Chapter 21

Ten Things to Know and Do When Picking an SEO Firm

In This Chapter

Navigating the SEO business: 80 percent scam?

Figuring out why you don’t need an SEO firm for on-page optimization

Finding a firm

Knowing what you’re getting, and what the SEO firm expects

Checking out a firm

The SEO business is 80 percent scam. There, I said it. Too late to take it back.

But plenty of you know that, anyway. In my consulting business, I hear all the time from firms large and small that have worked with SEO companies, sometimes paying many thousands of dollars, and received little in return. In fact, I’m often asked, “Can you check my site and see what they did?” and on doing so discover that “they” did very little.

I won’t go into detail here about my 80-percent-scam contention (if you care to read the details, visit www.PeterKentConsulting.com); I’ll just state that picking a good SEO firm is a little like picking a good multilevel-marketing firm. You might get lucky and get rich, but far more likely is that you’ll waste a lot of time and money.

In fact, one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How do I hire an SEO firm?” So, here are ten things you need to know and do when looking for an SEO firm that is worth the money you’ll be paying.

Read This Book

Step 1: Read and understand this book! Even if you don’t intend to do the work yourself, it’s essential that you, or someone on your team, understands SEO. Most people buying SEO services really don’t understand what they are getting for their money, so they’re buying blind, crossing their fingers, and hoping it will all turn out okay.

A better strategy is to understand what SEO firms do so that you can understand what the prospective firms are telling you and check up on them to see that they really do what they claim.

Why You Don’t Need an SEO Firm to Optimize Your Site

You actually don’t need an SEO firm to optimize your site. Ideally, the people building the site should be doing that.

Remember, SEO is essentially about two different things:

On-page optimization

Off-page optimization (for example, linking)

In most cases, when you sign up for a third-party SEO service to optimize your site, very little gets done, and some really important page-optimization issues are ignored. It’s hard for a third-party firm to come in and restructure your site, creating good keyworded URLs, for instance, or rebuilding your page templates to use H1 tags, or implementing extensive internal linking — and thus, they don’t. Instead, the SEO service tweaks a few things here and there, such as by fixing title tags and description tags (usually badly) and creating keyword meta tags (mostly pointless). I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a third-party SEO firm do a good job of page optimization.

Hiring a third-party firm to optimize your site is, in most circumstances, a bad strategy. Rather, the team that is building and maintaining the site needs to understand optimization and optimize as it builds.

So what’s the role of an SEO firm? In my mind, it’s all about linking. I don’t think it makes sense to hire an outside firm to do on-page optimization, so that leaves the other part of the equation, linking. My advice is that if you plan to hire an SEO firm, focus on linking.

There is one exception: a situation in which an SEO firm is going to come in and take over your entire Web site for you. Then that firm has control over everything and can make all the necessary changes. This doesn’t mean it’ll do a good job, necessarily, but a good firm could, in such a situation, do a good job. The average SEO firm, without having full control but instead just tweaking a few on-page issues here and there, won’t.

Find Firms Through Referrals

Perhaps the best way to find an SEO firm is through referrals. Do you have friends or colleagues who have worked with a good SEO firm, one that actually did help their sites rise through the search ranks? If so, that firm’s a good place to start.

Unfortunately, considering the 80 percent scam factor, you probably don’t have a friend or colleague who has successfully hired a good SEO firm, so you’re going to have to dig a little deeper.

Look for Niche Services

I said that the SEO business is only 80 percent scam; there are some good firms, and some of the better firms focus on particular areas, such as the legal business, insurance firms, or medical clinics.

So, you might look around and see whether you can find any firms working in your particular business. However, beware: Many firms focusing on a particular niche don’t do a good job.

Understand What the Firm Is Providing — Specifically

SEO firms love to blind with science. It’s easy to do, because most people don’t understand SEO. You, however, are different. Armed with your new knowledge from this book, you know what SEO is all about and what an SEO firm should be doing.

For instance, when a firm says, “We’ll get you blog links,” you know enough to ask, “What does that mean?” What kind of blog links? Are they follow or nofollow links (see Chapter 15)? Are they on sites that are indexed by Google? How many links? How many different blogs? And so on. All too often, I have clients admit to me, “Well, I’m not exactly sure what they were going to do.” Don’t be one of them!

One client I worked with was paying $2,700 per month to a firm without fully understanding what that firm was doing. It turned out that it was doing some (pretty worthless) on-page optimization, along with creating somewhere around 25 to 30 new links pointing to the site every month. After the client understood what he was getting, he also understood that he was paying way too much.

Understand What the Firm Expects of You

Here’s a common SEO scam. You sign up for an SEO program, the SEO firm does a little work for you, but then it starts sending you e-mails telling you what you should be doing. Eventually, you realize that the service you signed up for involves the firm telling you what to do!

“Here are some good blogs related to your business,” an e-mail from the SEO firm states. “You should get links from them.” Following is a list of blogs, something that took the firm all of ten minutes to put together. That’s its work for the month.

As a journalist from a major business magazine told me after an interview, when we started talking about her own startup Web site, “I thought that’s what I was paying for, for them to get me links, and now it turns out I’m paying them to tell me where to get links from. I could have figured that out for a lot less than $800 a month!”

So, before you sign up to spend your hard-earned money, make sure you understand what your prospective firm is going to expect you to do.

Look at Samples

Before you start, make sure you see examples of the firm’s work. If you are (against my best advice) hiring a firm to do on-page work, take a look at sites it has done. What did it do? Did it do it well? Are the title and description tags good? Are the URLs well keyworded? Do the pages use H1 tags, have good keywords scattered throughout, and so on? (After you’ve taken a look, you’ll probably agree that I’m right and not hire a firm for on-page optimization.)

If you’re using a firm to create links, do a link analysis on sites it has worked for in the past, using one of the tools I discuss in Chapter 16. See what sort of links it’s creating and how many. Are they good links? That is, well keyworded, follow (not nofollow) links, ideally from sites with some PageRank (although, as explained in Chapter 15, that’s not always essential). Are the sites the links come from indexed in Google? Is there a range of different types of links?

Whatever you do, do not hire the firm until you’ve seen, and evaluated, what it can do for you.

Ask for References

You should also ask for references or simply call the owners of sites you know the SEO firm has worked for and ask them how their experience was. Did their site’s rank improve in the search engines? Did the firm do what it said it would?

SEO work can be expensive, so a little time spent checking references can save you a lot of money.

Compare Dollar for Dollar

After you understand what you are getting, services become easier to compare. If you’re not paying for on-page optimization especially, you can even figure out pricing per link.

For instance, consider the service I mention earlier: $2,700 a month for 25 to 30 links a month. I’m ignoring the value of the on-page work, because quite frankly, it was close to worthless. So the monthly price works out at $90 to $108 per link. They’d better be really good links. (They weren’t.)

On the other hand, it’s often possible to get good keyworded links from sites with a PageRank of 2 to 4 for $3 to $6 per link, or low-value links (low PageRank links, for instance) for as little as 10 cents a link. This $2,700 per month service was way overpriced (and my client dropped it, in fact).

Will the Firm Provide Reports?

Make sure you’ll get reports; ask to see an example and make sure the reports provide useful information that you can understand. Many millions of dollars have been spent on SEO without the clients knowing what they are getting in return. (I call this faith-based SEO.)

It’s an old management adage that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you don’t get reports, you’re not measuring, you’re not managing — and you’re quite possibly being scammed.