05 Oct

Avoiding the Wrong SEO Company

miami-seoOne of my biggest pet peeves as an SEO is that we don’t get a lot of respect from business owners. We are often considered scam artists because so many SEO agencies will take a client’s money and not deliver any results.

When I opened my SEO company in Miami (WEBRIS), I made a vow to myself and my clients: always undercharge and always over deliver. This pact has led my agency to become one of the highest powered SEO companies in the city.

This is a fear that I am particularly proud of, for a lot of reasons. The first being that when working with a client and getting them the results they want, they actually make more money. There is no better feeling as a business owner than delivering these types of results and seeing the look on a client’s face when they can pay their bills for another month.

The second is I work ridiculously hard. It’s Friday night at 1 am and I am still working on my craft (and I live in Miami, by the way, there is no shortage of fun things to do).

For these reasons I want to share a couple of tops for not getting burned by another Miami web design company or SEO company. I for one am tired of these scam artists ruining hard working businesses websites and taking their money. Here are my suggestions:

  1. Make a list of detailed questions and follow through with asking them. Don’t let them get off the hook easy. Ask about past results, ask about their approach to your campaign and ask them to show social proof that they can get the job done.
  2. Contact their references. Make sure they provide you a list of the companies they have worked with in the past. Ask for name, email and phone number – then ask to see the results of the work they did. Make sure you follow up with the references. Any good SEO company will have plenty of happy clients that will be more than willing to lend a good word on their behalf.
  3. Ask for documentation and case studies on their work. The best SEO companies will have plenty of documentation and data on their prior work. These types of documents can usually be found online and are easily accessible via their website.
  4. Browse their website and view their own internal SEO. Does their website rank for their target keywords? Everyone knows that SEO related terms are the hardest to rank for, but that means if they do rank, then they know what they are doing and can be trusted with your campaign. If they don’t they may be a sup par company.
  5. Check their social media presence. Any good SEO company will have a strong social media following. Also, check to see how many shares each of their posts get. Check to see how they are interacting with their fans, as this is a good indicator of customer service.
  6. Check to see if they have guest posted on other websites. One of the hardest parts about SEO is getting links from other quality domains. Any good SEO will need to be adept and getting these links. This can come from a variety of methods, and guest posting is arguably the most powerful. Check to see what kind of connections they have with other websites and see how they are getting links from them. This may be a good indicator of how they plan to build links to your website. If you are working with an SEO company, look for links on websites like Moz.com or Search Engine Journal.

In the SEO world, there are no guarantees. Google changes their algorithm almost daily, so keeping up with these changes makes for a tough living. That means their results may vary from client to client, depending on that client’s budget and at what point they came on board.

With that being said, there is a clear distinction between good SEO companies and bad ones. The list I laid out above should help you to figure out which is which.

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