I'm thinking about meeting with a local SEO company. What type of questions should I ask them, besides the obvious "show me examples of your current clients high page rank." A little background: I have an ecommerce site that is about 2 years old. When it was designed, SEO was really not taken into consideration, it was more about graphic design, creating a brand through brick and mortar retailers, etc. Now I want to increase online sales. I've tried to do some link building myself in the past, but think I need a company to take a look at the site as a whole. I personally like to work local, however it has bitten my ass in the past. (My last host was a local company who went out of business and left me hangin.) Anyway, this SEO company I am thinking about hiring has been around for awhile and seems to have their stuff together. So what things should I ask them? Thanks for any help. Josh
Josh You're question is actually a very legitimate one. The best response I can give you is what we do for prospective clients. It's our policy to not reveal our client list simply because our clients request confidentiality. They do not want competing sites/entities to know they are beating them through our ethical optimzation methods. Since we don't provide a client list to prospective clients how then in the world do we ever get new clients? I'm glad you asked... We let our analysis and marketing plan sell our services to the new clients. For instance... someone like yourself would go to our website or simply PM me here and request a quote. We have a few conversations and perform an analysis which is then sent to the prospective client. Our analysis lays out exactly the strength of the site, the weakness of the site, their competitors overall strengths and weakness and how the client can dominate the market segment utilizing our very reasonable SEO/SEM services. Honestly Josh ... after that point ... they really no longer have any questions remaining.
Would you provide me quality and persistant results? Do you guarantee top rankings (if they said yes then leave them).
Some tips that will let you know they are bad: They mention guarantees for their rankings They mention search engine submissions They mention doorway pages They mention special relationships with search engines Other than that, ask to see examples of their work. If their clients prefer to remain confidential (which is irregular in my opinion) than ask them which keywords their company website ranks well for.
Ask them if they guarantee top 10 results for all of your keywords. If they say yes put the phone down.
I second that!! Anyone who says yes is LYING. Either that, or they should cost 10 million and be making illegal transactions with google. BESIDES that, look them up. Search google to see what people think of them. Ask for example sites they have done, etc. SEO really is losing it's value though, still good to do, but the key is making good quality sites that people will link to. I've seen horrible sites rank well because they have high link popularity and have some niche keywords.
Past clients and examples of good rankings are not necessarily a good indication. A site that ranks number 3 for a good keyword may have been at number 1 for years before the current SEO started working on it. Add to that the fact that most seo's won't reveal their clients and you have a problem. The best thing is to get the seo company to spend an hour (let them charge you if they want) explaining exactly whats wrong with your site and how they would fix it. Ask them how they will build NATURAL links to the site. At the end of the hour if you are impressed then hire them, otherwise take the suggestions they have given and pay their hourly fee and go look for another company.
Actually, it's simple to obtain top ten rankings by legitimate SEO companies. The difficulty lies in the contract verbiage. Almost any optimizer (including non-professionals) can obtain top ten rankings in an obscure SE... hence usually those companies contracts make a mention of obtaining top results. So.. it's really a bait-and-switch technique used by many seo companies across the pond. Take us for instance, while we can improve rankings in the top 3 engines... our difference, rests in the fact that we proactively monitor industry trends, and ranking performance of our clients allowing us to utilize preemptive tactics to minimize traffic and ranking effects, if any, to the our clients site should a major search engine change occur.