With 2025 on the horizon, Forrester predicts that businesses plan to spend triple their budgets on SEO in the coming year. If you’re ready to take your website to the next level and plan on investing in an SEO agency to handle updates to keep up, you will want to make an informed decision. SEO has changed significantly (and continues to evolve), so it is important to fully evaluate the SEO agency you are considering hiring. There are a few steps in selecting the right agency for your business, so be sure to keep the following in mind before you hire one.
What does SEO look like in 2025?
In order to hire an SEO agency that can deliver results, they have to be current with the best practices for SEO. Search engines like Google continuously raise standards for what they expect from websites. Now, search engines prioritize websites that follow the E-E-A-T acronym created by Google, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So, while including specific keywords is still important, having quality content is paramount.
Additionally, as more devices offer voice-driven search, SEO has changed to incorporate that into its algorithms, which means it prioritizes natural language processing over AI phrases. However, that doesn’t mean they’ve stricken AI from the record. AI’s influence on digital marketing and SEO will continue to be prevalent.
Why Hire an SEO Agency?
Implementing SEO isn’t as easy as it once was, and attempting to DIY SEO could result in detrimental results that actually hurt your ranking instead of improving it. When you hire an SEO agency, you can rest assured that they are current with the ever-changing algorithms and SEO strategies. SEO Agencies understand the tech, and their team can easily target brand visibility, drive organic traffic, implement paid search strategies, and optimize conversions. Meanwhile, your team can focus on doing what they do best instead of getting bogged down with technical mumbo-jumbo they likely aren’t trained in doing.
Steps to Find The Best SEO Agency for Your Needs
Choosing the best SEO agency for your business needs in 2025 doesn’t have to be challenging. Follow these steps to find the best SEO Agency.
Determine Your Needs
The first thing that you need to do is take a hard look at your business and what your goals are. Businesses have different needs, and there might be things that you’re already doing that work. Before looking for an SEO agency, complete an inventory of your business needs and goals. Do you need more visibility? Are you looking for more lead generation? Do you need to improve local SEO rankings? Figuring out where you want to go before searching for an SEO agency will help you choose the right one because some agencies specialize in specific types of work.
Budget & Goals
Before hiring an SEO agency, you must review your budget and goals. Clearly defined aspirations of where you want to take your website and digital marketing will make it easier for your chosen SEO agency to achieve those results. While an SEO agency can help you define goals if you aren’t sure, having an idea of what you want will help improve communication, direction, and expectations. Additionally, you need a specific budget to shop for agencies aligned with your price range so you’re not spending beyond your means or not investing enough to get quality work.
Examine Their Work
Unfortunately, many people and agencies simply talk a big game but can’t back it up. Take a deep dive into their work to learn their specialty, whether past clients are satisfied, and how much experience they have. In 2025, all SEO agencies should be up to speed with both AI standards and UX best practices, so keep an eye out for these qualities in their work.
Portfolio Review
Can you see the agency's track record of success in an online portfolio? If the agency doesn’t showcase the work, they may show client names—check out those sites and see if the aesthetic appeal and style match yours, whether they appear to be ranking well, and how functional their site is. Reviewing their work lets you determine if they might be a good fit.
Experience
As with any industry, having experience goes a long way. It can help a team know what to do (and, conversely, what not to do) and make better predictions for the future. Look for an agency that has been around for a while and knows the ins and outs of SEO. If they’ve managed to withstand the constant barrage of changes in SEO over the years, it’s safe to say they know what they’re doing.
Choose The Expertise That Fits Your Needs
Not all SEO agencies are created equally. Some are large enough that they have entire departments dedicated to specific niches of SEO, and some boutique agencies will choose to offer more refined and narrow expertise. When considering an agency, learn what types of SEO they excel at and whether they match your goals.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO firms deal with optimizing your site for speed. This means crawlability, or how quickly a search engine can examine the site’s content, responsive design (is it optimized for mobile), and other technical optimizations on the back end of your site. Firms like this can fix errors, make updates, and keep a solid site running smoothly.
Content SEO
SEO agencies focused on content provide you with just that—content! Whether you need to update the pages of your website with more user-friendly E-E-A-T content or add helpful blog content, a content agency is the type of firm you want to hire. E-E-A-T content refers to the Google acronym for experienced, expert, authoritative, trustworthy content that will generate a high-quality evaluation from Google’s ranking. The more helpful content is to users, the better it will rank, naturally.
Local SEO
Some companies aim to keep it local with regard to SEO. They focus on helping businesses beat out their competitors in a geographical area, which means assisting with local search queries, not just ranking for content against other online competitors.
E-Commerce SEO
Do you have an e-commerce business? There are specific nuances to targeting search for online businesses, so if that’s your business, you’ll want to either go with an SEO agency that focuses on that or one that offers that as an area of expertise.
Communication
Open communication is one of the qualities you should look for in an SEO agency. Are they willing to entertain your questions? Do they explain their work? When choosing to work with an SEO agency, you’ll want to quantify their work so you’re not wasting your marketing dollars. Additionally, having a company that works with you as a partner will help you achieve results that best meet your goals.
Are they available?
One of the worst things that can happen to a business is hiring a company to perform a service and never hearing from them again. While they might be working on your website, they need to have someone available to address questions that may arise. Open communication shouldn’t be a problem.
Reporting
Reports will communicate both the work that has been completed and the results of that work. Your SEO agency should regularly evaluate its progress and SEO performance to determine if its strategy is working. SEO strategy is not an exact science, so some tweaks along the way might help improve the work and enhance performance. Initial reports should identify pain points, and down-line reports should show improvement in SEO performance.
Transparent & Ethical
The team you choose needs to be transparent about its methodology and work. Are they outsourcing the work? How do they utilize AI? Additionally, setting deadlines and determining deliverables ahead of time will help to make sure everyone is on the same page.
White Hat Ethics
Seek transparent and ethical agencies that practice White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO is the only type of SEO a business should seek. It refers to ethical strategies for providing valuable content that helps users find what they want without nefarious manipulation.
Conversely, Black Hat SEO is bad news. It won’t help your business, no matter what the agency practicing these unethical strategies tries to tell you. Black Hat SEO has to do with unfairly manipulating results, which often violates search requirements and results in the opposite effect.
Connect with an Award-Winning Agency
If you need assistance implementing SEO strategies into your digital marketing plan, look no further than The Creative Momentum. Our team is experienced, knowledgeable, and ready to take on your project and bring it to the top of the list. Contact us today to get started!