29.SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Making the decision to invest in your website by hiring an SEO firm can be tricky; and once you have decided on doing just that, how do you know how to decide among SEO companies? Do you choose a large firm with lots of different employees to contribute to your project? Or do you go with an individual SEO consultant without all of the overhead of the large company for a more personal, one on one experience? Are SEO consultants like lawyers: the more you pay per hour, the more they do for you? Or do you go for the cheapest package available to you? It goes without saying that you should fix any broken links reported to you by your visitors. Which brings me to the next point: visitor feedback is golden. You should encourage it. One way to do this is with a site link, available from every page of your site, which says something like "Feedback" or "Contact us." It can lead to a form with a text box for the visitor to fill in. However you decide to do it, it's important to have an obvious way for your site visitors to communicate with you. When a mechanic tunes a car, he makes sure it is functioning to factory specs, and measures it against certain standards. You can do the same thing with your web site. For instance, does the HTML code on your site validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards? You can run it through the W3C's own validator to find out. Presumably your site is not static; in that case, you'll have to validate your site's HTML regularly. You should also find out whether your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Choosing an SEO firm is a very difficult experience for some, especially since there is absolutely no industry standard in what makes for a good cocktail of great SEO systems or techniques, nor are there any guarantees in this business, no matter what any of them might lead you to believe. With good reason, outsourcing SEO can be an emotional decision for a webmaster, especially if the site is one’s baby, so to speak, that has been hand-fed and raised from a small seed of an idea. Relinquishing the “power” of success or failure to a stranger at a sometimes staggering cost can bring a myriad of feelings, some of which may include panic, optimism, fear, anxiety, or even relief. How about the links on your web site? I'm talking not just about the links that lead to internal pages of your web site, but the ones that go off-site. If you have any broken links, you can bet a site visitor will click them and be annoyed that they don't go anywhere. You don't want annoyed visitors. Therefore, it's a good idea to set up a regular schedule for checking for and fixing broken links. There are many reasons someone would want to outsource to an SEO professional for help with their website. They may not have the type of knowledge, tools, or know where to even start. For most, simply the amount of time that SEO takes, including all the research and trend-watching, is something a website owner may not have. For whatever reason a website owner decides to hire an SEO firm to help their website reach top positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages), how does once know where to begin? Tuning Up Your Web Site - Tuning Up Are you still hearing an unpleasant "knocking" coming from your web site? Then you tune-up isn't finished. There are a few more parts you need to look at. For example, are you getting errors in your site statistics? Then you need to track them down and fix them. SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - What You Need First and foremost, you’ll need to know ahead of time what your SEO needs are. Ask for a site analysis so that you know just where your site strengths and weaknesses are. This way, you won’t feel like you don’t know where the SEO firm or consultant is headed with your project, and you’ll be better able to gauge what you need from a package, or whether you’ll need to heavily customize your SEO project. It isn’t necessary for you to understand all of the aspects of what goes into your SEO project, as long as you understand what the end results should be. When a site is easy to understand and navigate, visitors will feel welcome. They'll want to stay for a while. They'll also want to come back. This is why you should track how many repeat visitors you get, and how many visitors stay for more than 60 seconds on your web site. If more than 50 percent of your visitors are staying that long, and a significant percentage are repeat visitors, you're on the right track. Be very wary of any company that offers you guarantees, especially guarantees that state they’ll get you into the top ten results or your money back, or a certain percentage of the keywords you choose will end up number one or two in Google. This is great if you have an unusual type of site, or niche content. But there is a good chance that if you’ve thought of it, someone else has too. There is nothing wrong with guarantees like this, however: “We guarantee a x percentage increase in traffic by x date.” That is a far more reasonable guarantee to offer. Unfortunately, that kind of specific guarantee usually can’t be offered until the SEO firm has a good handle on what your site is doing in the SERPs and where its flaws might be. Find out what a firm’s code of ethics or standards are. Also find out what type of contract you’ll need to get started. If a company doesn’t offer a contract, then you need to get one of your own. It seems these days that contracts lately are only as good as the company behind them, but it does help to have a plan of action on paper to which you can legally hold the company. Make sure it covers any extra fees, what happens if you’re not satisfied with the work, what your responsibilities are as a client, and so on. There are a few SEO agreement templates on the Internet. In this case, it helps to remember that sometimes simplest is best. When considering user navigation, visitors benefit greatly from a visible, text-based site map. Ideally, they should be able to get to it from anywhere on your site in just one click. SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - The SEO Firm or Individual Consultant? There are advantages and disadvantages between choosing a large firm or a small company or individual SEO consultant. There may be different priorities you have regarding your website, such as customer service, longevity of the company, experience, full range of services, price, and even ultimate results. Here I’ll outline some of the pros and cons of both, and depending upon your priorities, it may help you decide which type of service to choose. Keep in mind that these are generalities that I put together based upon the collective experience of clients, webmasters, and other SEOs. They certainly don’t take into account every type of SEO firm out there, and sometimes you get very lucky and find one that doesn’t fit the mold at all while still meeting every one of your needs. Tracking what your visitors do after they arrive at your site can give you valuable information about whether your site design really works as intended. You may think your site navigation is "intuitive," but the paths your visitors take once they're on your site may prove otherwise. While you should never "force" your visitors to follow one particular path, web sites should be designed with some idea of the way visitors will navigate through the web site. If your visitors are veering from the paths you've planned, you need to figure out why. There might be a few advantages to considering a large firm rather than going with a smaller company. For example, they will probably have a well-rounded group of people with different areas of expertise. Search engine optimization is not just about marketing, but it is also about search engine friendly design, page structure, coding and programming. If you go with a larger firm, the better your chances are of finding people who can help you in any area of SEO, no matter what your specific issues may be. They will employ not only marketers and optimization consultants, but programmers and website designers for consultation. In general, you should be tracking visitor statistics on a regular basis. Measure visitor sign-ups and conversions - not just once, but regularly, so you can see how your site performs over time. You can use this information to improve your site; for example, you can make changes to the content on your landing pages and track how that affects the length of visits and how many of your visitors convert. You might get lucky with a small SEO firm that is well rounded in this area, but it’s difficult to find an individual consultant that will have the technical experience you might need. In my case, not only do I have the marketing experience and education, but I do have a solid coding background, even though I am not a programmer; and many times I will have to get a programmer to help with the really hard stuff. But if you find an SEO consultant you like, it would be extremely helpful to you to find one with website design experience, at least. Many times, however, the SEO consultant may contract outside services for your programming needs, and that will be fine for you. All you need to do is ask them, and if you’re okay with your SEO contracting another service, then make sure you mention it. Tuning Up Your Web Site - Tracking Traffic The number of search engine referrals you get is only one aspect of the traffic that you need to be tracking. Which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Knowledge is power, and you can use this information to increase your traffic further. For example, if you're getting a lot of visitors from certain blogs or social sites, maybe it's time to browse those sites and see why. Larger SEO firms tend to have set packages for SEO, and while usually reasonable in price, any customization of your SEO project may cost you much more than you intended. This is because custom work veers from what the SEO does day in and day out, and takes more of the SEOs' time. Smaller SEO firms, in general, have better customization options overall, since they tend to look at a client as an individual, not just an account. And while we're on the topic of being seen, how does your web site do among those who physically can't see it? The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers standards, guidelines, and support for those who wish to make their web sites accessible to blind and visually-impaired visitors. Don't immediately assume that blind people won't be interested in what you have to offer; they have many of the same interests as sighted people, and most have sighted friends for whom they purchase gifts. Don’t be put off, however, by companies that prefer to handle contacts via email or trouble tickets. This is a good practice for even a smaller firm, because it creates a written record of activity, and not just verbal communication. Let the company know exactly how you prefer your communication, and if phone consultations are extra, just keep in mind that it is far more time-consuming to maintain a telephone relationship with your consultant than it is for email. This is true of just about any company. Even companies like eBay don’t offer anything but online support or email. This will obviously be more of a concern with a larger firm than a small company or individual SEO. You should know which search terms are most popular with your target audience today, and optimize your site accordingly. Make sure you use and integrate these terms into the most logical places: page titles, meta tags, and visible page text. You may say you did this once already, but if you look at the site with fresh eyes, you may find that you can now do a better job than you did a few months ago. Another disadvantage of a larger SEO firm will be their company expenses, which may ultimately affect your price. It costs a company more to maintain a large batch of employees, equipment, and of course the building costs will be higher. We refer to this in business as "overhead." If a large SEO firm has a lower price, then this could mean they have to take on far more accounts than they should probably handle. This could adversely affect your customer service. We’ll look at price differences a little later in the article.
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