Best SEO in the world – does it even exist? (Apart from Fikson, of course, *wink*)
Using the best SEO company with the latest services for your website is crucial to success.
Search engine optimization is no longer a do-it-yourself project unless you have a solid decade or so of experience handling digital marketing and the latest Google algorithm changes. Making websites and web pages more relevant, authoritative, and mobile-friendly is now an essential part of any overall business plan.
Search engine optimization produces better rankings on all search engines. Because 92% of all web queries occur there, the focus is mainly on Google. Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and Duck Duck Go follow in significantly smaller percentages.
Google is still the king.
Companies seeking to compete in today’s marketplace need to understand that making websites and web pages more relevant and authoritative is now an essential part of their overall business plan. Gone are the days of using shortcuts, misleading titles, and junk links to improve search engine rankings.
Current algorithms rely heavily on activities and accumulating quality information from billions of internet users. Google changes its algorithms daily, which is another reason to bring digital marketing and SEO professionals on board to track and adjust to regular changes.
You know it goes much deeper than picking five or six keywords and stuffing your content with those words. Keyword stuffing is an exercise in awkward quantity over true quality. It doesn’t fool today’s search engines, algorithms, or potential customers.
As you are aware, there are numerous factors to consider when contemplating SEO for your website. Therefore, bringing in the best SEO company with the most up-to-date SEO services for your website is critical to your success.
What is an SEO company, and how can they help?
An SEO company will improve your organic traffic from search engines. Search engines receive over a trillion queries annually. If you want to capitalize on this, you’ll want the best agency to help you stand out above your competitors.
The SEO industry is complicated, but a good SEO company can measure and report on each optimization strategy’s performance. From there, the agency will be able to adjust and improve its plan to get higher rankings, increased website traffic, and a growing number of users.
Agencies that provide SEO services for your website take on multiple tasks, including ensuring your site loads quickly and contains all clean code with quality content that is the most effective at landing web searches onto your site.
This list includes many global SEO agencies you may have heard of. You should select the most suitable agency based on your company’s objectives, industry, target country or countries, and whether you require enhanced marketing, backlinks, or guidance on specific steps to boost your company’s growth and profitability.
Here’s who can claim the title of “the best,” according to customers and industry experts.
A list of the best SEO companies across the globe
Fikson
❖ About the company: Fikson is a top-tier iGaming SEO agency known for delivering exceptional results. Specializing in the unique challenges of the iGaming industry, Fikson has a proven track record of driving traffic and boosting visibility for online gaming platforms. Clients consistently praise Fikson for its expert strategies, tailored solutions, and measurable success in the competitive iGaming market.
❖ Services: iGaming Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Web Design, Blogger Outreach, Infographics Marketing
Pricing: We customize pricing based on competition, project scope, and specific client needs, starting at $5000.
OutreachZ
The market ranks the company as one of the best link-building companies. OutreachZ is an international agency with a client list of more than 1,000 start-ups, brands, and digital agencies. It also maintains a guest posting marketplace with robust 5,000+ connections with experts in their various fields. Also on offer for clients is the premium managed campaigns feature. Based on their requirements, the team selects the appropriate publishers for each client. This is a fantastic instrument for acquiring influential connections.
❖ Services: Link-building platform to take control of off-site SEO. There’s a guest posting marketplace that connects to authoritative publishers. The agency handles prospecting, blogger outreach, content production, and placement.
❖ Pricing: The average link building budget is usually $500 but can be lower or higher depending on your goals.
WebFX
❖ About the Company: A leading digital marketing agency. Customers get a full range of services with an individual strategy tailored just for them. We develop growth strategies for each customer based on their specific goals and needs. Along with award-winning digital marketing services, WebFX has its own proprietary technology platform. This agency focuses on successful digital marketing campaigns to increase leads, customer calls, transactions, and qualified website traffic. Company offices are all located in the United States.
❖ Services: SEO, link building, PPC, media buying and ad spend, website call tracing, SMM, and web design.
❖ Pricing: SEO prices per month are $1,000+, and the average hourly rate is $150-$199/hour.
Webimax
❖ About the Company: WebiMax can back up its promise, “Remove the negative, promote the positive!” This award-winning reputation management company delivers year after year. This agency is results-driven. We share SEO results with clients every month to foster communication and transparency.
WebiMax founders say they want clients to feel they’ve gained a strategic partner to help the business grow, not just an outsourced vendor.
❖ Services: reputation management, search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media marketing, lead generation, website design, and online public relations
❖ Pricing: Bespoke pricing.
OuterBox
❖ About the Company: OuterBox offers a suite of web services while focusing on helping companies expand and increase online sales. Its PPC management and pay-per-click services have a proven high rate of return on investment. It offers an array of digital marketing and SEO packages tailored to each client’s needs. OuterBox values teamwork and promises a cohesive online marketing strategy to improve business.
Our services include SEO, paid search, digital marketing campaigns, web development, web design, and eCommerce.
❖ Pricing: SEO prices per month are $1,000+ and average hourly rates of $100-$149/hour.
SeoTuners
❖ About the Company: One of the top digital marketing specialists. Clients also highly value the company’s business development strategy. This company pledges never to use black-hat SEO techniques. Instead, the experts promote web resources using ethical SEO. SEOTuners focuses on building powerful websites to provide an increasingly successful market presence. The agency commits to an ethical approach to all work aimed at achieving positive ranking results in search engine results for client websites.
❖ Services: SEO, branding, e-commerce development, PPC, conversion optimization, SMM, and web development
❖ Pricing: SEO prices per month are $1,000+ and average hourly rates of $150-$199/hour.
Blue Fountain Media
❖ About the Company: Blue Fountain focuses on modern and emerging technology to develop successful business growth strategies. SEO changes fast, presenting new challenges almost daily, whether algorithm changes or the impact of voice search, and Blue Fountain strives to stay at the head of the pack. In addition to optimizing content, this agency optimizes the technical side with reviews of wireframe mockups and redirects.
❖ Services: website design, digital marketing, mobile app design, website development, strategy, branding, and experience design
❖ Pricing: Minimum project size: $50,000
Delante
❖ About the Company: The company has extensive experience in assisting both B2B and B2C businesses in the creation and management of internal SEO strategies. They’re open to even the smallest start-up clients. Their client list includes businesses in the e-commerce industry as well as finance, automotive, SaaS, IT, cosmetics, healthcare, fashion, wellness, and more. Delante’s clients enjoy higher website visibility and rankings on the first pages of Google results. The team specializes in long-tail SEO to attract more users who are willing to buy.
❖ Services: SEO, link building, SEO consulting
❖ Pricing: Minimum project size: $1,000
Mayple
❖ About the Company: It is considered one of the top SEO services for small businesses. It also offers SEO solutions for major brands. Marketing results and managing content are among Mayple’s strengths. Each client receives a plan of action specific to their company and goals. Experienced marketing experts with exceptional knowledge in specific fields form the team to serve their clients. Mayple drills down to the client’s industry, target audience, and KPIs for measurable positive results.
❖ Services: business consulting, digital strategy, SEO
❖ Pricing: Minimum project size: $1,000
iSynergy
❖ About the Company: The available marketing services include top-tier programmatic advertising, inbound marketing, and SEO campaigns. The focus is on data-driven design with marketing technologies. The team members at iSynergy employ a creative approach in formulating a data-driven strategy. They promise well-built websites that develop the client’s brand story by providing memorable digital experiences. The company’s strategy is quality over quantity to give website visitors the information they’re seeking without creating content overload.
❖ Services: SEO, web design, conversion optimization
❖ Pricing: Minimum project size: $5,000
What services do SEO companies provide?
Here’s what you need to know to find the best SEO agencies globally:
The world’s best international SEO firms will masterfully promote your site to ensure that prospective clients and customers find it. In addition, an agency can provide a holistic approach to making your company visible and valuable by putting an experienced team to work for you. Therefore, hiring a highly rated agency ends up being cost-effective at the front end and ultimately profitable.
In addition to search engine optimization, a talented SEO agency will create a content marketing strategy and position your company to benefit from pay-per-click marketing on multiple search engines and popular social platforms while ensuring a favorable return on investment (ROI).
You’ll want to ensure the SEO company you’re considering hiring is genuinely one of the best by finding out how they capitalize on the fertile ground of user intent. Of course, keywords and phrases remain important, but user intent is a recent SEO star on the scene.
User intent means your content reaches people using search phrases similar to or related to your keywords, even though they’re not an exact match. Think of it as creating excellent content that touches on your potential customer’s or client’s wants, even if they’re not using your specific keywords to find the information.
How To Check if SEO Services (You Paid for) Brought Results?
While traffic might sound like an obvious answer, here are a few things you can check against to see, if the company that advertised itself as being the best, actually provided tangible results:
| Performance Metric | Description | Higher conversion rates indicate targeted traffic. | Expected Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Traffic Growth | Measures the increase in the number of visitors from organic search. | Use Google Analytics to monitor organic traffic trends. | Steady growth in organic visitors over time. |
| Keyword Rankings | Tracks the position of target keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). | Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to track keyword rankings. | Improved rankings for primary and long-tail keywords. |
| Conversion Rate | The percentage of visitors who take a desired action (e.g., sign-ups, purchases). | Monitor conversions through Google Analytics or CRM tools. | Higher conversion rates indicating targeted traffic. |
| Click-Through Rate (CTR) | Percentage of users who click on your link after seeing it in search results. | Check CTR data in Google Search Console. | Increased CTR showing better title and meta description optimization. |
| Bounce Rate | Percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. | Track bounce rate using Google Analytics. | Decreased bounce rate showing better content engagement. |
| Domain Authority (DA) | A score indicating the strength of your website’s ability to rank. | Use Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to monitor domain authority changes. | Gradual increase in DA, reflecting improved site credibility. |
| Backlink Profile | Quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website. | Use Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to analyze backlink growth and quality. | Growth in high-quality backlinks indicating strong SEO efforts. |
| Lead Generation | Number of leads generated from organic search. | Use CRM or analytics tools to track leads generated via organic traffic. | Increase in the number of qualified leads from SEO activities. |
| Page Load Speed | Speed at which your website loads, influencing user experience and rankings. | Use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to track speed improvements. | Faster loading times, resulting in better user experience and SEO scores. |
| Local Search Performance | Visibility and engagement for local searches, important for businesses with physical locations. | Monitor local rankings in Google My Business and local SEO tools. | Higher local visibility and engagement, especially in map packs. |
| Content Engagement | Measures how users interact with your content (time on page, social shares, comments). | Track user engagement metrics in Google Analytics and social media analytics. | Increased time on page and engagement, showing better content strategy. |
| ROI (Return on Investment) | Measures the financial return compared to the cost of SEO services. | Calculate ROI based on increased revenue attributable to SEO efforts. | Positive ROI indicating profitable investment in SEO services. |
Qualities of the best SEO company
Having an exceptional SEO company plan and carry out your web content optimization efforts is not a one-time task.
Markets and customer priorities change, just as Google algorithms do. Your SEO must respond and change to be successful.
People on your SEO agency team should check how things are going every day by viewing keyword position analytics and website performance numbers. An SEO expert should also review where the heaviest website traffic originates to see what’s getting you the best results and getting your company the most attention.
Keyword research should be a regular activity. Algorithms may change, but keyword ideas won’t fluctuate as much. Your SEO expert should closely monitor search volume and relevance to the questions people ask, ensuring the correct placement of words and phrases.
Optimizing content goes beyond researching and using high-value keywords. Members of your SEO team need to ensure your site contains quality metadata with a super-clean code structure and proper internal linking. This process of combining different strategies simultaneously gets you a higher ranking.
Top tips for choosing the best SEO agency
The best SEO agency for your small, medium, or large business will customize services to meet your goals. Ask to see specific numbers showing how they’ve performed for other clients. Ask for references and check with agency clients. Find out whether the agency feels like the right fit for you.
A quality SEO agency will be able to provide examples of their success for other clients in the form of page loading speed, number and quality of incoming links, keyword phrase usage, HTML and schema mark-up, mobile optimization, and domain authority.
The best SEO firms in the world explore the client’s goals, needs, and expectations. The best don’t take a cookie-cutter approach; each client gets their own customized plan.
The SEO agency you’re considering should be able to explain how they monitor techniques for changes or updates and how they stay agile to tailor new information to optimize your website pages better. Identifying the most valuable long- and short-tail keywords, capturing user intent, and expertly placing excellent coverage are important pieces of the puzzle.
When an SEO agency is pitching to you, it shouldn’t feel like they promise magical results. Instead, it should be pleased to share its strategies and examples of past successful campaigns with other clients.
You must know who will be on your team at the SEO company. The very best SEO agencies encourage their employees to improve their skills constantly. Find out how often SEO company employees research to understand changes in the algorithms Google and other search engines use. An expert-level company will also provide in-house training specific to new SEO tools and the ways digital media influences the overall market.
You should also be able to check out the SEO agency’s investment in tools and technology to harness best practices for its clients.
SEO for business growth
SEO gives you the power to answer people’s questions, specifically those in your field. This increases your visibility, possibly on a global scale. As a result, the amount of traffic to your website and pages should grow. As the number of visits to your pages increases, you become an authoritative voice in your market. People will increasingly trust that voice, thereby trusting your brand and products or services.
Identifying relevant keywords and providing quality content (not clickbait) is essential. Meta-text is critical so that search engines can recognize it as valuable content.
General SEO and local SEO
There’s general SEO and local SEO. The best SEO agencies for small businesses will help hyper-focus local content to capture “in city” or “near me” searches. The beauty of excellent rankings from local SEO is that the majority of users who conduct city, region, or state searches are ready to do business and ready to pick a company. That’s a solid reason to anticipate higher conversion rates.
Providing specific, uniform information about your company is important for local SEO. Your business name and contact information, as well as website information, are a simple way to get leads using Google My Business.
Ensure that the company name, address, phone number, and contact email address remain consistent across all platforms.
Research shows that including photos on your site has been found to result in 30% more visits and higher. Active blog posts also improve rankings. Additionally, adding schema markup, a vocabulary of tags or microdata to the HTML to enhance its readability and expression in the SERPs, aids algorithms in understanding the relationships between content pieces.
You may find that the SEO agency you hire will submit your site to online directories to make your URL easier to find. For example, you may hear references to GMB (Google My Business). This showing how users interact with your business profile and its most popular content can be useful.
Invest in quality content creators. The content you put on your website is a service to current and potential customers. It sets the tone for your company’s professionalism and abilities. Consider creating blog content, creating videos with accompanying written text content, and taking photographs. The more people access these types of content, the more likely it is that search engines will link to your page instead of your competitors’.
Hiring one of the best SEO agencies for your company means putting affordable web design and search engine optimization to work for the most profitable results.
The top 10 core elements of SEO
An SEO specialist must have extensive knowledge about a wide variety of activities to help a client appear higher on Google search results pages.
When deciding which SEO agency is best for your business, consider the following top ten activities, which are most important to you, and which agencies have the best reputation for delivering quality:
- 1. Build an SEO strategy with on-page and off-page SEO.
- 2. Research and identify relevant keywords.
- 3. Competitor website research
- 4. Identify gaps in competitor strategy that can be used to boost your online presence.
- 5. Technical audits on load times, status codes, and crawl errors
- 6. High-quality link building
- 7. Create a cooperative plan to optimize both search engines and visiting users.
- 8. Daily review of algorithm updates; change strategy as needed; and use ethical techniques.
- 9. Regularly monitor the results of SEO campaigns with an eye for how to improve.
- 10. Manage necessary digital tools, including Google Search Console, Analytics, and SE ranking software.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the control you have over the code and content of your website and web pages. It includes text, headings, links, and photos or videos.
On-page SEO is the vital foundation for improving search rankings. It’s what a quality SEO company will craft for the best business results, including the title tag, images, keyword research and placement, description meta-tag, optimized URLs, and sitemap.
One can study and implement standard technical procedures in on-page SEO to improve rankings.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to all things that do not originate on your website but help it get higher search rankings.
Off-page SEO is primarily focused on getting valuable backlinks, which are links that point to your site from other high-quality websites. Off-page SEO is an open-ended process that requires the SEO specialist’s creativity to make your content valuable enough that another site wants to refer its visitors to you.
Evolution of SEO
The internet became available to the public in the summer of 1991.
Right around six years later, the notion of search engine optimization came on the scene.
Search engines are behind almost every online destination, and they have changed how we find information and answer our questions.
In modern times, search engine optimization mainly revolves around Google. The industry has seen other search engines come and go, but Google continues to reign supreme.
At the start, ranking high up on search engines was essentially directory-driven. Slap “AAA” at the front of your business name and see the gains.
The eternal goal of being number one soon moved beyond ranking based on domain names, on-page content, and alphabetical directories to complicated metrics and algorithms. For example, Google’s PageRank algorithm is notable for making history in the arena of information retrieval.
Social networks exploded onto the scene in the 2000s.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn would spark many similar sites. Experts suspected social signals could have an impact on search rankings, and they did so by helping SEO and driving additional traffic to websites, boosting brand awareness and loyalty.
The next steps brought improvements in detecting user intent and a new algorithm that advanced conversational searches.
Mobile phones changed the SEO world again in 2015, when mobile searches topped the number of Google searches performed on a desktop for the first time.
SEO strategies
Start with the basics by knowing which industry you’re competing in and who your target audience is. Then it’s time for keyword research to further evolve into content that satisfies the user intent behind the search terms.
Accurate reporting is a necessary strategy for successful SEO. Without correct reporting results, you and your team are not able to make precise adjustments and improvements.
Google’s mobile-first index aims to ensure that websites look professional and perform well on mobile devices. That functionality must be in addition to, not instead of, laptop and desktop search optimization.
Employ excellent contract creators either within your SEO agency or possibly bring one or more writers directly on board. These experienced professionals will easily skip over the pitfalls many lesser creators make. Mistakes that will hurt you include keyword stuffing and spammy or click-bait content. Your site loses credibility and may anger visitors and potential clients, so aim for blogs and articles that can go viral simply because the information and writing are so good!
Linking to high-quality web pages is nearly as valuable as getting backlinks because your content is so good. Always double-check that the links are working. Error 404 messages can derail your best efforts.
Beyond on-page and off-page SEO, there are good guys and not-so-good guys in the SEO world.
White-hat SEO
White-hat SEO follows a solid strategy that adheres to search engine rules and best practices.
There’s no trickery in white-hat SEO. Truly solid content and coding are used rather than attempting to manipulate or fool a search engine or the user. Think of no spam, no clickbait, and no loading links that point everywhere but leave the user with very little usable information.
You may also hear it called ethical SEO. It follows accepted rules and is intended to produce long-term positive results. It’s not just a quick hit that will fade back to or below previous sales levels.
There’s a reward for following the rules and not trying to get around regulations or trick the system. Specifically, following proper policies and guidelines will push your site higher in search engine results. Combined with engaging, authoritative content, you may even find yourself in the top rankings.
Black-hat SEO
Then there is black-hat SEO, which is considered rather dirty.
Black hat SEO employs techniques specifically intended to manipulate or deceive search engines and users. For example, it may try to trick a search engine’s algorithm to get good results and higher rankings without doing good content and code creation work.
Such unethical methods go against search engine guidelines and could completely remove your site from the engine’s database index. So the risk is certainly not worth any possible short-term reward.
A deeper dive will show that a black-hat SEO strategy may produce a sudden rise in organic listings, but the search engines will soon sniff out the rule-breakers bringing penalties to your door.
If an SEO agency proposes any of the following strategies, know they’re talking about using black-hat SEO:
● Doorway pages
Pages with no real value are built only for ranking specific keywords, but ultimately, the homepage or other doorway pages are basically useless.
● Hidden links or hidden text
This sneaky technique camouflages certain text or links by making them the same color as the background color.
● Cloaking
Cloaking presents a web page to search engines that is different from what users see. Cloaking deceives search engines into displaying a page, which would not appear if the user used the proper keywords and the internet.
● Link farms
The sole purpose of link farms is to generate a large number of sites that point back to your site through links. However, this artificially inflates the number of backlinks, which can throw a search engine off in the short term by masquerading as an authority site.
● Keyword stuffing
One of the original ways to attempt to spam search engines was to rank sites higher. Increasingly, it’s completely ineffective because it can’t stand up to ever-changing algorithms. When the same word or phrases appear on a page in an unnatural manner, the page has become overly cluttered.
It’s always a detrimental idea to attempt to manipulate search engines with the intention of misleading users. Sooner or later, your site will be found out for using unscrupulous methods, and search engines can ban your site altogether on the basis of its use of any black-hat tactics.
Link building for SEO
Backlinks are a coveted SEO ingredient. They’re links from other authoritative sites that point back to you and your content by linking their web page to yours. It’s pretty difficult to fake, so having another web content creator decide to pass their visitors on to you is incredibly valuable.
Backlinks are also called one-way hyperlinks. Link-building strategies include public relations, email outreach efforts, broken link building, and content marketing.
The goal is always to improve search engine visibility.
The future of SEO
Mobile optimization, ensuring your website works and displays well on mobile devices, is now the metric that helps push your site higher in search engine results. Optimization has to include both Apple and Android products.
It’s one more thing to monitor on a regular basis and course-correct as needed. You must still ensure your website view for desktop and laptop computers remains optimized.
SEO rankings continue to get more competitive. This is because Internet users are becoming more adept at identifying quality content and sites than those trying to beat the system for ranking.
Now, SEO tactics have to evolve and improve continually. In addition to mobile optimization, matching user intent is now required for success. The idea is not just to give users a bunch of links but to actually assist them in finding the information they want.
All of Google’s products, including ads and Gmail, now incorporate machine learning. Google’s RankBrain, now running on every search, demonstrates the impact of machine learning. In addition, intelligent searches now have to cater to visual and voice searches, chatbots, and personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa.
SEO specialists will have to keep up with all the technological advances to keep their skills and services top-notch.
Final thoughts on choosing the best SEO agency
The best SEO companies’ reputations boil down to whether they deliver demonstrable results. Clients are right to expect realistic results and good communication about what’s happening if they’re going to include hiring an SEO agency in their budget.
A well-run SEO campaign is expected to result in increases in your website’s visibility and results that show improvements in brand awareness. The bottom line should improve with increases in sales. It should help you compete successfully against businesses very similar to yours. New customers should contact you to purchase your products or services. You should see a higher return on investment (ROI), including higher conversions and, ultimately, more sales. And an agency’s deliverables shouldn’t be a short bump in traffic and sales. You’ve done it right; you should be seeing long-term results, including increased revenue.
Having a solid and respected online presence is the lifeblood of a successful business these days. Brick-and-mortar locations simply are not enough for today’s consumers.
Aggressive self-promotion methods and aggressive marketing strategies aimed at attracting new customers are warning signs of SEO companies that may not deliver valuable results. SEO success can be measured and reported, so it’s a big red flag if a company balks at showing you their record with other clients.
SEO specialists have to juggle many tasks, even at agencies where different colleagues focus on different portions of an SEO strategy. However, most skills complement each other, so team members can provide reliable service when needed.
We hope this guide has been helpful in finding the right SEO company, especially with so many SEO agencies in the picture; finding the best one that fits your needs could be overwhelming.