(There was a post that I had replied to earlier where someone was asking for a recommendation for a Good SEO Company. I felt that there should be a stand alone topic on this. Other SEO's feel free to add more to this. You may or may not agree with what I have written)
1. One of the best ways it to get personal referrals from people you know. Most of my clients came from previous clients’ word of mouth. Bottom line, you need to see the results of their work first. Ask to call and speak with their current and past clients
2. Ask to see a report from one of their past clients and then verify the information with that client. If a SEO company wants your business, they will gladly do this
3. Don’t be afraid to ask the SEO company what keywords THEY rank for. Run away immediately if an SEO company tell you they don’t worry about ranking their own sites
4. Ask if there is a money back guarantee if they don’t meet their goals. While a SEO company should never guarantee rankings, they can guarantee that is there is NO material improvement then you are entitled to receive some or all of your money back
5. Do not be pressured into signing any long-term contract; ask if there is a trial of some sort where you could try their services without being tied into a long-term contract. Personally, I offer my clients month-to-month cancel anytime; If an SEO company is confident in their service they won’t need to hold you in a contract (personally speaking) 6. Most important: Figure out what each sale or customer is worth to you. Then let the SEO Company know that this has to be a positive ROI (Return on Investment). Basically if they are charging you $1,000 per month, they had BETTER be able to bring you $2,000 worth of business. What’s the point of SEO if you aren’t making money? I often tell my clients that my first priority is to make sure that they are taking in more money than they are paying me. Why? Simply because a happy customer means more referrals. Simple.
I think the SEO business has evolved over the years. Before, the hype was all about getting keywords ranked. However, many businesses started to realize that just getting a #1 ranking on Google will not bring in revenue. You want to choose a SEO company that will find the best way to increase sales and improve conversion rates.
I also recommend hiring a local SEO company. Every decent size city or town
should have a handful of SEO experts if not thousands in places like LA and
NY. For example, if you are providing a professional service, they will know
the market and determine the best angle to rank high in search returns.
I think that every business owner or the guy who is is in-charge of hiring a worker or a company to do SEO for there site has to know some basic SEO information and methods, there is a lot of parts in improving seo , and if the guy who hire to guy or the firm to do seo has absolutely no knowledge at all on the work that has to be done to to improve the website ranking , then it is very hard to see if any work has Ben done to improve your sites rankings .
you need to have a basic understanding about the importance of keywords, and not just about general keywords but about money keywords that trigger sales... finding the right keywords in your industry ,placing the keywords in the location of the webpage that will help you the most for example in the Title tags or in the Header tags ,
you have to understand how impotent inbound links are ,and its not the amount of links you have pointing to your site( that's a toll that worked some years ago , that a website was ranked based on the sheer number of links pointing to them ,the reasoning was assuming that good pages attracted lots of links, but today that isn't working any more)its how much "important " the linking site is when viewed from the search engine point of view, that more important the page linking to you is that more the search engine will think that YOUR site is also very important and will rank you higher.
there is a lot of work from a lot different ways how to improve SEO of a site , and if you think of spending money on SEO , then its a mush you should have some basic knowledge about the work that has to be done.
Take care
Be very careful about who you hire for SEO or link building for your website. Unfortunately there are a lot of SEO “experts” or link building services out there that build links that will eventually get you in trouble with Google. Just remember that per Google Webmaster guidelines, you are responsible --- even if you don’t know what they are doing. The problem is that some (not all) of these services build questionable backlinks.
Just last month a company approached me. They provided some references, reports for my site, and more. I was almost ready to take the jump and sign on with them, but I wanted to check the finer details about HOW they build the links. They gave me a couple websites that they had done work for and even provided specific keywords that they could show improved in search engines rankings. These were for a couple companies that were relatively newer clients and they had only been working on for a few months.
On the surface to the average small business that would have been enough to get the client to sign on. But not for me. I looked at the specific webpage which had improved in the SERPs and then looked at the backlinks for that page. Fortunately, I have been able to teach myself how to backtrack these links and look at the source code. What I found was that they were building several types of questionable links. For the page that they purportedly improved in the SERPS, there were only 3 backlinks. The first backlink was blog spam, where theentire blog appeared to be hundreds of unrelated links. The second one was actually in the source code as a hidden link. At that point I didn’t bother to look any further.
I e-mailed them and they replied saying that they did not build these backlinks. Later that day the president of their company even called me to explain that they did not build the links. This company has about 30 employees, so I thought it was unusual to have the head guy call me. When he had me on the phone he was very believable. But when I hung up, I didn’t believe them, so I checked to see WHEN the links were built and what the previous version of the (linking) webpages looked like. Just as I suspected --- they were built within the last 2 months, which was in the 3 month window that this SEO company had been working for this client. I didn’t need to see anything else to know that they were NOT being truthful.
The typical small business website owner usually does not have enough background to be able to check the finer details of what an SEO company is doing. So IF you do have someone build links for you, be sure to check a few of the backlinks to make sure they are on the up and up. They should provide you with a list of the links that they built, and just looking at them, you will know if they are quality or not.
Be very careful about who you hire for SEO or link building for your website. Unfortunately there are a lot of SEO “experts” or link building services out there that build links that will eventually get you in trouble with Google. Just remember that per Google Webmaster guidelines, you are responsible --- even if you don’t know what they are doing. The problem is that some (not all) of these services build questionable backlinks. Just last month a company approached me. They provided some references, reports for my site, and more. I was almost ready to take the jump and sign on with them, but I wanted to check the finer details about HOW they build the links. They gave me a couple websites that they had done work for and even provided specific keywords that they could show improved in search engines rankings. These were for a couple companies that were relatively newer clients and they had only been working on for a few months. On the surface to the average small business that would have been enough to get the client to sign on. But not for me. I looked at the specific webpage which had improved in the SERPs and then looked at the backlinks for that page. Fortunately, I have been able to teach myself how to backtrack these links and look at the source code. What I found was that they were building several types of questionable links. For the page that they purportedly improved in the SERPS, there were only 3 backlinks. The first backlink was blog spam, where theentire blog appeared to be hundreds of unrelated links. The second one was actually in the source code as a hidden link. At that point I didn’t bother to look any further. I e-mailed them and they replied saying that they did not build these backlinks. Later that day the president of their company even called me to explain that they did not build the links. This company has about 30 employees, so I thought it was unusual to have the head guy call me. When he had me on the phone he was very believable. But when I hung up, I didn’t believe them, so I checked to see WHEN the links were built and what the previous version of the (linking) webpages looked like. Just as I suspected --- they were built within the last 2 months, which was in the 3 month window that this SEO company had been working for this client. I didn’t need to see anything else to know that they were NOT being truthful. The typical small business website owner usually does not have enough background to be able to check the finer details of what an SEO company is doing. So IF you do have someone build links for you, be sure to check a few of the backlinks to make sure they are on the up and up. They should provide you with a list of the links that they built, and just looking at them, you will know if they are quality or not.
You certainly have a very good point of view in choosing the SEO Company to do optimization process on a certain website. It is true that there are mammoth numbers of SEO Company offering SEO services but then some of them are not that reliable and accountable just like what you've expected. So meticulously speaking, as a business owner you must check first the company background and history, learned more as what they clients (previous, existing) says. Through this information gathering, it can help you to determine who can help you boost your online visibility.
I agree that a company needs to be able to provide clients who will talk with their potential clients and share their experiences, but I can not totally agree with having that company's website having top rankings for several reasons. The SEO market is EXTREMELY competative, perhaps THE most competative group of keywords to get, and if an SEO company's primary method of marketing is word-of-mouth, why should they spend the time to be #1 for an impossible keyword like SEO. Better time spent would be to get their clients to be #1 for their respective keywords.
Thanks for great post.Really awesome.Good point to who want hire SEO company.
That was one of the most straight forward post I came across. You made it short and frank instead of beating around the bush. And I liked it. The points are worth keeping in mind while choosing a SEO company, and the question I like the most is- Asking them for what keywords they rank? That will really bring out the exact picture.
SolaceLaw | Window Shopper | 4/5/2012 - 11:15 pm
should have a handful of SEO experts if not thousands in places like LA and
NY. For example, if you are providing a professional service, they will know
the market and determine the best angle to rank high in search returns.
Good Luck!
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