FAQs

What should you look for when hiring an SEO firm?

• Where is their site in the search engine results? If the company is good at SEO then their site should be highly ranked. If their site is not listed in the rankings you need to wonder why.
• Ask for step by step information on what they will do to promote your site. If there is any area which your instinct tells doesn't sound right, do some research. There is plenty of information available. Type “ethical SEO” and ‘search engine spam” into Google and you will find lots of data to compare.
• What is their Google Page Rank? A PR of 3 is relatively easy to get with a small site, PR of 6 is harder, and above that is extremely difficult. If you're approached by a SEO company (or any marketing company for that matter) with a PR of 0 or an unranked site. Ask why.
• What is their customer support like? Do you receive a generic email from them (did they even look at your website?), or a detailed proposal along with testimonials and other backup material? Ask for references and follow up on them.
• Does the company get referrals from their existing customers? We do consistently.
• Do they know SEO or is it just a sideline to their main business (usually web design). Keeping current on the latest SEO information is a full time job (We know it – We do it).
• How much experience do they have? If they are new to the field do you want them experimenting on your site?
• Has the company ever turned down a site? This is moving into the area of ethics. Some sites are either difficult or impossible to optimize (100% Flash sites), others border on spam (free for all “link farms”).
• Above all compare what services the company offers. Compare it to others in the same field. Some SEO companies rely on only one aspect of SEO (links, keywords, or submission). Others offer a complete package. Remember to compare like with like. There is no point in comparing a proposal which is just going to cover Meta tags and keywords to a proposal which is a full service SEO package including content writing and a links campaign.
• Does the company provide ongoing maintenance to maintain your rankings? Search engines change their algorithms constantly and without regular monitoring and maintenance rankings will eventually slip. What is good today may not be good tomorrow.