SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)

Chapter 12. When You Need Professional SEO Services

After reading this book you may have come to the conclusion that you don’t want to or have the time to invest on optimizing your website. Or maybe you have investigated the competition and found that the amount of competition is too much for you to handle on your own. Whatever the reason, you may come to a point where you feel that hiring a professional is what you need to do.

I could just stop the chapter right here and say hey, e-mail me at:

Sean@WebSEOPros.com

We will take care of you. If that is not what you want to do, let me give you some pointers to help you out. There are a lot of scam artists, cons, and the like which want to separate you from the money in your bank account. In fact I think it is easier to find the scam artists peddling SEO than the real thing.

If I were to guess on a ratio, there is probably 1,000 scammers for every one SEO consultant that knows enough to get you listed at the top of the search engines. The information in this chapter is crucial to learn to keep you from falling victim to scams.

Hiring the Right Professionals

In this business cutting corners is not an option, because the wrong SEO practices can be far more detrimental to your website than doing nothing at all. Virtually every one of my major clients was first scammed by an SEO scammer before coming to me. In fact, it is not at all unusual to hear about a company or website owner that’s been scammed by a supposed SEO consultant who guaranteed them top placement in hundreds of search engines in just days and they actually sent the fraudulent company money.

One of the first clues is the absolute guarantee part. It’s just not possible for anyone, even an SEO expert, to guarantee that your site will appear at number one of search engine rankings all the time. Nonetheless, many people claiming to be SEO experts will tell you they can do just that and in just days. Don’t believe them. Good organic rankings for keywords worth using takes months to achieve.

In most cases, what happens is this: A website designer or owner who has had to create a website for SEO decides he or she can implement SEO for others to make a profit.

However, just because these people have done SEO on their own sites doesn’t mean they can plan SEO and implement optimization techniques on your website in the most effective manner possible. Every site, company and industry have different optimization needs.

In most cases, it takes a team of people to perform proper SEO techniques for a business website. That team might include someone to submit your website to different directories and search engines, someone to create and submit articles to online resources, someone to design and implement SEO elements, someone else to code the website to make it attractive to search engines, and a project manager to manage the whole SEO program from beginning to end.

Recognizing SEO Scammers

There are certain things you should check or look for when choosing an SEO company. These are the following:

· Get references from them. See where their customers rank. Go one step further, though. If at the bottom of the referral website’s homepage it does not show that the SEO company you are checking out does their web design or SEO work, call or email the company and verify that their SEO work is handled by them.

It is not uncommon for scammers to find a highly-ranked site and claim it is their work. In Web SEO Pros case, many of our customers allow us to keep a link at the bottom of their homepage that states, “SEO Services Provided By: WebSEOPros.ccom” and a link to our page. It makes it easy for our customers to see we really do the work we say we do.

· Be wary if the prospective company says that they guarantee that your site will show up in the first page of results or even as the number one result every time! Time for a reality check: the algorithms that the search engines use are closely guarded trade secrets meaning that no one outside of a few people at the search engine companies knows exactly how it all works. Guaranteeing a certain page ranking is a sign of inexperience at best – and much more likely, indicates a scam.

· If you hear an obviously busy call center in the background, run. If their sales department is a room crowded with telemarketers trolling for business around the clock, it’s a big red flag that you are being scammed.

· They promise to secure you top rankings for long-tail keywords which strikes you as unlikely to be used by anyone. For starters, they are trying to sell you a guaranteed page ranking (but we know better, don’t we?). If the keyword they are offering you a top ranking for sounds a little fishy to you, look up its popularity with the free Google Keyword Tool we discussed earlier in the book. See what its popularity is. Keywords that no one ever searches for are easy to main on page one of a Google search.

· If their services are offered at unrealistically low prices be weary. There are some SEO scammers who lure victims by offering to optimize your site and run promotional campaigns for prices that sound entirely too good to be true. Usually they want the amount upfront and from a checking account rather than a credit card.

· RED FLAG: “We can give your website and SEO tune up for $499.00.”

· RED FLAG: “Results in 48 hours (or less).” If this could be done it would save everyone a lot of money and time. Everyone would be number one. Oh wait. They can’t be.

Again, do your due diligence. Look at their credentials, find out who’s used their services in the past and what they have to say about the company. You should expect regular weekly reports on how your keywords are performing and you should be able to easily get in touch by phone and speak to one of the SEO consultants to get their advice and input as needed. It needs to be an interactive process. If the reports are only monthly or quarterly that is not enough time to get notified when a keyword drops and take immediate action to correct the issue.

The best SEO companies have years of expertise in the field and know the most effective SEO methodologies inside and out. When algorithms change they also know how to determine the changes and react and have a process in place to notify their customers. Your placements on the major search engines may change from month to month but will return to normal as your professional SEO company does what is necessary to get you back to the top.

What to Expect From a Professional SEO Company

When you find an SEO firm that offers the services that you need, you can expect to receive certain specific services from them. The services vary from firm to firm, but here’s a list that you can use as a good rule of thumb:

· You should be provided with an initial professional SEO audit. The audit should thoroughly examine your sites URL properties, current SEO elements, problems with the current design and structure of your existing website, provide keyword and competitor research, and look at the mechanics of a website as a whole and include recommendations.

· If you are trying to employ an SEO company that is a one man show who does the auditing, the optimization, the linking, the articles, the research, the social media, the web changes, monitors the analytics, does the billing, and everything else, you will soon learn that no one can be an expert at everything and you will soon be lost amongst his many clients.

· At WebSEOPros.com everyone wears their own hat and focuses on just one part of the process. That means there is a team assigned to every client.

· The company you hire should employ a project manager who tracks all the needs of your company’s website(s) and follows the reports. This person needs to be able to bring in the experts needed at a given time they are needed and always be available by phone. If your SEO expert says he is only available by e-mail that is a big red flag!

· You should be provided with recommendations for keywords and a plan to optimize your website. This report should indicate how each page of your web site is optimized including what on-page SEO elements such as HTML tags, keywords, and content needs to be changed on your website on an ongoing basis.

· You should be provided with information on how the SEO company plans to perform the optimization of the internal site navigation. Your internal navigation can have a serious effect on how your site performs in search results, so a good SEO will examine and optimize that navigation structure.

· Your SEO company should be able to scan the Internet weekly for mentions of your domain name in Blogs and other social media and provide this in a weekly report. This is now known as “Reputation Management” and is a critical piece of any online presence. And should be part of your weekly SEO Report.

· The SEO company should be able to scan your website weekly for design changes made that inadvertently broke links or strayed from the SEO goals set in place. These warnings should also be in your weekly SEO Report.

· A plan on how the SEO company intends to perform link building for your domain and verify they are only white hat techniques to sites relevant to your industry or follow guidelines set at http://angelasandpaulsbacklinks.com/.

· The company you choose should have procedures and the ability to test the different search engine algorithms to detect changes. They should be able to immediately make changes to your website to combat those changes.

· A plan on how the SEO company will show their progress and the monitoring of your SEO efforts and keyword statistics. They should also be able to give you statistics on your major competitors as well. If the SEO company cannot provide you this information on a weekly basis, especially in the beginning, find another company.

· SEO requires ongoing efforts. The SEO company must be able to train your staff with the most successful methods for maintaining optimization and providing news articles and suggestions.

Professional SEO firms can offer a lot of benefits to your website. After all, your core business is not likely SEO, but an SEO firm’s is. The good ones can properly optimize your site, and your services, in less time than you can. For that reason alone, it should be enough to make you consider hiring an SEO firm, whether or not you end up doing so.