SEO Companies 4 Questions
Just got back from PESA on the Gold Coast. I can’t speak highly enough of this conference. It’s not just a business conference, after 9 years it’s like catching up with a bunch of mates. This was the 4th conference we’ve exhibited at this year and none of them even come close to PESA for information delivered, support and networking. Not just from the speakers and the streams but just hearing the stories of the delegates will fast track your online retail education. We’ll be heading to thinkglobal in August which is taking this experience to the US. We’ll have a booth there so for all my US mates in retail get along and I’ll buy you a frothy. We filmed our SEO101 session so I’ll have that up soon.
One of the most common issues I came across whilst doing the 15 minute SEO audits was SEO done badly. There could have been a variety of reasons that on site SEO doesn’t get done properly, like business decisions or restrictive CMS but I cringe when I see people still selling backlink schemes. This will always end in tears. SO here are 4 questions that I would ask an SEO company if I was choosing one.
1. Can I contact your SEO clients?
We do this a lot but it can get to a point where you don’t want to keep asking your SEO customers if it’s ok for prospective clients to keep calling them. So we will share ranking reports with permission instead. Make your own mind up if these rankings are good or not. Have a look at the keyphrases and if it would be logical to type them in i.e. “SEO companies operated by bald men in Melbourne Australia” is not a good phrase.
2. Do you outsource work?
I learned the hard way a few years back that SEO is not something to outsource to the third world. I hadn’t spoken to anyone else who agreed with me until I caught up with a bloke at PESA who’d be head of a few global SEO teams and vehemently agreed with me. His exact words were “QA man right?” Yep right. SEO is such a fragile, complex skill. You can have all the processes and crosschecks in the world but if you are paying the lowest rate to someone to someone in another time zone it will not end well. We keep everything under one roof except for content writing. We’ll use sites like jobs.probloggger.com to find specialist writers worldwide but they are not touching the code. Cheap SEO is like hiring a cheap lawyer. They’ll take your money but you probably wont like the result.
3. What is your backlink strategy?
Ours is to use the disavow tool to remove bad backlinks. Then reputable business directories like Yellow pages that Google sees as an authority for business listings and will also send some traffic. Next we ask the client to talk to suppliers and look at where they can contribute in the local community to get a backlink. If someone has a plan to increase your backlinks by X over a given time frame, I would suggest that is the wrong approach. This is trying to game Google, which Google will slap you for but it also takes you away from what you should be doing, which becoming an authority in your field by publishing great content.
4. What is your content strategy for SEO?
There are only a few SEOs locally I know that do this. Perhaps there are a lot of smaller players that do but I haven’t come across them. Building your content is the one thing you can do that will build traffic long term. I try and get people to forget about Google. Some clients want to write their own content which is fantastic and often ask me about how many keywords they should use. I simply tell them to write the article so it is a good read and if they can use keywords use them, as long as it reads well. For instance I may have used the acronym SEO more than one in this post 🙂
Thanks so much to those I met last week. Once again I learned a lot and I hope you did too.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
