Moe Tamani's Internet Marketing and SEO Blog, Articles and Search Engine Optimization Tips » outsourcing seo

6 Ways to Screen SEO Professionals

Seomul Evans — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:13:43 +0000

6 Ways to Screen SEO Professionals

internet marketing Articles from Moe Tamani, the SEO Services Consultant.

If you do business on the internet, you know how important SEO is to the success of your company. Comprehensive SEO can increase your search engine rankings and thus increase the traffic to your website. While some business owners enjoy taking on the challenge of SEO themselves, others choose to hire SEO professionals to do it on their behalf. If you’re part of the latter group, consider these 6 ways to screen SEO professionals before hiring one.

Who Called Whom? If an SEO professional calls you first, be wary. Unless they are just starting out in the business, quality SEO professionals should be too busy working for their clients to be making cold calls. The greatest irony in receiving a cold call from an SEO professional is that SEO professionals should be experts at marketing. And if they can’t find their own clients without cold-calling, how do you expect them to find clients for your business?
Check Out Their Search Rankings. Anytime you’re researching SEO professionals, make sure to look carefully at their search engine rankings. Some SEO professionals invest heavily in paid links while spending a minimal amount of time on optimizing for a few keywords. Paid links are expensive, which means that an SEO professional relying heavily on them will necessarily have to bill you more for his work. He’s really hoping that you’ll focus on the top search engine rankings without noticing how many links he’s paid for. Beware of the professional who only shows you his company’s site, and do some of your own research to discover how many keywords his company ranks for. If it’s only a few keywords, find someone else.
Who’s Working For You? A lot of US-based SEO companies hire out their work overseas where labor is significantly cheaper. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it ultimately means that you might have a hard time monitoring the work that they’re doing for you. Another drawback is that overseas SEO work utilizes techniques that can get your site banned from Google.
Meet Your Professional Face-to-Face. It is sometimes the case that an SEO professional will use lots of technical jargon that may confuse you more than help you. But there’s no reason you shouldn’t expect an SEO professional to be able to talk about exactly what he does and how he does it in terms that a layperson can understand. He should welcome your questions and be willing to take the time to answer them. If the SEO professional isn’t patient with you and your questions, move on.
Be Suspicious. Any SEO professional who guarantees you a #1 Google ranking should be shown the door immediately. Only Google decides who receives a #1 ranking, and anyone who says that they can obtain it for you is lying. Your professional can only control a few of the factors that influence Google rank. Instead of finding a professional who wants to guarantee something, find one with years of experience and plenty of expertise who will give his best effort to improving your search engine rankings.
Leave the Black Hat Alone. Black Hat SEO describes any SEO techniques that are looked upon unfavorably by search engines. They typically try to force search engines to give high rankings to websites that typically wouldn’t get high rankings. While some black hat techniques may work in the short term, they almost never work in the long term, and can even get your site banned from Google.

There is not doubt that SEO should be an integral part of your overall internet marketing technique. If you choose to hire a professional to help you with this, make sure you’re hiring someone you can trust who will get results for you. Research them thoroughly before making a hire, and make sure you talk to the actual person or people who will be doing the work for you. Hiring the right person can be the difference between success and failure, so get it right the first time!

The Soft Costs of In-House SEO

MoeTamani — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:46:44 +0000

The Soft Costs of In-House SEO

internet marketing Articles from Moe Tamani, the SEO Services Consultant.

There is a misconception in the business world that SEO is equivalent to “free traffic,” as though SEO involves nothing more than waving a magic wand and watching the traffic come pouring in to your business website. The reality is that SEO is quite costly. Whether you outsource your SEO to an internet marketing agency or choose to train your own professionals in-house, you’ll find that SEO is a significant investment. But the reality is that you simply can’t afford not to do SEO, no matter how much it hurts to see that money come out of your budget.

You may feel like you’re saving a bundle if you choose to take care of your SEO in house. But if that’s your choice then you’ll have to hire experienced professionals or pay to train staff that you already have. You’ll need to allocate some funds to an SEO consultant to help to prioritize your SEO opportunities and help your in-house employees hone their skills. You’ll have to invest in software and off-site training, as well as ample opportunities for networking.

The soft costs are more difficult to measure, but they will definitely affect the bottom line:

1. Missed opportunities. If you’re not able to completely optimize everything, then you’re losing sales. You may never know just how many sales you’re costing yourself, but a recent study revealed that 66% of all of the recommendations made to companies by SEO experts weren’t implemented one year later.

2. Time costs. Large companies who choose to allocate internal resources to SEO find that it takes a very long time to get their SEO plans off the ground. And the longer it takes to implement SEO, the more traffic you’re allowing to just pass you by. One SEO expert told of an outdoor equipment retailer who invested over 1000 man-hours of his IT Department’s time to URL rewrites. There was no way they could have known in the beginning that it would take so long.

3. Priorities. If you ask your IT team to work on SEO instead of the tasks they had been doing, you shift their priorities. It’s highly likely that one of the tasks they had been working on will slip through the cracks, and there’s no way to determine how that might affect your business in the long run. SEO is crucial, but there might be other crucial aspects of your business that get overlooked when you switch your employees’ focus.

It’s hard to determine just how much lost revenue results from SEO that’s done poorly or inadequately. In fact, you may never know what you’re missing. This is exactly why so many companies turn to paid search strategies rather than organic. Paid search makes them feel like their doing something, even if they’re not even close to maximizing their website’s potential the way they could by hiring an SEO firm. Paid search is also predictable. But if you stop paying for paid search then you stop getting traffic. The same is true for your SEO investment, but it will take a lot longer to see the drop-off in traffic if you’ve been using natural search.

Once you’ve invested in SEO and finally achieved top rankings, the new challenge becomes maintaining those top rankings. Your competitors are doing everything they can to outrank you, which means that you now have to do everything you can to stay in your spot. So even if the initial SEO work is complete, you have to keep building links and staying abreast of search engine algorithms since they change so frequently.

You may decide that in-house SEO is the way to go, but consider the hidden costs of do-it-yourself. While it may seem cheaper in the short term, consider the long-term costs of taking on the tasks yourself. Is it worth it?