If you have a business, you might already have a web site. Doesn’t matter you are doing online business or offline business, we all need a web site that represent our business online. When you meet with your new clients, they will ask for your phone number, email and your web address. Your web site is one of the important keys of your business success. So you need to hire someone to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your web site. How do you know they are qualified?
The following 10 questions are important questions that most SEO expert will ask them self as well.
For more detail please read Hiring an SEO Consultant by Jon Rognerud on Entrepreneur.com.
Here are the summary of those 10 questions
- What ranking guarantees do you provide?
- Are you going to make changes to my website?
- What is your approach to linking?
- What reporting and overall communications will I receive?
- What does your pricing model include and what other services do you offer?
- Why is your own PageRank low?
- Who are some of your competitors?
- What are your qualifications?
- Can you provide references and successful rankings?
- How much will the traffic results cost and when can I expect to see them?
Personally, I will add few more questions while I am learning to be a good SEO expert for my own business.
- Are you using social bookmarking, social network and web site rating system as your SEO tools? There are many social bookmarking and social network such as digg.com, stumbleupon.com, facebook.com and myspace.com are used for link building. It might not be the ideal ways to build the backlinks, but does work well for a lot of small business.
- How quickly can you adjust your SEO strategies to the search engine market changes? Search Engine company as big as Google constantly change their search engine program and algorithm. Change SEO strategies become important. Without knowing the trend on the search engine market, you might just miss the big opportunities. For example, if AOL change their search engine partners from Google.com to Yahoo.com or Ask.com, can you expect how many potential visitors you will miss or gain? Knowing what region your visitor came from is important. Knowing where your potential visitors came from are important as well.
- Do you know any other web platform or resources can help you reduce your SEO investment? Do you know blog, image sharing and Wiki sites can also help you increase your backlinks with minimum investment? Knowing what other unique niche resource is important as well.
Personally, I try to optimize my business web site without invest a lot. Some SEO consultants charge a fortune for wrong reasons. At the end, they are the one getting benefits by serving you as SEO expert.
I think what is needed for small business is an SEO consultant who will not only get them started, but will also show them the ropes as they go along so that the business owner can continue to maintain the site on his/her own. For larger businesses this is a different story, but for small local businesses, things are not as competitive and I think the business owner should do their best to always make time for this.
Great post! A lot of people don’t know much about SEO, and so they don’t know what to ask. This is a very helpful post.
Twitter: TerenceChang
says:
Danielle:
That is right. Local business owner who have not had enough experience with Internet, will not know what SEO is all about. There is a good market out there for SEO experts to dig.
Good questions. Hopefully this helps small companies from getting burned by bad seos
Twitter: TerenceChang
says:
Single Grain:
Thank you for stopping by. Yeah. I asked myself the same questions and decide not to hire anyone before I know how far I can go by myself.
Another question you should ask your seo company uses any blackhat technques, you should always request benchmarks on a monthly basis like rank reports
Twitter: TerenceChang
says:
@Leaflet:
You are right. I think most SEO company are over estimate their SEO skills.
SEO’s are a special breed. I would have to say that 75% of Search Engine Optimizers are snake oil salesmen(present company excluded), there business model is based around a theory, a perpetually moving target and I really feel that there ARE NO GUARANTEES and if an SEO guarantees you anything on the SERP you need to hang up the phone or politely excuse yourself out of his office.
what do you men by saying wiki sites can increase backlinks ? how do you do that ?
Twitter: TerenceChang
says:
@Internet Marketing:
If you are doing marketing and don’t know what Wiki can do for you, you are missing some great chance to get high page ranking. Two ways to do so. One is to join wiki community and provide some quality content, which will give you credit back. Or you can create a unique niche wiki and accepting quality content. Either way, will give you good back links for long term.
I think that the most important factor to note is past results and references. A lot of SEO’s are good at talking and not so good at providing results to their clients.