If you were going to ask anyone for advice before hiring an SEO to help improve your online presence, who would you choose?
Let’s be honest, for all the company’s with tools, software and expert brains working out what will rank hire on Google there is only one company that truly knows.
The industry of SEO has gone through some monumental changes after it began it’s rapid assent from the millennium, knowing how to hire a credible SEO agency is not easy. There are few specific qualifications (Google’s Analytics Academy & Google Partners Badges being an exception).
The actual phrase”Search Engine Marketing” was first proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 (Danny Sullivan was a co-founder of Search Engine Land) to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies. Since then there has been a surge of SEO companies and platforms developed to help you hire an SEO.
Whilst a lot of company’s claim to have a ‘magic formula’ to get you to the top of Google there are others doing huge amount of hard graft, writing and managing content, indexing pages and making the whole internet more user-friendly, better indexed, more secure and getting customers to the right products and services faster. The difficulty is for a company that is not experienced in this elusive technical world of SEO, it can at times be very hard to tell the ‘White Hats’ from the ‘Black Hats’.
Thankfully Google has offered some useful tips on how to hire an SEO on the page ‘Do you need an SEO ?’
Some useful questions to ask an SEO you are thinking of hiring include:
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- What’s your experience in my industry?
- What’s your experience in my country/city?
- What’s your experience developing international sites?
- What are your most important SEO techniques?
- How long have you been in business?
- How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
* Thanks to Google Websmaster Tools for the Questions
The industry of SEO has gone through some monumental change since it began it’s rapid assent from the millennium, and knowing how to hire a credible SEO agency is not easy. There are few specific qualifications (Google’s Analytics Academy & Google Partners Badges being an exception).
If you are looking for advice on Search Engine Optimization, online presence or website analysis please learn more about our services.
