So let’s say that you are located in Costa Rica; either you were born there or you moved there recently from another country. You have just realized that having a good looking website is not enough, you need to market it to increase traffic and therefore generate positive ROI. You may ask yourself:”where do I start?” Many business owners or directors start by searching Google for terms like: “seo costa rica” or “costa rica seo” and other keywords along those lines. But is this a good way to get to know the best companies available? Not necessarily.
A company that can’t rank their own website in search engines may have difficulties providing good advice about what to do with your website. Nevertheless sometimes, SEO companies have very little time or desire to optimize their own websites (most of the time this is not the case). Now, the problem is thinking that if the company was able to achieve the first page of Google for the keywords “seo in costa rica” that means that they are good internet marketing specialists. Let me explain further, because by now you might be ready to close your browser and move on… You see, search engine optimization has change a lot since 2003. Sites this days don’t rank based on a little change in meta tags. Sometimes because of the lack of competition, seo firms will rank very well for their own terms in smaller specific markets (like Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras and so forth) so therefore they don’t need to have a lot of knowledge to achieve their own rankings. The question is do they really know what they are doing when they get their hands on your site? Are they following the search engine guidelines or are they bending them?
This days a lot of good webmaster services companies and web design firms in Costa Rica have decided to also offer SEO. It seems like if the clients ask for it then why not just offer it? right? No! Is like a doctor that carries the pills in his pockets, because since his patients need them; he would think that is faster to “upsale” them the pills on the spot. Sounds silly doesn’t it?
My recommendation is simple: don’t search only for “seo in costa rica” in Google; perhaps a better approach is to ask questions, make sure that you are completely confident that you are hiring a knowledgeable seo professional. SEO in smaller markets as in bigger markets is not so much about the secrets, is more about the dedication and solid work. When hiring an SEO firm in Costa Rica (or anywhere for that matter) expect a long term relationship. If you want your website to increase in traffic then maybe limiting yourself to only SEO might even hurt your company specifically. Finally, try to make sure that you are not hiring the regular freelance web designer that learned how to optimize a site by watching a couple of youTube videos.
by: Alex Centeno MBA.
Alex has worked as an internet marketing consultant for more than 6 years with several international companies locate in Europe, United States and Central and South America. His experience includes providing internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and analytics for a wide variety of verticals including: luxury tourism and hospitality, retail, e-commerce, finance and others. He holds a masters degree in business administration with emphasis in Marketing from the University of Science and Technology of Latin America. His thesis research covered the “Internet Marketing Strategies of the Plastic Surgery Clinics in Costa Rica”. He has written several internet marketing, seo and analytics articles and some of them can be found at: https://intermarketing.merkados.com/. Currently he is the president and online marketing director for Merkados Interactive Partners LLC. in North Carolina.
