You’ve thought about doing search engine optimization (SEO) for your funnel, but how do you know which agency to hire? Your cousin knows a guy and so does your colleague. You see plenty of 5-star SEO agencies on Google, and then there’s that one persistent company that emails every couple of weeks looking for your SEO business. They all promise killer results, but will they deliver? This is not like buying a new pair of shoes. If you’re unhappy with your choice, you’ll be out a significant amount of money and time…and potentially locked into a contract. So how do you find a high quality ClickFunnels SEO agency that will follow through on their promises? Think of it like a job interview and ask the right questions. These questions can help you sniff out a fake and hire the real deal.

You can learn a lot about this industry from books, training courses, and videos, but there’s nothing quite as valuable as experience. The tips, tricks, and tweaks that will help you outrank the competition are best learned in the trenches. If someone promises the world but is brand new to the industry, consider finding another agency with more experience under their belt.

​It’s also important to remember that search engines change their policies and algorithms over time. Someone new to the industry may be well-versed in the SEO du jour, but it will look different in a few years. A seasoned professional who has seen algorithms come and go will be able to adapt your campaign better than someone who only knows what works today.

There’s no exact formula that every good SEO agency follows, but they should all be able to point to a specific strategy for doing three things:

On-page optimization
This process ensures that your website is optimized so that search engines react positively to it. Be wary if a company doesn’t mention starting with an audit. Audits show your website’s current weaknesses. They should assess:

✅ User-friendliness (structure is easy to navigate)
✅ Optimized title tags and meta descriptions
✅ Clear calls to action
✅ Mobile friendliness (most users search on mobile now)
✅ Load speed (users will bounce if your pages are loading too slowly)
✅ Broken or spammy backlinks
✅ Plagiarized content (content that is found elsewhere on the internet will be penalized)

After running the audit, the ClickFunnels SEO agency should present you with a plan for turning your website’s weaknesses into strengths.

Content mapping
Search engines judge you by your content, which means you should be creating consistent, high quality content for your website.

An agency should review your current content to see what’s producing results and what content you might be missing to support your keyword targets. Then, they should create a schedule for creating new content (blogs, infographics, case studies, videos, etc.)

Off-page-optimization
​It’s not just the activity on your website that matters. To establish your credibility, you want other websites to be linking to your website and talking about your content. Make sure that the SEO agency you choose has a plan to make this happen. It may involve creating content for third-party sites.

Clients can jump ship for a lot of reasons–internal issues, lack of budget for SEO, etc. But in general, if an SEO agency is proving themselves to be indispensable to a company’s bottom line, clients are going to stick around.

A good ClickFunnels SEO agency can grow business revenue by several percentage points per month–or more. We recently grew a retail client by 307% the first year, 1,025% the second year, and 3,368% the third year. They’re not going anywhere.

​The answer to this question can tell you a lot about how an agency will increase your bottom line.

Just like with paid ads campaigns, there are countless ways to measure the performance of an SEO campaign. You should not have to trust that your SEO agency is doing a good job with your campaign–they should be able to prove it with analytics reports.

An SEO agency should provide you with the following reports on a regular basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.)

Keyword rankings
This shows how your rankings for target keywords are progressing according to different search engines and different devices (mobile, desktop, etc.)

Traffic
This report shows how your traffic for a specific time frame (usually month or year) compares to traffic from the previous time frame.

Conversions
Traffic is important, but it does no good if it doesn’t convert. A good SEO agency will help you track conversions. They should also be able to translate this to revenue from SEO. You can compare this to your search engine optimization spend to measure your ROI. In other words, a good funnels SEO agency should be able to put a figure on just how valuable their services are.

​Note: You may see some progress within the first few months, but remember that it will take time for your campaign to mature. Conversions won’t jump overnight, but you should see steady increases to keyword rankings. When you start reaching page 1 positions, you should see big gains.

Google is always changing their algorithms, and most changes shouldn’t have a big impact on your rankings. But there have been some big ones that changed the SEO landscape. For starters, your SEO company should be able to tell you what the big algorithm changes were: Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and Medic.

​Beyond that, they should be able to tell you how they helped their clients adjust to the new algorithms and maintain their rankings. If the agency was honoring SEO best practices from the start, they shouldn’t have had to start from scratch to get their clients back in Google’s good graces.

Following best practices for funnels search engine optimization will help you rank high consistently. Many SEO companies resort to black hat techniques to get a quick gain, but the last thing you want is for a penalty to come along and send you from page 1 to “nowhere to be found.”

​Black hat techniques include things like stuffing content with keywords without regard to readability, stealing content from other sites (Google hates plagiarism), and resorting to low-grade backlinks.

Backlinks are when another website hyperlinks to yours. Backlinks are an important part of Google’s ranking criteria, as they count as a vote towards your website in the search engine popularity contest. But, not all backlinks are equal. Google rewards quality over quantity, and it’s better to have one reputable backlink than a half dozen slimy ones.

When you ask a prospective SEO agency about their link-building strategy, make sure they’re not using link-building schemes (“link mills”) where they pay for incoming links. No matter how subtle the scheme claims to be, Google is getting very savvy at recognizing cheap links and will likely penalize you in the end.

Other agencies might resort to links to spammy sites that you do not want to be associated with. These sites are famously loaded with ads or trashy content (think the 3 Ps—porn, poker, and pharmaceuticals).

Another technique is to court links from irrelevant sites. They may be easy to come by, but if they’re not related to your industry, they could end up confusing Google and diluting your industry-specific keyword rankings.​

Honesty and transparency are important, and this question will help you see how an agency owns up to their missteps. Pay attention to how they tried to make it right for the client and the practices they changed to avoid future problems.

SEO used to take six months, but due to more competition on the internet, it can now take one year or more to achieve page 1 rankings and a steady flow of traffic and leads. That doesn’t mean that you won’t see impressive gains all along the way if your SEO agency is doing their job, but beware of anyone who promises instant results.

If an agency says yes, run! No one can guarantee results due to many variables–the biggest of which is Google’s algorithms. An agency would have to fully crack the Google code to guarantee rankings, but that’s impossible because Google guards their algorithms so fiercely. And even if you were to outsmart an algorithm, it could change at any given moment. Trying to outsmart Google algorithms is like trying to outsmart the stock market.

​Some SEOs try to game the system by taking SEO shortcuts. These agencies may promise top spots short term, but they won’t likely be able to keep you there for long. As Google fine tunes its algorithms, you could be hit with penalties that will plunge your site into the murky deep.

If any agency’s pricing is too good to be true, beware. Search engine optimization for funnels is neither cheap nor easy, so a screaming bargain probably means that the agency is cutting corners in a way that could jeopardize your long-term success.

​Will you pay monthly? Will you be locked into a contract? Many companies require contracts to give time for results to show. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but make sure you have the budget to support it. And you should also check on your options for getting out of the contract if the company isn’t doing their due diligence or if your own business falls on hard times.

If your SEO agency says they’ll take it from here, that’s not a good thing. For funnels SEO to work well, there should be a close partnership between you and your provider. Don’t be put off if they ask for your website login credentials. You’ll waste a lot of time if you don’t give them the keys to optimize your site, post content, etc.

They should also ask you to explain more about your target audience, industry, and what benchmarks you want to use to measure success.

​Make sure they establish who does what in the relationship. Will they create content? Do you want to review it before it posts? Will they meet with you regularly about rankings? Or simply send you analytics and wait for you to reach out if you have concerns?

But there are also many honest, smart SEO agencies that can save you countless hours and deliver incredible returns on investment. Asking the right questions can help lead you to the right company to skyrocket your funnels SEO.