SEO is essential for the proper growth of any website in today’s internet landscape. The internet is now saturated with sites all vying for the top position for the millions of possible keywords searched for by millions of people each and every day. Having your website stand out from the crowd is the difference between simply having a website and having a profitable website.
Understanding what search engines like and what they hate has become a discipline of its own, requiring studious research and impeccable implementation to achieve maximum effect in as little time as possible. For this reason, the internet is now awash in agencies that specialize explicitly in Search Engine Optimization, referred to as SEO. So now webmasters are turning to these organizations to raise their rankings and drive traffic to their sites.
But part of being a webmaster/business owner is ensuring you make the right choices for the future of your website. Choosing an SEO company with the perfect ratio of price to skill for your particular needs is imperative to gainful growth of any website. So, should you stay within your own country or try outsourcing to an overseas company?
Consider Their Proficiency In Your Target Language
As far as the quality of the work you’ll be receiving is concerned, you need to do your homework into how well the overseas SEO company will do in your native language. SEO services that have English as a second or even third language, for instance, don’t always have a tip-top understanding of English, and while they might be able to trick Google’s algorithm into showing visitors your site, your visitors will be turned away by the poor spelling and grammatical errors typical of cheap foreign SEO services. SEO is a two-fold process: the website has to both be attractive to search engines (robots) and the people that use them (flesh and blood humans).
So, first inspect any communications and the website of any particular overseas SEO company. Do they use proper sentence structure? Can they conjugate verbs properly? Can they speak in proper English and not pig English? Even if their website passes the mark, remember: they’re in the website business. Email them before you choose to hire them and dissect any messages you receive from them with the same criteria you did for their website. Any company that won’t even communicate with potential English speaking customers in proper English can’t be trusted to employ proper English SEO practices.
Check Your Budget
It is an unfortunate reality that there is a huge income disparity throughout the world. The minimum wage of some countries per hour is more than the weekly wage in others. It’s a fact of life that life is unfair, but this can be leveraged to get the same quality of work from an overseas company that you could get from a local one, but at a mere fraction of the price.
It’s worth noting that even though people in other countries live on less dollars per day at raw conversion, their goods and services are also differently priced to better reflect this. So what might seem like slave wages to you might actually be a very attractive wage for whomever you’re choosing to employ.
Look at your budget and decide whether choosing to outsource to a country with a low cost of living (which typically accompanies low average wages) is a smart move. Some places in East Asia have a high proficiency in English thanks to their tourism industry & English being the international business language while still maintaining a low cost of living. Doing SEO Services Thailand style, for instance, can acquaint you with companies well versed in English and common internet practices in an area where $1 USD can purchase a plate of street food. While some may consider this exploitation, the budget but still near-western wages you are offering the workers of these companies can be an entire order of magnitude higher than the wages they’d get if these people had to look for brick and mortar jobs. So, choosing an overseas SEO company might just be able to get you high quality work at a very affordable price.
The internet is the great equalizer in that effect in my humble opinion.
Find The Best Of Both Worlds
So, the main takeaway here is that it’s entirely necessary to find the best mix of quality and affordability when it comes to overseas SEO companies. The fact that the employees of the company were not raised in your native language is the biggest hurdle they have to overcome if they want to prove themselves worthy of your business. After that, check that their prices are lower than what you’d expect from a local SEO company. The main benefit of outsourcing any kind of service is to enjoy a lower overall cost offered by the fact that people in other countries are willing to work for comparatively less for the same amount of work.
Do your homework and think carefully before committing to any overseas SEO company, but the benefits can be very much worth it if you choose wisely.