You have probably heard again and again all about how SEO is invaluable for your company website to be successful. You will hear a lot on this subject from many SEO companies out there. All the benefits are explained extensively, but do you hear any SEO company talking to you about the fact that they could be actually hurting you by “helping you”? I’ll give you a very straightforward explanation:
An SEO company has many ways to get you that coveted privileged position on search engine results, some of these ways are good and some of them are VERY bad. Some of them can actually get you penalized by search engines such as Google, making you waste a lot of time and money to rectify the problem.
What’s the best way to avoid this? To know what your SEO company is doing, you have to be aware that just hiring someone to “get it done” might not be the best choice here. I know that understanding SEO is not everybody’s cup of tea so I’ll point you to some good questions you can ask the SEO Company taking care of your website.
How is your SEO Company going to get results?
What practices are going to be employed on your website to reach your company’s objectives? I know that you are hiring someone precisely because you don’t want to know about all of these things but believe me this is a conversation you want to have with any potential SEO company you are about hire, it might reveal very interesting things.
Your website is an online extension of your business, so if someone has their hands on your website, they have their hands on YOUR BUSINESS. Which parts of your website they have their hands on and why? Link building is being done? Great, is it natural link building or are paid links involved? Any SEO company should be able to explain this in terms you can understand, if they can’t then the next company on your list might be a better choice.
How will your SEO Company measure their results?
What is going to be considered success and how are we going to measure it? It could be e-mails or phone calls coming from the website? Increased traffic? Conversions? High rankings for targeted keywords? Would it be a combination of these (as it should)? Or will they just bring tons of people to your website to amaze you with traffic reports or will they be doing something more targeted so they bring you a ton of the RIGHT people? You will be able to get a sense of what you and your SEO Company are going to be working towards and it will help you keep your SEO Company accountable for the work being done on your website.
What is the timeframe for our project to see results?
This is a dreaded question for a lot of SEO companies and you should see some interesting reactions here. SEO doesn’t happen overnight, the time frame will depend on a lot of things; the type of website you have, the size of it, the type of competition that you have, the list goes on. Beware of SEO companies that promise results overnight and as it weird as it sounds; that give you results overnight. Yes, lighting fast results might not be as good news as you think. Some of the practices to get these seemingly amazing results are precisely the ones that could land you on the doghouse with Google.
SEO is something that takes careful planning and in most cases time. Spare some time and get involved with what’s going on with your website, we understand that you are not the one making all the SEO happen on your website but you should still be monitoring your search traffic, links, how well you come up on searches done for your targeted keywords, etc.
Ask your SEO company about Google analytics or any other kind of analytics they use and how can you have access to see what’s going on with your project. As we said before, this is not only a website for your SEO Company to work on, this is YOUR BUSINESS.
