The SEO industry as a whole has a pretty bad rep. For that you can thank the snake oil salesmen, SEO companies that scam and rip people off, and all the mis-information out there. One really needs to be careful when they venture out to hire a SEO firm. It’s important that you educate yourself enough to know the difference between good and bad SEO practices.
There are a lot of good SEO companies out there, but for every one that’s good there’s 3 that are bad. Not only do you have to worry about the scam artists, but you also have to worry about hiring inexperienced SEOs. They’re just as dangerous. I’ve compiled a list of 10 things that you should avoid when hiring a SEO firm.
1. Search Engine Submissions - If you’re looking at hiring a company that offers search engine submission services then look somewhere else. Submission services are pointless. Search engines will discover your site by crawling links from other sites that point to yours. You don’t need to submit, it’s a waste of time. This a service you will most likely find offered from inexperienced SEOs.
2. Meta Tags - Meta tags are old news and do nothing to improve your rankings. It doesn’t hurt to add them on your site but they won’t do anything to improve your rankings. This is a trap that’s easy to fall for so be careful. Avoid companies that use this as a selling point.
3. Reciprocal Links - A good SEO firm will not try to sell you reciprocal link services. They will build one way links to your site through methods such as; link bait, articles, press releases, and online public relations. Link quality is more important than link quantity, so look for companies that focus on building good links for you.
4. Resubmissions - Resubmission services are worse than submission services themselves. Some companies sell you a service that they will resubmit your site to the search engines everytime new content is added, or every month. This is just plain silly. There is no reason at all the you should ever need to resubmit to a search engine. This is another sign of inexperience.
5. Promise/Guarantee Results - Your SEO company has no control over Google or any other search engine for that matter. So how can they promise or guarantee results when they have no control over them. The best a company can do is optimize you site to the top of their abilities using proven, ethical techniques.
6. Don’t Show Up For Own Name - You can learn a lot about an SEO company by searching for their company name. You’d be suprised at some of the big name SEO firms that have been banned from the search engines themselves. Often times they don’t even rank for their own company name. This is a good indication they use unethical practices and if you go with them you risk ending up banned as well. Always run a few searches on any company you’re considering hiring, you’d be suprised what you can find out.
7. Over Optimization - If the SEO company has over optimized their own site, then chances are they will do the same with yours. What exactly does over optimization mean? One good indicator is the copy of the site, if it seems like it’s been written for search engines and not humans I would consider that over optimization. You know, the ones that use keywords so much that it doesn’t make grammatical sense.
8. Hidden Keywords - Yes, there really are companies that claim to be ethical optimizers that use spam techniques like hidden keywords. I even came across an SEO company that sells this as one of thier services and claims hiding keywords in the background of your site has an 18% chance of increasing your rankings. It also has a 100% chance of getting you blacklisted from major search engines if they find out, and sooner or later they will. Avoid this and all other tricks.
9. Mirror Websites - Everytime an SEO firm cold calls me to pitch their services I always listen. At first I pretend like I know nothing about the subject to see what they’ll end up telling me, sometimes you can even pick up a few good ideas. Chances are not, because most SEO companies worth their weight don’t have to cold call to get new clients. Anyways, I received a call in the past from a company that was basically selling mirrored sites. They would build a site similar to the clients and optimize the hell out of it, then have links point to the real site. You’d be suprised at some of the big brands this particular company had worked for.
10. Blackmail - The most recent scam from a SEO company has been making it’s way around the industry lately. A company called Paramount Webmasters has been cold calling well ranking sites and threatening to report them to Google and have them banned if they don’t hire their services. This should be a no-brainer. If a company calls you and tries to blackmail you like this I’d suggest laughing at them, hanging up the phone, and reporting them to Google.
In closing it’s important to do your homework before hiring an SEO company, or any service company for that matter. Run a search on the company, ask for a couple referrals, and make sure you go with someone who knows what they’re doing. Most important of all, educate yourself.
Is there anything you think that belongs on this list?
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Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of