How to Select Your Next SEO Firm: Ten Tough Questions to Guarantee Ongoing Success

How to Select Your Next SEO Firm:
Ten Tough Questions to Guarantee Ongoing Success www.bloofusion.com How to Select Your Next SEO Firm: Ten Tough Questions to Guarantee Ongoing Success Whether you are a CMO at a billion dollar software firm or running your own online enterprise, at some point optimizing your site for discovery and favorable ranking by search engines for the queries that result in lead generation or purchase will become a priority. It is also likely that unless you are blessed with in-house talent or have spent the last few years educating yourself on current search engine ranking factors, you will need to consider looking outside your organization for help. How do you sift through all of those unrequested emails promising top placement, friends' recommendations and the companies that show up on the first two pages of Google, Bing or Yahoo! results?
Opting for the right selection criteria Countless SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Pay per Click) providers have at one time or another created a document with the intent to help people separate the wheat from the chaff and, strategically, place their company securely in the finalists' round. With that disclaimer clearly stated we offer the following advice in selecting an SEO partner that you can work with. Performing SEO on your web site is more than just pulling a few meta tag levers and watching your rankings magically skyrocket. It is an integrated marketing process. If it were that easy then why are countless firms investing heavily in internal SEO teams as well as external SEO outfits to drive their online strategy? When done well, Search Engine Optimization will help you align your PR efforts, aid you in writing the content for collateral, make your email campaigns more effective and improve the clarity of your communications with your clients. At the base of SEO is grasping the language your potential clients use to find your products, services and solutions and integrating this language in the right content elements on your site. In a nutshell: if you can speak the language your clients are using in search queries, Google will reward that attentiveness with higher rankings. And selecting the right SEO partner to work with is vital. Answering the following questions will guide you on your journey to selecting the SEO firm that is right for you and your staff.
© Bloofusion, Inc. Page 2 How to Select Your Next SEO Firm: Ten Tough Questions to Guarantee Ongoing Success
1 | Are they guaranteeing #1 rankings?
We would like to make things easy for you and tell you to delete every email and disqualify any SEO who guarantees number one ranking for your site. Within the SEO industry these vendors are generally considered to employ questionable techniques and have, on numerous occasions, temporarily taken their clients to a number one slot and subsequently had the site be de-indexed or black-listed by Google. Often these firms will be unavailable for comment as soon as their strategy backfires. This is not to say getting your site to number one will result in Google penalizing your site nor that being number one is not a good SEO's ultimate goal. However, attaining sustainable top slots within Google is something that is achieved within months, not weeks, and while not a mystery this requires hard work. Any SEO you consider should be honest enough to acknowledge this hard work along with reasonable time frames, certify they will not be using known "black-hat" (Google contra-indicated or forbidden) SEO techniques and be willing to assist in getting you re-indexed by Google if a problem does occur. If they guarantee #1 rankings, grab your credit card and run.
2 | Does their approach sound like smoke and mirrors?
Many of the activities of SEOs can be extremely technical as they touch the programming of your site, but they should not be incomprehensible to the non-practitioner. If your potential SEO partner cannot explain what they will do and why these steps are vital then you would be best to consider another partner. Far from it being necessary for you to understand every minute step involved in a project, this is why you are hiring an outside expert, but just as you would not trust a mechanic or surgeon who cannot tell how they are going to fix a problem it is not wise to put your money or ... [download for more]