Bretts Marketing Bytes

I was recently asked by a company if they should do anything critical before engaging with their web design company to perform SEO. My first response was “What makes you so sure that your web design company knows SEO?” They looked at me with a blank stare.

Believe it or not this is my answer to anyone who uses a web design company to do a marketing job.  My opinion is based on what I have seen in the past few years from web design firms who claim to perform SEO.

“Most web design firms are good at web design, keep it that way!
SEO is a marketing function. Most of the best SEO’s that I know have very little website development experience.”

Here are some items that you should know before engaging with anyone to perform SEO for your company.

1. Website designers and developers are good at making websites. They are not marketing people. Get what I am saying?
2. SEO is not just about ranking number one on Google. It’s about bringing in targeted traffic to your site and knowing how to convert them to customers. A company that simply focuses on ranking is probably not going to produce very effective results in the end.  Ranking will only get you so far, it is the conversion that counts.
3. Any firm that you engage with should first do an extensive SEO audit on your current site. This audit should be done separately from your web design company. An SEO audit creates checks and balances between your web developer and an SEO.
4. SEO is not about meta tags. Anyone who mentions these tags is living in the 90’s. Put on your Doc Martens and run as fast as you can.
5. Ask about techniques that they will use to get you ranked. If it is built simply around putting keywords in your copy and waiting for the search engines to index it, guess what…You will be waiting a long time.
6. Ask what types of link building techniques they will use. Quite honestly, If they are performing black hat techniques it will get  you banned from Google.  Ethical link building is based around finding linkage from authoritative sites in your industry.
7. Ask them about their process. How do they start engaging? If they never ask you your objectives in the beginning, how the heck will they measure the success of your campaign in the end?
8. If they guarantee top ranking you should run as fast as possible. Nobody can guarantee rankings. The  search engine algorithms are top secret and are constantly changing.
9. Ask them to show you results. If they have no results, chances are they are not the company for you.

The bottom line is SEO is a very complicated process, and is not just as simple as plopping a few keywords in your page copy. Truly good SEO’s take this profession very seriously and know effective ways to promote your website through search engines. Take these tips into consideration before engaging with an SEO company. Good luck and happy conversions.

4 Responses to “What to look for when hiring an SEO firm”