Hiring SEO Agencies

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is often regarded as a risky business and it unfortunately still had a poor reputation with many people. While information about the industry is now more readily available, many businesses feel uneasy about contacting SEO agencies to bring visibility to their websites.

The fact remains that many so-called SEO agencies can easily be blamed for allowing and even encouraging such fear to exist.

The truth is that the SEO industry is indeed filled with shady agencies that are more interested in parting businesses with their money by making promises of first page rankings. These agencies often hide behind unscrupulous tactics that contribute to bringing such a shady reputation to the internet marketing world.

It is thus obvious that people are thus weary about selecting an agency for their online marketing strategy.

The factors listed below are the top three ones you should consider whenever you need to hire a SEO agency.

Reporting

Reports are obviously something you absolutely need to stress upon since you need to know that your campaign is actually getting you somewhere. Unfortunately, this is also where many rubbish agencies scam their clients simply because the latter do not know otherwise.

Many SEO Agencies thus still offer SEO ranking reports which basically shows how their websites are faring in search engines for the targeted keywords.

However, it is important to note that a ranking report often does not tell the whole truth. With the advent of personalized search results, rankings now differ all the time, and what one person see from one location will almost always differ from a different situation. You should thus ask for traffic reports, which show the real picture as more visibility for your website obviously results in more traffic.

Link Building

Link Building is another factor that is very often taken advantage of by untrustworthy SEO agencies. Many agencies go around selling directory links while claiming that these will be more than enough to get on the first page of search engines. However, these links are often poor ones that will never have an impact on your ranking.

In the case of link building, you must thus request a report of the links that are pointing to your website. This ensures that you can actually track the work they are doing and that you are getting back your investment.

If the SEO agency tries to play down the importance of providing these, you can quickly deduce that you are just wasting your money with them.

References

Unless the SEO agency you are considering is brand new (which you should avoid anyway), ask for references.

You want to know that this particular SEO firm has a proven track record and that they can back this up with examples. These references will also allow you to determine the quality of their work.

Companies whose strategy involves manipulating the search engines with black hat techniques will usually be averse to providing their references. You will thus know which SEO agencies to steer away.

The techniques these companies use may work on a short-term scale but they will nevertheless be eventually found out by search engines with good SEO.