When we choose SEO professionals, it is important to choose those who are worth the money. It means, we should gain excellent results without paying too much. Just like auto mechanics, real estate agents and house painters, some are clearly worth the money and others are best avoided. Unfortunately, SEO is not a regulated and official field of profession. There’s no real education degree for SEO and these professional are often gathered from marketers or graduates on Internet-related majors. It means, it could be harder to define whether we are getting a good SEO consultant.
Even so, we should be able to narrow down our choices by asking the following questions:
- How do you choose the right keywords: SEO is based on multiple things, such as visibility and keyword research. We should be able to find signs of problems when the SEO consultant seems to struggle when answering this question. The worst answer is when they say that they allow clients to handle that. In this case, we should keep shopping. A good SEO consultant will allocate enough time to get to know our products, services and brands. They should be able to determine the right keywords for their designs.
- What type of Black Hat methods do you use: The obvious answer for this question is: “No, we don’t use black hat methods and I advise you not to use them”. This could be a sign that the SEO consultant is committed in choosing the proper white hat methods for our website. Before shopping for SEO consultants, we should know about typical black hat methods, such as hidden text, domain masking, cloaking and others. It is a bad idea trying to trick search engine into believing that our website is more relevant, qualified or informative than it really is. Our aim is to avoid SEO consultants who silently use black hat techniques or even suggest us to use them. By saying that we are interested on these methods, we could actually discover the real truths about some SEO consultants. Websites that’s backed up by black or even grey hat SEO methods could eventually be purged from search rankings. It is certainly a stupid thing to pay someone to ruin our online presence.
- What’s the best SEO technique for my website: Any SEO company has secrets that they want to keep, even if they use only white hat methods. Their methods may be legal, but they still don’t want others to know about them. Even so, we should have a real insight by asking this question. A qualified SEO consultant will say more than just about building inbound links for our website. If the consultant divulges something interesting, then we may find the right person.
These simple questions could significantly narrow down our choices and the next step is to make sure that we will work with great individuals. This could be the start of a long, healthy professional relationship between our company and the SEO consultant.
