avoiding the pitfalls of hiring an seo firm
February 1st, 2007
A client jokingly forwarded a recent article entitled “Optimizers not optimal for getting site noticed.” The author is critical of the SEO profession, which she believes is riddled with scam artists.
For the most part, search engine optimizers are — do I dare say it out loud? — crooks. They promise the sky and all the golden-top-10-Google-rankings beneath it. They make cold calls or send cold spam (yuck) to otherwise smart business owners and, within minutes, the owner is rattling off the company’s credit card number to his or her new best friend.
If you read this blog regularly, you know I’m a search engine optimizer, or SEO. I’m proud of what I do and know my services have had a positive impact on every organization I’ve worked with.
Staying married to employment, treating a customer badly would lead to a word of mouth meltdown for my SEO firm. That said, there are crooked SEOs, just like in every profession or business. You, as a buyer, need to be cautious of where, and with whom, you put your money.
The news story has some good tips for watching your back, but here are some things I look for when analyzing another SEO.
- Check under their hood. Ask your SEO what keyphrases their own site is targeting and how they’re doing in Google. Be particularly mindful of how many searches per month their target keyphrases receive. You can do this by using a free tool offered by Wordtracker. If your SEO doesn’t pass the test for their own site in ranking for strategic keyphrases, they likely won’t for yours.
- Check their backlinks. This is the sunshine that makes a site grow into a happy, healthy, well trafficked-by-search Web site. If your SEO’s site doesn’t have a significant amount of quality, relevant backlinks from other sites, this is a red flag. To find out this information, go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and put in your SEO’s site, and check their “inlinks.” Here is what Cheezhead’s looks like.
The links are ranked in order of how important Yahoo! sees them, so the first 10 or so links should tell a lot about your SEO. If you see that many of the links are from substandard sites with “links” in the URL, this is a red flag. Also, if your SEO has few or no backlinks, run for the hills.
- Check their on-site particulars. Going to an SEO firm’s Web site can be very telling. Look for some of the following:
- a. Avoid SEOs with a Flash-only Web site. Search spiders don’t read it well - if at all - and no competent SEO will promote themselves in this fashion.
- b. Checkout how many pages they have listed in Google. For example, run the following query: site:cheezhead.com. If your SEO has few pages indexed, you may want to ask about it. In addition to this, check for a Site Map, which helps search spiders find internal pages on a Web site.
- c. In your browser, type in the SEO’s site URL without the “www.” For example, if you type in cheezhead.com into your browser, you’ll notice that it redirects to www.cheezhead.com. This is a pretty standard SEO strategy that should be practiced. It sometimes goes the other way, where “www” redirects to non-www, but it’s rare.
- Referrals. This is a must. Before you sign any agreement with an SEO, talk to their current or past clients. Ask specific questions about the strategy they implemented and what the results were. A typical referral should be able to say something like, “Before we hired our SEO, we weren’t ranking for any of our targeted terms, but now we do and our traffic has increased by this and our conversions have increased by that.”
SEO is arguably the best thing you can do to drive targeted, inexpensive, ongoing traffic to your Web site. It should be a fundamental part of every organization’s marketing (and recruiting). But you can get burned, which hurts everyone in the search marketing industry.
By sharing these very basic tips, I’m hopeful the employment sector, which I serve, won’t sour on search. At the end of the day, do your homework, complete with a healthy dose of common sense, and you should be fine. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about an SEO firm you’re thinking about engaging or have engaged.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Super post Joel!
Bob :-)
February 1st, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I liked this part the best: “They make lots and lots of money. They romp around the world giving speeches at search engine optimizer get-togethers which makes them more money and garners them more respect.”
I somehow suspected that your humble facade was nothing more than an eminence front.
February 1st, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Joel - nice post. In my previous lives I’ve had to research the sometimes murky world of SEO, and your advice is spot on. Kudos.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:07 pm
nothing in this post is new for me- but im sure this “checklist” is extremely usefull for decision makers who dont deal with online marketing like seo and sem on a daily basis.
February 2nd, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I am generally distrustful of SEO consultants as a profession, but that’s because there are a lot of people who add SEO consulting to their list of skills without doing much (the same is true for “blog” designers). I help my clients with their SEO, but I’m not a consultant, and don’t pretend to be.
I do read a lot of their blogs, and the problem seems to be there is a hierarchy of talent for consultants, and the gap between the best and the vast middle is huge. Sadly, the hype about search engines makes business owners who still think ‘hits” are a good indicator of traffic an easy target for scam artists. Then again- those business owners would balk at the real price and effort of first page rankings.
Just as a general comment for Joel - when I find out someone is a client of his (and I’m pretty nosy), I ask them about what they think of his skills - and every person praises both his skills and his personality. That’s a pretty important criteria for any consultant.
That was an unpaid and unasked for referral - my private opinion based on anecdotal surveys of an unrepresentative sample of Joel’s clients, and I’ll be glad to repeat it for what it’s worth to anyone who asks.