It seems everyone and their mom these days claims to be experts at SEO. And unfortunately, every business owner and blog poster under the sun is trying to find the best, fastest, and cheapest way to be at the top of Google. Worse still, most firms all say the same thing: that they’re the best around.
The first question I always hear is, do people even need an SEO firm. The honest answer? No. That is, if you plan on never sleeping again, spending hours keeping up with every little change in search algorithms and the keyword flavor of the day to keep whittling away at a better search ranking.
Or. You could spend a little money from your advertising budget and have a dedicated SEO professional do all of that for you, because we actually don’t sleep.
The first thing to look for in choosing an SEO firm is taking a look at who else they’ve helped. Chances are, if you can’t quickly find anything on their past clients, they don’t actually know how to do their job. But if you’re seeing their website, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia come up as the first search results, you know you’ve struck gold.
Another thing to look for is whether or not they’ve covered all of their content bases. A solid firm with designated content coordinators are going to do more than just send out a Tweet a few times per day. They’re going to take the fight for your company to the Internet with promos, giveaways, fresh sponsored ads, and social media posts. Less reliable firms, however, are only going to focus on email lists and maybe a fresh post on the Facebook page every couple of days. As someone who’s been in this business a while, that’s not going to be nearly enough.
Third thing to check for is what methods do they use for tweaking their SEO practices? To keep the spammers on their feet, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other major search engines regularly change their search algorithms.
However, they don’t release a press statement saying what, exactly, their crawlers are looking for. It’s at that moment that all the firms turn towards their preferred sources to try and figure it out. Some are more reputable than others, and some industry leaders catch on faster. It’s important to familiarize yourself with who the heavy SEO hitters are, and find out if that’s someone your potential firm looks up to for guidance.
Finally, does the firm even have the right background? If you don’t see communications major degrees hanging on the walls or some sort of certificate saying that they’re formally trained, they may not be. Some people think that just anyone can be an SEO firm. And while some things can be self taught, others really need to be formally educated.
That’s why, for the best in SEO service, you won’t find anyone better than our team. We have the right tools, the right people, and the experience to take your business to the next level!
