Selecting your SEO provider is an important decision.
Choose well and your business is set to tap a rich vein of pre-qualified leads, that will drive new business for you long into the future. Choose poorly and you land up with a provider that harms your reputation or worse still uses risky or out-dated tactics that get your site banished from the search engines entirely.
How do you avoid falling foul like this, and ensure you land up with a winning SEO provider?
In this post, I lay out my 10 step plan of how I would go about choosing from the many, many SEO providers available to you. Follow the plan closely and I am confident you’ll find a quality SEO provider that will get you the results you deserve.
Use your online network!
Using your online networks can be lucrative and are almost always a good place to start. By asking for advice on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, you’ll discover lots about the process of hiring SEO providers, even if it’s not direct recommendations.
Talk face-to-face about SEO too.
Use local meet-ups to go down and talk to people about SEO for the same reasons above. There should be people who have direct experience of the process, and maybe you’ll receive some recommendations.
Use online communities and forums.
See sites like Moz.com, LinkedIn Groups, and Quora. There are some fantastic discussions going on about SEO on these sites and others, and you should be privy to them before diving into SEO.
Don’t rush in!
You may by now have received an amazing recommendation by using one of the above tactics. But before making a decision, hold on. They may have worked wonders for someone else, but your business is different and they may not be able to do the same for you. So, I’d recommend doing some further thinking, as listed below.
Make a list of what is most important to you, having read my “Truth About SEO Companies Guide”.
Consider experience; location (i.e whether you are able to meet them in person and whether that’s important to you; the size of agency (see my important advice re this in Truth About SEO Companies Guide, particularly #6). Of course, think about budget too. Create a shortlist. Even if you feel you’ve narrowed it down to a favourite already, it’s worth contacting and checking out others in more detail. This experience will allow different perspectives. Ask each of your shortlisted providers some very project specific questions about how they will handle your site. Moz (formerly SEO Moz) have come up with a great list. Their questions and the answers you should listen out for are here. More recently Search Engine Journal also published a list of questions you can ask your potential SEO provider. Either set of questions, your potential provider should answer easily. If they don’t, dismiss them from your list right away, they don’t have the knowledge or know-how to optimise your site safely and efficiently. You could ask for references, but I’d recommend a safer bet is to use your network again. Ask possible providers who they’ve worked with in the past and then use this information to contact people in your network who may have experience of their work. Can they recommend them? Beware, though, that 100% satisfaction rate is rare, so getting one bad review may not mean that you would have a bad experience. Delve deeper if this is the case. Check out their online presence. How they present themselves to you as a potential client, will be one thing. But how they present themselves elsewhere may give you a better idea of how they’ll interact with you once you’re signed up. So, look for clues online in their contributions to blogs, social media, comments in forums, etc. This will also help you get a sense of how knowledge and skilled they are. Finally, as I covered 7 Misconceptions of SEO, be really wary of choosing between competitors on price alone.
Always be aware that cheap rarely buys quality when it comes to SEO, and can have disastrous consequences for your business.
Good luck with choosing your SEO provider!
What other tips and experience do you have that might help when choosing a reputable SEO provider?
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