What to Look For in a Competent SEO Company

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What to Look For in a Competent SEO Company
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SEO is an industry that is always on the move. 
What works today might not work tomorrow, and it
may not have been an effective strategy
yesterday.  Techniques change.  Tools evolve. 
Rules build upon rules.  If youre going to
outsource your SEO to a third party, youre going
to need to make sure youre hiring the most
competent company available.  Dont settle for
any company within your budget pick one that
knows what theyre doing. Before getting into
positive qualities to look for, first familiarize
yourself with some warning signs of poor
companies.  If you see a company exhibiting one
of these signs, scratch them off your list.
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Any guarantee other than a satisfaction
money-back guarantee. The worst of these is the
guaranteed 1 position in Google       Search
promise, which is impossible to live up to.
Unsolicited offers from the SEO company arriving
in your inbox. If they need to resort to
untargeted mass mail, they arent pleasing their
customers and thus cant attract them
legitimately. That, or theyre just phishing for
your information. Using submitting your site
to search engines as a selling point. Search
engines dont need to be notified that your site
exists if youre doing SEO properly. Mass
directory submission. Directories arent a valid
SEO technique today, so any company that still
promotes the method is doing something wrong. A
lack of transparency. SEO isnt exactly a secret
Google publishes a huge amount of information
about it every year, and there are hundreds of
websites dedicated to the topic. An SEO company
with something to hide is afraid of what youll
find out. No referrals, past or present
clients. A good SEO company should have satisfied
customers who are willing to vouch for their
services.
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Providing a Content Creation Service
A huge part of modern-day SEO is content
marketing, and content marketing means creating
quality content for your site.  You can do this
yourself, of course, but a good SEO company is
going to handle it with their own in-house or
contracted writers.  If youre looking at an SEO
company and they want to leave the content to
you, shrug and move on. Seriously, creating
optimized content is the largest part of current
SEO.  It doesnt take a lot of time or effort to
optimize and automate titles and descriptions,
work on incoming links, clean up past mistakes
and streamline code.  That can almost entirely be
accomplished in a few short sessions.  The
ongoing part of SEO is all in the content
marketing.
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A History and Reputation
A History and Reputation
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This was partially covered above, under the
negative heading of the lack of referrals and
past clients.  When you consider hiring an SEO
firm, you need to take a look around and figure
out their reputation.  See, when an SEO company
fails, the damage takes a long time to clean up. 
When an SEO company fails and their clients
recover, those clients tend to go on the warpath
campaigning against the company.  If you run a
search for the company youre considering, and
you discover that they have an ongoing negative
reputation, you need to remove their name from
your list. When you create a list of companies to
investigate, one of the first thing you should do
is search for reviews.  Read more negative
reviews than positive.  Some negative reviews
will be tied to client mistakes or to pricing,
and those you can safely ignore.  Others will
warn you of black hat techniques and other
problems which should keep you away.
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Willingness to Communicate and Explain
An SEO company should be willing and able to
explain complex SEO concepts in a way that
satisfies your curiosity and reassures you of the
knowledge and experience of the company in
question.  They shouldnt disregard your
questions with any form of you dont need to
know or talking down to you. Communication
should begin early.  This is why many SEO
companies will offer free consultations.  This
will involve them scanning over your site
without requiring admin access at all, so dont
give out your information and creating a list
of SEO bullet points.  They should list both what
youre doing wrong and what youre doing
right. From there, communication should
continue.  Establish weekly or monthly progress
reports, touching base to make sure your goals
are aligned and that youre both satisfied with
the arrangement.
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Professional Ethics and a Focus on White Hat
Techniques
A lot can go wrong over the course of
implementing SEO.  At any point, your company may
turn to a black hat technique that will bring in
favorable results for a short time, before coming
back to bite you. To help forestall this
possibility, you should ask pointed questions of
your potential company.  Here are a few questions
you can try, though a good company may call you
out on the black hat techniques and explain their
alternatives before you can finish.
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A Concrete Timeline for Consultations and
Improvements
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SEO takes time.  Theres no two ways about it. 
You can get immediate results with PPC, but the
moment you stop paying for such a campaign, the
benefit disappears.  You can achieve fabulous
long-term results with organic SEO, but it takes
time for those results to build. A good SEO
company will have a timeline to achieve these
goals.  They will never say youll be ranked
number 1 in Google by six months from now. 
Thats a guarantee they cant hold up.  They may,
however, say something like we will have a
website redesign ready in three weeks. 
Deadlines and timelines are important so you can
hold them accountable if they miss them.
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The Right Price
SEO can be very expensive.  As a general rule, if
a company is too cheap to be true, you should
probably assume their services will be
low-quality at best.  On the other hand, more
expensive does not always mean better.  After a
certain point, an expensive SEO company is
probably catering to extremely high-end clients. 
Some will charge more than their services are
worth, just because people will pay when they
dont know any better.
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A Short Contract
A contract that lasts longer than 30 days is
asking for trouble.  A contract that lasts longer
than 60 days is a huge warning sign.  Make sure,
as well, that ownership of your site and your
content all remains under your company, and not
the SEO company.  The last thing you need is to
hire a company only to find that they take
ownership of your content.  Always read any
contract before you sign, of course.  Otherwise,
you never know what can come back to bite you.
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For More Information, Visit http//www.theexper
tseo.com/
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