Choosing An SEO Company

(For an overview of search engine optimisation and web site rankings please see this post).

It is a real shame that there are a hell of a lot of cowboy SEO companies, individuals and agencies out there.

Here’s what happens.

A business owner or entrepreneur like you hires someone to do some SEO based on the claims they make. 6 months down the road nothing has happened. You have paid out all this money, but had no results, no leads, no sales!

It is like an advertising sales person calling you and saying buy 6 months worth of advertising for £3,000 and you will get 500 responses. But after 6 months you haven’t even got one response.

If that happened would you go back to them? Of course not!

And unfortunately many businesses have been ripped off by so called SEO companies or individuals – big promises, no results.

Not only will these types of companies not produce results, but they will also hinder your chances of success once you fire them.

This is because a lot of them will use tactics that search engines frown upon. These are tactics that the search engines see as spam and consequently will put a black mark against your web site, making it very difficult for you to ever gain rankings.

So not only are they taking your money they are actually hindering your chances of ever gaining decent search engine rankings.

But please don’t be put off, even if you have had a bad experience before.

SEO is such an important part of a business’s profitability. As we have said before, it doesn’t matter whether you are a local shop or a national company – SEO can add significant revenue to your business and aid in its growth.

Let’s look at some points that will guide you to finding a decent SEO company.

Targeting Keywords

SEO is all based around keywords. Keywords are the things that people search for in the search engines. So the aim of SEO is to try and make your web site rank for keywords that are relevant to your business.

Some keywords are harder to rank for than others – generally because they are more competitive.

You should never try and rank for just 1 word keywords; you should be aiming to get rankings for 2, 3 or 4 word keywords.

For example – If you were mortgage broker. Don’t try and rank for ‘mortgages’ – you should be targeting ‘fixed rate mortgages’ or ‘mortgage rate comparison’ or ‘mortgages for first time buyers’.

These longer keyword phrases are known as ‘long tail’. It is easier and quicker to gain decent rankings for these long tail keywords – and frankly you can specifically target exact products or services that you offer, which means you get a better quality of traffic.

Make sure that the SEO company you use targets long tail keywords to start off. Once you have rankings for those keywords you can concentrate on 1 word keywords (if it is going to be profitable for you).

If you are local company that just operates in a town or county then you can also optimise for local keywords, which can be very easy to rank for.

For example – ‘Southampton tanning salon’ or ‘sunbeds in Hampshire’.

Think towns, cities, counties, regions, suburbs, etc.

 

Finding An SEO Company

It is highly likely that you will able to find a few good SEO companies or individuals in your town (or at least in your county).

Local SEO companies will optimise their web sites to rank for local SEO keywords. If they rank for these you will at least know that they know what they are doing.

So use the following keywords in Google to see what you can find:

YourTown SEO
YourCity SEO
YourCounty SEO
YourTown Search engine optimisation
YourCity Search engine optimisation
YourCounty Search engine optimisation

(Also try spelling optimisation with a ‘z’ – so optimization).

Another way is to search for the keywords that you would like to rank on, go to the sites that are currently ranking for said keywords and see if there are any links on the web site to the design or marketing company that built the web site.

Generally these will be at the bottom of the home page or tucked away in a ‘Links’ page.

You can of course contact other businesses that have good rankings for their specific keywords and ask them who they use.

Then there are the large agencies. But unless you have a big budget, you should stay away from them.

 

Assessing An SEO Company

#1
“We GUARANTEE you will be Number 1” or “Get No.1 Position in Google – Guaranteed”

These sorts of claims are complete lies. With SEO you can’t guarantee anything. So any company making these claims are lying to you. Don’t touch them.

If you know your SEO stuff you can make estimations. If a company said something like the following, you know they are not lying to you, and in fact know their stuff.

“We have assessed the keywords you want to target and found that they are not hugely competitive. Based on this and a few tweaks to your web site we feel we could get you on the first page of Google, Yahoo & MSN in about 2 to 6 months.”

#2
Ask them to show you examples of their SEO work.

Get them to show you the keywords that they got other companies ranking for. You must see results.

Some companies will give you examples of obscure or very uncompetitive keywords – which anyone could easily rank for. You need to see more competitive keywords that they have had success with.

Would you hire a web designer without seeing samples of their work first? Of course not. It’s the same with SEO.

#3
Keywords.

Make sure they work with you on selecting the right keywords to choose. No one knows your business better than you.

You don’t want them to SEO for keywords that are not closely relevant to your business. You don’t want to waste money driving untargeted traffic to your web site.

You also don’t want them to use keywords that no one searches for. What’s the point on being number 1 on Google for a search term that hardly anyone uses?

Choosing keywords is quick process but it does require some brainstorming, creativity and research. So make sure you are happy with the way they go about this.

#4
What SEO tactics are they going to employ.

Here is a summary of main things that make up a good SEO campaign. You don’t need to understand them, but you can check these against what the SEO company tells you.

a) Keyword Research
How are they doing it? Where are they doing it? What keywords do they suggest?

b) Web Site Optimisation
This might vary depending on whether they are building a site for you or tweaking your current web site. Here are some concepts they should mention. Don’t worry about understanding them at this point – use them for reference:

Site coding. JavaScript. Navigation menu. CSS valid. Clean code. Quick load times. Blog. RSS Feed. Robots txt. Few images/flash.
Keywords and keyword density.
Titles, Meta tags, headers, page content, anchor links.
Site structure. Link structure. XML Site Map.

c) External Tactics
You also want to find out what external tactics they are going to employ to get you that first page ranking. Again these might not make sense, but you can check what they tell you against this list.

Directory submission.
Article Marketing.
Blogs & Forums.
Social media (Facebook, HubPages, Sqidoo, MySpace, etc).
Online PR.
Link buying.
Other one way link building tactics.

 

SEO Costs

Again this will vary depending on the size of your business, what they are going to do for you and how competitive your keywords are.

Are they building the site for you from scratch or are they tweaking your existing site?

Generally a decent SEO company or individual will charge an upfront fee and then a smaller monthly fee for ongoing work.

If yours is a small job (i.e. targeting local related keywords or less competitive keywords) you might be able to get away with a one off small fee for tweaking an existing site and doing some link building. This might cost anything from £750 to £3,000.

Larger projects that require a new web site as well as monthly SEO work will be more expensive and you can expect to pay a few thousand up front and a monthly fee of £250++++.

 

Wrap Up

If you have any questions or would like some feedback on the information SEO companies have given you, then just fill in the form below.

 

Until next time

Tim & Chris