting all-in-one platforms handle the day-to-day tasks that eat up most business owners’ time. We know how to set up and maintain a lot of these tools. We know their pros and cons. Some of the tools are Shopify and WooCommerce, which works with WordPress sites. One study found that over 68% of business owners spend the majority of their time on the day-to-day tasks that Shopify can do for you.
Depending on what you want to pay and have needs for, e-commerce platforms can potentially offer you time and cost-saving measures, including:
- Product videos
- 3D visualizations
- Faster checkouts
- Less costly and faster shipping
- The ability to create flash sales
- Access to web templates
- Access to extensive help resources
- Retain customers with loyalty programs and prompt emails about orders
The other big problem we often find is that companies don’t understand search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a set of practices content creators follow to make sure web pages rank high on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Imagine you are a local customer looking for a company that specializes in what your company sells. Type a phrase such a person might use into Google. Is your company’s website on that first page of Google results? If not, it could be that you don’t have enough SEO-friendly content on your website.
What Would You Do to Fix These Problems?
At SEO Design Chicago, we start off by offering you a free SEO analysis. This means that we show you how people are finding your site. What words do they type into Google? Can you have more of these words on your website? We explain how you might do so.
We also explain concepts like keywords and talk to you about how often you need to create new content for Google to rank you high in their search results. Working with a team of 30 experienced writers and multimedia content producers, we can make the content for you, or you can handle it yourself. Many of our clients have us handle content creation. We make sure that your content is the best that it can possibly be. We generate a plan that is specific to your line of business and never miss a deadline.
Our team also looks at how your website could be improved from a design perspective. Often, when people start websites, they use pre-made templates. But we customize those templates so they look unique and reflect your brand. Our website advice can also relate to how your website looks on a phone. We do this because how your site looks on a phone affects where Google places your website in its search results.
We also suggest what e-commerce platform might work best to help your business run more smoothly. Digital marketing agencies shouldn’t just talk to you about design and content. They should be able to help you talk about what takes up a lot of your time. Is it the inventory? Shipping? Invoices? There are a lot of online platforms that can handle these tasks for you.
How Long Does It Take You to Produce Results?
We regularly provide you with digital marketing agency reports on a variety of topics, including:
- SEO reports about who is visiting your website, how they’re finding it, what they do when they’re on your site, and why they leave it
- Who has clicked on any content we created for you or suggested for you, and what they do after engaging with that content
- What users think about your website design
The frequency of these reports depends on how often you want to know this information. That’s one of the things we nail down with you during our initial meeting.
We’re honest about how long it will take us to produce content, make web design changes, make software upgrades, migrate to new systems, and enhance security. Just look at our testimonials from clients. We are experts in all things tech, and online content production. Of course, we have to charge you something. But our rates are affordable. And while you could try to do these things yourself, or have staff do them, it will likely take you longer. The time you spend on digital marketing is time you could devote to your natural skill set.
What Do You Know About New Developments in AI and Data Security?
AI is evolving rapidly and will change everything about how people use websites and find information online. Hackers develop new tricks to steal customer information every day. That’s why this question is one of the best questions to ask a digital marketing agency. A lot of digital marketing companies just do web design and content creation. But the best ones, like SEO Design Chicago, start each day scouring the news about new technology, whether that means cool and scary developments in AI or new Google software rollouts.
We then immediately work with our clients about how AI can help them (like live chat solutions), and how they can best protect themselves against security threats.
Do You Offer Any Sort of Free Trial?
If you want to know more about how we can help you, reach out and we’ll give you a free SEO analysis. This will show you how your business appears in local searches.
Many of the systems and products we recommend to clients have free plans, or free trial periods so you can see what they can do.
We can’t tell you exactly what we’ll charge you until we know what you need. But the sooner you get in touch with us, the sooner we can give you an estimate of how much the services you are looking for will cost.
Contact Us Today!