How to Select an SEO Company

How to Select an SEO Company
By Scott Quarterman

For small to mid-size companies having an SEO marketing plan in place is a necessity but often is overlooked. Many businesses believe that once they have a nice, new, beautifully-designed website up and running that they are done. Without an SEO plan none of your prospects will be able to find your website – no matter how nice it looks.

So you know SEO is important and you know that you should be doing SEO on your site, but you have no idea how to get started or what to look for. Here are a few things to think about:

Be sure the SEO company discusses your business goals.

Having an SEO company understand why, from a business perspective, they may be working on your project is key to understanding what this company is about. They should understand that SEO is about generating more business for your company. If they don’t understand or discuss your business objectives you should move on.

What size SEO company should I work with?

Personally I believe that small SEO companies are the most passionate about what they do and in most cases will provide a much better service. Large interactive agencies have a tendency to be distracted with too many other projects, account people are often moved from account to account, they charge over inflated rates, they often have too many hands touching your project, and are not as efficient as their pricing should warrant.

What should you pay for SEO services?

There is no normal standard here but in general there will probably be an initial startup fee and then a monthly fee to maintain the search engine rankings. The startup fee should include site analysis, competitor analysis, keyword analysis, and implementing changes into the site. The monthly fee is important and key to maintaining your traffic. Rankings change on a daily basis. Just because you’re in the #1 spot today doesn’t mean you’ll be there tomorrow. If you don’t have someone watching your rankings on a daily basis you rankings will start to fall – and thus your sales.

The amount of the initial startup fee and the monthly fees will of course vary depending upon the number of pages that are being optimized and maintained. Some SEO companies base their numbers on the amount of time it takes to perform initial and ongoing services per page. This is a good practice. That way you can tie budget back to each page when performing ROI analysis.

What should you watch out for when selecting SEO companies?

Here is a short list of “black hat” SEO tactics that should be avoided at all costs. These methods will in most cases get you banned from the search engines. Definitely ask the SEO companies that you’re courting if they practice these sorts of tactics.

• Redirects - This means pointing one page to another page. Search engines do not like this at all.
• Link Farming - These are businesses that sell links to you. This is one of the quickest ways to get your site removed from a search engine.
• Page Cloaking - This is where a company creates on version of a page to show to search engines and another version to its visitors. Search engines are very wise to this and this practice should not be used.

There are many other SEO “black hat” practices to watch for but these are the biggest offenders and should be avoided at all costs. Be sure to ask the SEO companies that you are talking with if they understand that these practices could get your site banned from the search engines. Do not hire a company that provide these types of services.

When hiring an SEO company be sure they are passionate about your business and talk about how they can increase YOUR bottom line. After all SEO is about generating more traffic to your site and thus more business.

Scott Quarterman is the owner of 77 Web Solutions a web marketing firm in Atlanta, GA, that specializes in increasing the performance of small to mid-sized business websites. For more SEO tips please visit our SEO Blog.

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