Before you sign with an SEO company there are several questions you need to consider to avoid becoming one of the many businesses who have been ‘burnt’ by ‘low end’ SEO companies that simply do not deliver results.
Have they analysed your website?
A trained and experienced SEO technician will need to analyse your website and its software to determine the onsite work needed to ensure all pages can be indexed and highly ranked by the search engines. They should provide exact details on the onsite work that they will be carrying out. DO NOT PAY FOR THIS! It is essential work they must undertake to provide an accurate quote.
Have they analysed the linking strategies of your high ranking competition?
A quality SEO company will look at your competitors and identify the quality, number, and source of their inbound links. From this they can see how many links and of what quality you need to rank above these competitors.
Are they providing quality links pointing back at your website?
If an SEO company says they will build you a PR3 link then your link needs to be placed on a link page that has a PR of 3. These have to be built individually and take approximately 1 hour per link. Buying a high number of packaged links (say 500 PR4 links for £500) will mean that that the home page of the linking partner will be PR4 but the page your link is sat on will be PR0, 1 at best. This is known as ‘low end’ SEO which was a well-used technique several years ago – search engine ranking criteria has developed and advanced over this time and so have the SEO techniques. YOU CAN GET THESE TYPE OF LINKS YOURSELF VERY EASILY BY SUBMITTING A SIMPLE ARTICLE ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS TO FREE ARTICLE SITES AND FROM DIRECTORY SITES – this takes a couple of hours at most and will save you hundreds of pounds.
Can you really see a return on your investment?
Think about it. Companies achieving Top 10 rankings in Google for highly searched keywords are generating high numbers of targeted traffic to their website. They invest money in SEO because the ROI is high. The truth is you need to invest time, effort and expertise to really reap the rewards of high rankings. An investment of a couple of hundred pounds plus £50 per month is not going to get you competing with those websites generating thousands of unique visitors a day through search engines. THERE IS NO POINT BEING NO.1 IN DOZENS OF SEARCH ENGINES FOR KEYWORDS THAT NO ONE IS SEARCHING FOR.
Finally…… there is no quick, cheap and easy solution to gaining high rankings in Google for highly sought, competitive search terms. But once there, you will find a return on your investment many times over. Just make sure you have the right SEO company working for you – if they answer the above questions correctly then chances are they will deliver what they promise.