So you have come to a few blogs and have read about SEO, link building, Google News optimization, video marketing, and search engine marketing overall. Maybe you have a site and have gotten some nice results and it has not increased the sales you were expecting or you want to dive into having an Internet business but you do not want to spend the time performing search engine optimization. No matter how you have gotten to this point you are in the market to find a SEO company to provide SEO services.
Buying search engine optimization services is not an easy process. If you have none or limited basic understanding of SEO, it’s really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.
Many companies looking for SEO marketing try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:
- What is this SEO firm going to do for me?
- How much do they cost?
I guess we have all said this about anything we bought but when you’re hiring for a particular position in any business, you’re looking at that individual’s background. You aren’t just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You’re hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.
For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house SEO expert). By selecting an agency or expert purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.
Develop a Scope of Work First
This can be tricky because as we discussed before you may not know much about SEO so how are you going to determine what needs to be done? You need to know what the scope of work is when proposals are put together for SEO efforts. That is one reason why creating a SEO request for proposal (RFP) is important. We use this process of thinking in our everyday lives but we just do not make it an official document. Example – I plan to go buy a new vacuum cleaner and so I make some notes on a scrap piece of paper
- Good for dog hair
- 12 amps
- Corded
- Washable filters
- Works on carpet of tile
- HEPA
In theory I have just create a scope of work and I now can go ahead with finding the right vacuum cleaner for my needs. So, too, should you determine the scope of work for SEO efforts. Ask yourself:
- What do I need to be done?
- How is the competition as a whole?
- What will the SEO company do for me?
- How will I or some internally do for this effort like (blog posts, writing content, creating new pages, adding content, changing structural changes to site)?
- Will the SEO company provide link building services and social media marketing?
- What have they said about your current site if it has been on the Internet?
The Decision Process – Is Two Fold
So you built your scope of work and have sent it to a handful of SEO companies. You have received three proposals and in general they look the same. Really there is only so many ways you can say the basics but these Internet marketing service companies will have different approaches/processes to how they work. You have to ask yourself:
- Do they follow a process?
- What is there reporting?
- Is there methodology for link building “white hat”?
- Are they talking to you in specifics on your site/industry or just their services?
- Are they telling what you want to hear or what you need to hear? This is the deal maker in my opinion. Example – you just developed a new site and you have not performed any SEO on it. You should be hearing things like 12 month commitment, new content daily both site and blog related, other costs associated such as PR release fees, directory fees, some paid search for traffic and keyword discovery purposes.
Transparency in SEO optimization is important. If an unethical individual does something to your site that’s against search engine guidelines, you’re still the one responsible for your site’s content, and it will be your site that’s penalized. Unfortunately there are plenty of “hacks” out there who prey on the non-educated and make a bad name for the search engine optimization industry.
Now the second part of this is who are the experts that will be doing the SEO work? This is a major reason why some SEO companies charge $300 per month and others charge $10,000 per month. A recent graduate is going to cost a lot less than a 15-year SEO veteran. That’s just a fact and the old saying you get what you pay for really fits. The majority of companies perform “comparison shopping” with SEO companies and I really think that is a fatal mistake.
So you like Company A and the people who will work on your SEO so you choose Company A right? Not just yet. SEO companies are a service-based business and they work off billable time just like an attorney would do. If you can get more hours a month from one company over the other and the skill sets are close then you might want to go with the company that offers more hours on your site. Certainly, they will have tools that they pay for (and these costs are shared among the clients), but time is money. And some people’s time costs more than other people’s time. You should also consider all the time that these seasoned professionals have put into research, reading, studying, attending conferences, and otherwise honing their craft.
So in summary – check references, see rankings for yourself (against keywords that “matter”), get information on the individuals who would be working on the efforts, and talk to the company about their process. Think of this in the same manner that you might if you were interviewing an individual for any other position with your company.
You want someone with high integrity, energy, enthusiasm, a likeable personality, and a good approach to business. They should have a solid understanding of the job that you’re hiring them for, and a plan for success.
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