Screen Your SEO Professional to Avoid Getting Taken

Part 3 of a 3 part series.

It’s all well and good to have an understanding of what good SEO is, and to know how people are scamming others in the SEO world, but if you have to hire someone, how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones?

In all fairness, more SEO bungling occurs from sheer ignorance or lack of experience than ever occurs from outright fraud. But if you end up with a bad job, you’ll feel the same either way. Knowing that site owners need firm guidelines to judge a professional ahead of time, we are suggesting the following screening points when hiring SEO professionals:

1. Look at the website of the professional in question. If it makes promises of fast results, page one placements, or recommends an automated system, they are a company who is not honest or knowledgeable.
2. Ask for references from clients. Check them out. This might seem like a no-brainer, but many people fail to do it. Look at the sites of the clients they refer you to, and make sure that you do not see red flag elements such as over-repetition, or keyword lists in the content.
3. If the professional quotes you a price, or makes any kind of promise before they have looked at your site, RUN! They are either so inexperienced they’ll hurt your site, or they are scamming.
4. A good professional should ask you questions about past site performance. They should check your current stats and standing and ask questions about your site structure. They should ask you questions about your target market, business goals, and details about your business so that they can target the optimization in a way that will actually attract your target market. If they fail to do this, then they do not understand the marketing aspects of SEO well enough to do an effective job. SEO is PERSONAL. If your professional is not personal, then they aren’t getting the point.
5. A good professional will work within your budget, and be willing to help you prioritize tasks for your business, so that you get the most important things done first.
6. A good professional should understand that startups and very small businesses have special needs for competing against larger businesses. If you talk to them, and do not hear some explanations of how you can gain good results even when competing against more powerful companies, walk away. They won’t be able to help you to achieve good results if they don’t understand that.
7. If you hire article marketing from an SEO professional, make sure you check out their writing ahead of time. If you are not impressed with it, and if it is not interesting enough to read, then don’t hire them. Good article marketing isn’t about keyword laden articles – it is about high quality, interesting, compelling writing that draws a reader in and informs them of something new. If you don’t feel that way about their writing, then they won’t produce anything better for your business, and anything less just doesn’t work.

This list of screening criteria should help you drastically improve your odds of getting someone who knows what they are doing.