Are You an SEO Schmoe?
What’s an SEO Schmoe?
There are two types:
- Those who sell SEO services and really don’t have a clue or complicate things beyond the necessary to ensure their job security.
- Those who don’t know just enough about SEO to avoid being taken advantage of by the Schmoes mentioned above.
Yes, there are reliable folks out there who do a great job with SEO. They make sure they benchmark their work, they understand the platform the site is on and more importantly they work with a client’s knowledge of their market and what they want their site to accomplish to ensure the SEOing going on is what the client desires.
The onus however, is on the client to have enough informaiton to not be taken advantage of or to fall for the pie-in-the-sky hype some of these companies promise.
Here are 5 issues you need to get definitive answers on, and information you need to investigate, before you start throwing 4 figures of your hard earned dollars at any SEO firm:
- Search for the the terms that describe the services the company is offering. Do they rank highly for their own site? If not, why not? If they cannot get their own site found for the terms you would use, why should you believe they can then do so for your site?
- If the SEO company is offering high ranking guarantees – how is that possible when no one can control or influence search engines? Google’s own published guidelines state: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings…” Google also offers some useful questions to ask an SEO, some of which include:
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- What’s your experience in my industry?
- What’s your experience in my country/city?
- What are your most important SEO techniques?
- How long have you been in business?
- How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
- Get referrals before you sign any contract! Do they have long-term satisfied clients? Make sure they prove it with client testimonials and references (not just one guy who happens to be a friend). Ask for examples of Web sites that they have optimized and which keywords they optimized for. They should be able to show you where in the search engines that client is appearing. If they can’t give examples, they probably don’t have them!
- SEO best practices call for building links to your Web site. Ask what link building strategies they plan to use. Slow consistent link building from authority sites is best. How do they plan on attaining one-way inbound links to your site?
- Guarantees and Benchmarks: What goals will they set to meet for your site? You know the saying “if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is”?
If an SEO company guarantees results, be suspicious. Real search engine optimizers will tell you, there is no exact way to know where your Web site will be ranked in the search engines after optimization is complete. Search engines do not reveal the exact way that they choose which Web site is better than another, so know ones knows exactly what will place your site above another.
While SEO techniques are pretty universal, SEO in of itself is not a one-size-fits-all. Site owners need to understand what is involved and what is possible in order to fully be able to determine what SEO firm is best for their project.
So don’t be a Schmoe!
At your service,
Judith
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- Not All Links are Created Equal
- Inbound Links = Networking Opportunity
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