Four Questions You Should Ask Your Potential SEO Firm Before Hiring Them

You have decided that hiring an SEO firm is a good idea for your website and your company, but around every corner is a firm, or individual, pretending to know all there is know on the subject. There are scams, black hat practices and frauds everywhere. It seems as if there are more of those than there are genuine SEO experts.

How can you tell the difference? The answer is simple. Ask the hard questions and gauge their answers.

What type of Search Campaign does your firm prefer?

Ask the company if they do Paid Search or Natural Search optimization. The major differences are, a paid search should include a huge variety of key phrases, even numbering into the hundreds. A Natural Search is much narrower and focuses on a small number of effective key phrases. Your SEO firm should be able to do to both.

The SEO firm will set up a Paid Search campaign to gauge which keywords or phrases are targeted the most as regards your site and then they will focus their efforts on those select keywords or phrases for the Natural Search campaign.

Unfortunately, many times, firms skip the Paid Search Campaign because it is more profitable for them. In a Paid Search Campaign, much of the client's money will go to Google or Yahoo to pay for the campaign, leaving little for the firm, itself.

The only time a firm should skip the Paid Search phase is if the client's site is a narrow niche that has only a few, well targeted keywords or phrases that are appropriate to that site.
Not only should the potential firm be willing to perform both tasks, they need to make certain that the keyword or key phrase campaign is in keeping with the goals of the website. If the client's goal it to generate leads, then the keywords and phrases should reflect that goal. If the client's goal is to generate sales, the campaign should keep that in mind.

Does your firm perform SEO copy writing?

SEO copy writing is the creation of website content that is written to attract the attention of search engines. If you have seen a site with a phrase that is repeated over and over, you have likely seen a page that has been created by an SEO specialist.

The downside is these pages do not go over well with humans.

The key is finding a happy medium, which is keeping your keyword and/or phrase density to about 17 to 20 percent and to make the sentences and paragraphs sound natural. Because the algorithm changes frequently for search engines, this will keep any SEO firm busy by making frequent site changes to keep up.

Your chosen firm should not be shy about making site content changes without loosing focus of your over all business goal.

What about link building?

This process is extremely important to raise rankings with Google, who gets about 65% of all search business, and somewhat important to Yahoo and MSN, the next two most popular search engines. Make certain your potential SEO firm engages in sufficient link building efforts. This is done by creating links to your site in a number of ways: blogging and social sites are just the beginning. A good SEO will write articles and post those articles to sites such as ezineArticles.com or Helium.com. This creates a link back to your site. These articles can then be posted other locations, such as blogs. If the system works well for you, someone else will find the article and post it to their site or blog, giving you an unsolicited link back to your site.

The problem is this method takes a long time (sometimes 2 to 3 months) for real results to be seen. The solution is to purchase links. Care should be taken to link to only reputable sites and not to link farms which sell links simply to make money for themselves. The more inbound links your site has, the better your rankings will be.

What keyword or phrase will be used to show my rankings?

It is a fact that if you do a search for an article by that article's title, it will show up as #1 in page rankings. If you search for the page's URL, it will be #1 because there is only one site with that URL. The real test of your SEO firm is if they can raise your rankings via a keyword or phrase that is a popular key word or phrase and not something so narrow that you are the only one who will have that particular search phrase. What are the odds that someone will do a search for "Four Questions You Should Ask Your Potential SEO Firm Before Hiring Them?"

The firm should focus on the keyword or phrase that will accomplish what your company is hoping to accomplish.

Don't Wait to Optimize Your Website

Tons of information is available on the Internet about SEO and the best practices for web developers. As a two fold project, your website should be designed to be search engine friendly and then professional web marketers need to work on your site’s SEO. That is the best of both worlds because right from the beginning your site will be friendly to users AND to spiders.

But, what if you already have a site that isn’t producing the results you want? Help is still available and your existing site can be made more search engine friendly.

Too often, business owners complain, “We have a really great website, but we have no traffic. We love our website design, but we want more people to visit our site.” So, a competent SEO professional will do a site analysis, first. Frequently, they find a gorgeous, visually appealing site with terrific flash and loaded with elegance. Sometimes they find a site that is not user friendly, meaning it is difficult to navigate or so “flashy” that people simply don’t know where to click. A shopper will get very frustrated very quickly, in this instance and leave your site for something easier to use, loosing you a potential sale.

Second, the sites haven’t been optimized in any way to be spider friendly. It is not architecturally sound with regard to meeting the needs of search engines. The story SEO professionals hear is the web developer decided something looked really good and just went with it and did not take anything else into consideration.

If this has happened to you, it is time to stop and go back to square one. You will have to have your website totally revamped. Even if you spent a lot of money on your first website, if you aren’t getting traffic, then it is money wasted, anyway. Not reinvesting in your website will cost you a lot in terms of lost revenue.

The longer you wait to update your site the more money your company will loose. The worse thing you can do is nothing at all.

If you are presented with a proposal that is not search engine friendly and is not user friendly, then move along. The prettiness of the site is the last thing you should consider. It doesn’t matter if everyone in your company thinks the site looks good, business today depends on traffic to the site. It depends on exposure and high rankings. Allowing managers, or even a web designer who doesn’t know about web marketing, to design your site is a bad business decision. Ultimately, you will not achieve your goal of creating a web presence.

At Ciniva Systems, we design your website to be friendly to users and to search engines. A bonus is the site will look really nice, too. There is no way to loose.