From time to time I hear SEO agencies referred to in terms normally reserved for dodgy car salesmen and other rogue traders. ‘Charlatans’ is one of the more prosaic descriptions I’ve heard recently. Strong words indeed for marketing circles and an unfortunate by product of the ‘black art’ nature of SEO which enables some unscrupulous companies, attracted by the sizeable budgets available in SEO, to operate dubious practices behind the promise of spectacular results.
In the worst cases of SEO work, brands whose agencies have adopted more aggressive, ‘black hat’ approaches to boosting their clients’ rankings have ended up boosting them off line altogether once the search engine people caught up with them. Famously BMW and more recently Go Compare the high profile aggregator have been delisted as a reward for such SEO practice.
Guarding against overly ambitious SEO agencies wearing fur coats and promising the world is now a necessary part of a marketer’s armoury so how do you separate the good from the bad? As in the used car show room, it’s a time for hard questioning. Here’s a guide to the sort of questions you should be asking.
1) What are they promising to deliver and what does it cost? Do the two match-up?
2) What are they doing technically to achieve the result? If they can’t or won’t explain what it is then don’t hire them.
3) If they’re using link building tactics where are the links from? From valued sources, worthless directories, paid links?
4) What are they doing with website content to optimise it? Stuffing a website full of keywords is not a good practice and will be detected by search engines.
5) Google has changed its algorithm three times this year already, is the SEO agency aware of this?
Ultimately the big question you should be asking yourself is ‘do I understand this?’ If not, don’t work with them as ultimately it’s your responsibility if you fall foul of Google & Yahoo for ‘being evil’ in your SEO tactics.