What’s the biggest problem with SEO? You have no idea what’s going on. It’s true and you know it, half the people who try SEO can’t remember what the acronym stands for. So smart managers do the best thing they can possibly do when confronted with the unfamiliar – they get an expert. But how do you do that exactly?
Lawyers have the bar, and doctors have the board; SEO doesn’t have an industry equivalent of that; actually there’s nothing clients can use to tell the difference between the experts and the novices. This presents a bit of a problem because knowing nothing about a topic – other than the need for a marketing blog – leaves people vulnerable to phonies. Fortunately, there are signs lawyers can look out for during the experience to see whether they’re the real deal.
The first red flag to watch out for are promises; SEO is a turbulent industry where things can change literally overnight. An SEO company or expert that has the gall to make promises of results in the coming three or five months is in no position to establish such lofty goals. But there should be at least some results coming from their efforts.
It’s almost impossible to see any drastic changes to the ranking in the first few months, but the SEO provider should be reporting some kind of progress. These include things like link cleanup that people never see but make a significant impact on where search engines put the website after a search.
A good SEO company is one that has a solid general plan. No two clients are the same, as is true in any field, but there needs to be an outline for clients to work with in order to understand what’s supposed to happen. If an SEO company doesn’t give any more information after saying they need time to study the website, ask for it and see if what they come up with is credible.