Questions to Ask ANY SEO Firm

1. Will the SEO service provider share its optimization techniques with you?
   Ask them for an overview of how they achieve results. If the firm won’t give you an explanation, chances are the company is trying to hide unethical techniques.
2. Is the SEO firm putting “in-house created contact forms” in your website that are hosted on their servers?
   If so, why?  Think about it.  Those are “your” leads and you hate spam as much as your viewers do – you can never guarantee that your SEO firm feels the same way.  Even if you’re participating in any “Guaranteed Lead Capture” Program with any SEO firm, it’s always best to use the forms provided by your online website platform if you’re using one.  If you need more than one recipient so your SEO firm can track leads on their end, we highly recommend www.wufoo.com  (have been using their forms since 2005) or any other online company that specializes in custom form creation – this way you’re still in complete control of your leads and prospect information – and know that names in your database are not being sold to a third party.  If you choose “anything” other than your online website platform’s form choices, you “will” have the responsibility of exporting / importing any database contacts from your form host into your online website platform database or whatever lead management database you’re using.
3. Is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) part of the SEO firm’s strategy?
   Optimization results should not rely on PPC. Performance results for organic optimization and PPC should be evaluated separately.
4. Can the SEO firm guarantee your site will not be penalized and/or removed from the search engines and directory indexes?
   By using unethical techniques, many SEO firms may produce short term results, but in the long run will end up getting a client’s website penalized or even banned from being indexed by the major search engines.
5. Does the SEO firm optimize more than your homepage – if so, how many pages?
   A good SEO firm will maximize the number of active pages on your website. It’s more work for the SEO firm, but it will produce the greatest results for YOU.
6. Does the SEO firm provide an unrealistic guarantee?
   Any SEO company that guarantees a specific position (like number one or two) on Google or Yahoo are being dishonest. It is impossible to guarantee specific positions on search engines.
7. Are automated submission tools used or are all submissions processed manually?
   Automated tools can often lead to penalization and result in your site being excluded from the search engines.
8. If the plan includes link building, is the firm using a link farm?  Or is it contracting sites individually and concentrating on link reputation more than link popularity?
   Soon websites linked to and from link farms will be penalized and banned from the major search engines.
9. Does the firm’s technique involve showing one page to the visitor and a different page to the search engines?
   If the answer is yes, then you are probably dealing with a search engine optimization provider that uses “cloaking” techniques. Many search engines specifically warn against this practice in the organizations’ terms of service. Google is particularly harsh on sites that use cloaking, and is known to remove them entirely when it finds them.  This falls under “Black Hat SEO Practices”

Tagged as: Innuity, Point2 Agent, SEO, Ultra Agent Websites