If you google with "SEO agency" you will find couple of hundreds name on the list. If you go though their websites, you will see very nice and organized web sites they have. But please keep in mind that this is not important to hire a company who have many employees or have a beautiful website. When you ask them to have your site at top on the search engines, they will promise you. But if you think logically, can they keep their words to keep all websites at top on google? It means that this is not logical to ask or promise of this issue. Let them tell your the stories, how they start, what problem they are facing, how they solve, they success and failure. A real SEO professional is really important for your business and this is must for any business to keep the sales increasing. But if the SEO guy is wrong to work for you will be useless and for sure harmful for your google ranking. A professional company must have a professional site. If you go though their content you will understand but still this is not everything. This is not necessary to hire a company where 500 employees is working, you can hire 2/3 person's firm. Some firm/professional work by a list of tasks or a specifics strategies. Now this is important to talk to them face to face or over the phone or internet to describe about your business, target market and the things that you want to achieve. As you know, many SEO company offering free discussion before you hire them. Most of time, companies don't understand the business and just do some back links and other stuff which is truly time wasting. A SEO professional will understand your business. Don't go for cheap, this is just wasting money nothing more. Most of time the cheap service providers are nothing to do with SEO or may be they will working with 20/50 project simultaneously. An Expert can work 2/3 project at a time and they will ask you the price from $500 to $1500/m. If you looking for long term term, they may give your more good price. The duration should be 6m to 12m. Moreover, I have experienced that many clients try establish that they know many thing about SEO and push to follow what he or she wants. This is really dangerous and in this case the project will not be success.
There are already Many Post and Articles those have already shared great info & Details about "How to hire a SEO agency" But any way ! This is also nice Explanation & Summary about hire a SEO agency !
If I may add, ask the SEO agency to submit client's recommendation and portfolio. Anyhow, this is great article.
The largest problem is trust. You hire SEO for $500, they just hire someone else, for $100, they just hire people on fiverr for backlinks for $5.... Last SEO expert I hired, guaranteed results within 30 days or money back guarantee. So after 3 months, I am wondering why no traffic, and his answer was along the lines of "oh well, we reached top 10 within 20-30 days so we are already met the target"... so for 2 months since then he has fallen asleep, and I am out by alot of money. I mean really, to pay for 2 additional months and fall from page 1 to nowhere in top 10, thats a joke. You should have seen the graph he sent me. It is not just one seo, I have hired many different seo companies. They all make bullshit promises of money back if no results, but truth is, if and I mean *IF* they really could deliver the results, they would offer to clients to pay when they see results. I did a test for this theory here in DP. I had SEO experts promising me that my site would be earning $500+ a month if I hired their seo services and they even offered money back guarantee. So I offered to them (even made public thread open to all ) and offered that they do SEO for free, and I will place their ad links on my site for a contracted period of time, and after 3-6 months I would pay them cash to do SEO for my other websites. Out of all the big top talkers, noone had the balls to take me up on the offer. I mean really, they claim money back guaranteed, and promising my site will earn $500+ a month, and I proved that they are all full of shit. If anything they said was genuine, they would have earnt alot more money then just cash. Honestly, the only way I will ever hire another SEO firm is if they prove and deliver high quality leads to my website(s) and payment after seeing results. My advice to other people hiring SEO firms is this. Take out $5000 (enough for 1 years seo for a site), and just blow it all while having the best weekend ever!
Ask him for a couple of recommendations that they have given to their clients, check their past performance, check out whether they have any negative reviews or not.
Great article... But maybe the most important hing for me is to read the NEGATIVE reviews about any SEO agency... WHY? Because anyone can buy GOOD reviews, but in most cases (not in 100% of them!), it's the truth!