Some points you may want to consider before hiring an SEO company

As a web developer I often have clients who need SEO services. Here is my personal do and don't list when I have to find a new SEO company for any of them.

• Do not always choose the services that come with low costs even if they claim to do a great job for you. After all, you may end up getting for what you pay, right? However, if money is an issue for you, with a right research you can come across services that are more affordable and of good quality.
• When you type in the "SEO company" in the search engine bar you will be presented with tens of lists of companies willing to provide you this service. You should start browsing throughout these pages and come up with a list of your own to include the most appealing SEO companies for your link building needs.
• Once that you have this list you will find it easier to do the selection by doing some research. It is not enough to fall for what the company claims to do but rather find out about their work results. You must find within their website and especially outside something related to their customers' reviews and find the level of satisfaction these ones have had while working with the specific company. A good company can earn its reputation after they have completed several of these projects and still are involved in achieving them. Let's not forget that SEO techniques are performed as ongoing processes and once you hire their service you can be stuck with them for a good period of time.
• Check for the SEO company experience in link building process. You will find out that several of the presented companies are quite new in the business, and for this fact you should know you must avoid their lack of experience. Being a new comer is not necessarily an indication of lack of knowledge, but it is different from a company that has been active in this field for some time. With more clients and more time passing by, a company can gain more knowledge and better experience in attending other clients' needs.
• Always find out about their customer support. Make some inquiries and see how prompt you will get their answers. This is an important factor to determine the attendance and seriousness of their service.

Would you like to add anything?

 

1.Chose a company that is capable to bring results and capable to work with a decent amount of clients. Conclusion, don't bit off more than you can chew. Understand your own potential and develop the business in time not over night. Good point low cost - poor results too.
2. Start and have a chat before. Many SEOs claim to be what they are not and easy you can see that!

 

You definitely need to be extremely careful with who you trust to do your SEO work.
Personally, I just started with a firm over the net who has had multiple clients with standing results. Meaning that the work they've done has kept them on the top of the search engines. The price for their starter package is $199/month for 5 urls + 5 keywords. They do everything within the google guidelines to prevent any penalties and have also taken it upon themselves to remove my bad backlinks.
Something that EVERYONE should do before hiring an SEO team is look at their portfolios. Don't take anything from the horse's mouth. If they said they ranked websitex.com for keyword X, look up that keyword and website in an incognito browser and see if it stands where they said it did.
Do this for ALL the projects they've worked on if you are able to get that information. Otherwise, my best advice is to leave that company alone. If they cannot prove their merit, then they aren't worth it.
Best of luck to everyone who is trying to rank.
Patience, great content, and some cash is all it takes to get out there.

 

The real test for an SEO company is their own SEO success. I can't tell you the number of times I have seen an SEO company marketing their services on a website with no pr and an Alexa rank in the millions. Obviously a new company will start out with messed up stats, but for a company claiming to have successfully driven massive amounts of traffic to websites for years, having virtually no web traffic themselves is more than irony, it's scandalous.