Best SEO Agencies and Companies

We’ve researched the best SEO companies, ranking them according to their customer satisfaction and range of services. Shoreline Digital Marketing is the best SEO agency – stick around to hear about the four other best SEO services companies, including the best local SEO agency.

You want customers to find you online and convert at an acceptable rate – you’re going to need the help of an SEO agency. But you don’t want just any old internet hack, oh no. You want the best. 

We care about equipping business leaders for these dicey post-pandemic times, that’s why we put the top SEO agencies through their paces. We scored each company based on aggregate customer reviews, the services they offer and the number of trusted partnerships they have.

You can read more about our methodology below, get straight to the supplier reviews or make your life easier and have SEO agencies get in touch with you directly to offer their best deals. If you let us know what you’re looking for SEO-wise, we’ll match you with our trusted experts. Easy peasy SEO-squeezy.

1. Best SEO Agency for Franchise SEO: Shoreline Digital Marketing

Core services offered: SEO content creation, link building, on-site (technical) SEO, local SEO, analytics and reporting, SEO site audits, reputation management, keyword management.

Shoreline Digital Marketing is transparent about its range of SEO services but reluctant to offer set price packages. You’ll have to contact them directly for SEO pricing.

2. Best SEO Agency for Ecommerce SEO: WTM Digital

Core services offered: Keyword analysis, competitor analysis, onsite SEO optimization, offsite SEO (backlinking), targeted SEO campaigns, SEO copywriting in-house, local SEO and Google Tag Manager.

WTM Digital SEO Services Pricing:

Unlike many SEO companies, WTM Digital offers transparent pricing guidance. According to the agency, you can expect to invest between $2,000 to more than $10,000 per month.

Their Google Tag Manager services start at $2,000, though some clients spend $5,000 plus.

Amazon SEO services begin at $2,000 monthly and can exceed $10,000 per month, while copywriting services start at $2,000 and go up to $30,000.

3. Best SEO Agency for Reputation Management: Hibu

Core services:  Local SEO, reputation management, website audit, content review and optimization, voice-optimized FAQs, offsite SEO (backlinks), social media post creation, website creation.

From law firms to small retail – all businesses can benefit from reputation management – it’s basically a PR service which, among other things, corrects the record when unhappy customers leave negative feedback online. Such a service is invaluable for B2C businesses who face strong competition in retail industries and personal services, for instance.

4. Best SEO Agency for Local SEO: Wiideman

Core services: Local SEO, off-site SEO (linkbuilding), on-site SEO, SEO consultation and training, SEO audits, SEO strategy and roadmapping, SEO staff procurement.

Here’s a snippet from Wiideman’s in-depth research on how to rank higher for local SEO.

Wiideman SEO Services Pricing:

While Wiideman is not forthcoming with SEO pricing information, they do state on their website that their SEO monitoring service starts at $99 per month. Services you’ll receive for this include Google Search Console reporting, notification of recent inbound links and risks to your rankings.

• Basic monthly SEO monitoring: $99 per month
• Basic weekly SEO monitoring: $199 per month
• Premium monthly SEO monitoring: $199 per month
• Premium weekly SEO monitoring: $299 per month

We’d recommend choosing a plan based on how much time you have on a regular basis to read through the reports and implement changes accordingly. If you really have the spare capacity to make SEO updates on a weekly basis, then you could benefit from the weekly reporting. Otherwise, if you’re realistically only going to get around to this once per month, then the monthly SEO reporting price package is best for you.

Here’s a list of what you’ll get in the monthly report if you purchase Wiideman’s SEO monitoring services.

Moreover, Wiideman offers a refund guarantee for clients who implement SEO recommendations and fail to see improvements in organic traffic after three months. There’s some peace of mind for your finance manager! We’ve not seen an offer like that anywhere else, which speaks to the confidence of the firm in the quality of their consulting services.

5. Best SEO Agency for Multichannel SEO: Volume Nine Digital

Volume Nine Digital takes a six-stage approach to sharpening your business’ SEO, from establishing initial goals and KPI targets to strategy execution and performance review.

Volume Nine SEO Services Pricing:

Volume Nine’s monthly SEO services retainer prices are set between $2,000 and $10,000 per month. This is within the typical price range for the types of SEO services on offer. Broadly speaking, Volume Nine doesn’t offer fixed price packages but the team prefers to work out a tailored set of services and a bespoke price point on a per-client basis.

They also offer a number of free resources online such as this handy social media engagement checklist which reminds you of how exactly to engage with your customers online. While social media is not a ranking factor for Google’s algorithms, it’s still an important strategy to broaden your online presence.

What Does an SEO Company or Agency do?

The best SEO companies will leverage industry expertise and software tools to increase the competitiveness of your business by boosting it higher up on search engine results rankings. Search engines such as Google use algorithms that rank websites shown to users after typing in certain phrases. It’s the SEO agency’s job to get the website of your business to appear over and above the competition because that way you’ll get more clicks through to your company’s web pages, leading to more conversions. 

In effect, SEO agencies can increase the profitability of your website by attracting targeted web users who are already looking to buy what you’re selling. When you’re scaling up a large business, you need to outshine the competition on search engine results pages – only the best enterprise SEO agencies will get you there.

This “pull-em-in” type of marketing is known as “organic search” stemming from the idea of customers naturally flocking over to you using search engines. It’s a “free” kind of marketing because you can’t pay to appear higher on Google search results pages (SERPs). It’s therefore distinctly different from paid advertising, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

Now you may think it’s perfectly possible to undertake your own SEO for your company web presence. While it’s possible to do it yourself, it’s most likely a waste of your time unless you’re extremely knowledgeable and have access to some high-level analytics tools. 

That’s the broad outline, so now let’s look in depth at exactly what SEO services agencies provide.

On-Site SEO

The best SEO services company will suggest and implement changes to your website to make it appear more attractive to your target audience and to search engine bots. It’s called “on-site” because it relates to tinkering with your actual website. Agencies will do this in a whole multitude of ways, but here are the main features of on-site SEO:

• The site is indexable and properly tagged in the back-end.
• The sitemap is logically organized with any broken links appropriately redirected.
• Content on the front-end has a clear layout, divided into headings and subheadings.
• Web pages are optimized for keywords, meaning key search phrases feature prominently in headlines and in deep-dive blog posts.
• Long blocks of text are broken up by relevant images with alt text and keyword-optimized descriptions.
• Content is high quality, accurate and genuinely valuable to the web user.
• Web pages should be logically linked together across the website.
• Web pages are easy to read on a variety of devices, respond to different browser window sizes and meet accessibility guidelines.

Your SEO agency team will analyze on-site SEO opportunities during a site audit, after which they’ll typically suggest a series of strategic changes. During their audit, they’ll use a number of software tools to view your website from a machine’s point of view, revealing areas for change which can’t be seen with the human eye (no matter how great an expert that human is!).

Consumer buying habits have changed – perhaps forever – thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Research collated by Wiideman details what ecommerce business leaders need to know about changing customer purchase habits.

Off-Site SEO

In order to be seen favorably by Google, other websites must include hyperlinks that lead back to your website. This is known as “backlinking” and it’s the main activity of building off-site SEO. Off-site SEO is the harder nut to crack compared with on-site SEO because it typically relies on external relationships with other website editors. 

There are a few different ways to convince other website editors to include links back to your website:

1. You can pay them.
2. You can beg them.
3. You can suggest it nicely.
4. You can offer to do something in return. 
5. You can own lots of websites and insert backlinks yourself.
6. You can spam websites with blog comments that include backlinks. 
7. You can create genuinely high-quality content that others independently link to.

Some of these are good ideas (numbers three and seven), some are bad ideas (number two), and some are terrible (numbers five and six).

Now backlinking is a tricky game and you really need to get it right. Unfortunately, not all agencies are equally ethical in their approaches here. Search engines such as Google will issue harsh penalties to domains (a.k.a. websites) that gather too many low-quality backlinks. If you opt for a cheap, unreliable or otherwise disreputable SEO agency you may end up paying for services such as “black hat” backlinking which actually harm your SEO in the long-run.

How Do I Choose an SEO Company?

Now that you understand some of the risks of choosing the wrong SEO agency – such as a penalty from the mighty wizard of search engines, Google itself – you want to know how to choose the right SEO company for your business. We’ll examine this important process in three easy steps, followed by a quick summary.

1. Decide on the SEO Services You Do and Don’t Need: Worked Example

Make a detailed list of business aims and match each one up with the individual SEO services you’d need to get there. You can also make a note of service you definitely DON’T need, so you can reject any upselling the agency may try to dazzle you with later down the road.

Example: Janice wants to expand her wholesale beauty supplies ecommerce business, but is a bit clueless when it comes to SEO services. However, she starts by making a list of things she knows very well: her current business needs. Then, Janice brainstorms ideas on how to achieve these aims using her real-world experience. Next, thanks to her having read Expert Market’s guidance on SEO services, she’s in a better position identify what her business needs.

Her notebook ends up looking like this:

Janice brings her notebook to the planning meetings she’s arranged with several SEO agencies. At first she’s a bit worried that some of her boxes don’t have many good ideas at all.

However, Janice is pleasantly surprised to learn of the best SEO agencies for small businesses that achieve a variety of business goals with organic search optimization services.

She requests a callback from multiple SEO agencies. Janice then collects ideas from each meeting and expands upon each of the answers in the third and final column. She’s now in a much better position to narrow down her shortlist of agencies and make a final choice.

2. Identify Evidence of Tangible Results on a Comparable Project

The key things to look out for are signals that it’s a reputable agency that delivers quality work. Since it’s harder to review the results of search engine optimization compared with, say, web design, you should spend time reading recent customer reviews. Sometimes SEO agencies even name their current and former clients on their website, so you can feel free to reach out to those clients individually and ask a few questions about the SEO work done for them.

3. Set SEO Targets Clearly Before Handing Over Any Money

Of course, SEO agencies will always showcase their most successful case studies with incredible return on investment figures. Although it’s tempting to believe you’ll definitely get similar results, you should ask prospective SEO agencies probing questions about what ROI you can expect for your particular project. Setting a goal at the start of proceedings – such as a minimum web traffic increase – is a good way to remain in control of the expected outcomes in light of the financial investment your business is making.

Quick Summary: How to Choose the Best SEO Agency

• Check out our unique research
• Identify SEO companies based on expertise and services
• Look for evidence of similar work to your project or business’ needs
• Read customer reviews of SEO companies
• Contact current and former clients of SEO company to ask questions
• Confirm realistic targets with the SEO agency before you agree payment

Now you may be wondering how exactly we chose our best SEO agencies for the purposes of this article. Well, all shall become clear after you’ve read the next section.

Methodology: How We Rate and Rank the Best SEO Companies

For the purposes of this research, we searched ranked listings of SEO companies and hand-picked the best based on a number of criteria (detailed below). It’s important we remain as objective as possible, so our reviews are informed by this objective evidence.

Firstly, we selected the highest-rated SEO agencies according to verified customer reviews.

Once we had a shortlist, we scored each agency individually, assigning points for the following categories:

• Customer reviews (mean average across six platforms)
• Range of SEO services offered
• Number of trusted partnerships indicated on their website

To assign points in the final criteria, we scoured the companies’ credentials and counted the total number of branded partnerships with major platforms such as Meta, Microsoft, and Google. In order to gain these accolades, companies have to pass the vetting standards of the platform in question, so it is another mark of service quality.

Adding up the scores, we converted final totals into a five-star rating system.