Project Management Resources & Links

How to Choose an SEO Consultant

You can have the best web site amongst your competition, but without search engine optimization, it will not succeed. So, how to choose a company to optimize your site for the search engines?

Ideally, this is a choice you made before your site was designed – and a designer with strong SEO skills was selected. If, instead, your site was constructed without both the target audience and the search engines clearly in mind, you may find your hands tied by mistakes made in the design – the use of Flash, e-commerce sites without enough simple HTML to be indexed, or a site without enough text or pages to please content-hungry indexes.

If that’s the case, you will need an Search Engine Marketing Consultant that is part web designer and can redesign your site or tell your webmaster (clearly) what changes need to be made.

When selecting the SEO consultant, look first for results. The firm or consultant should be able to demonstrate success with their present clients. Don’t rely solely on the SEO firm’s case studies – do some research on your own.

While it may be logical to learn who has placed your competition in the top ten and try to hire them, you will often find that they cannot or will not work for an existing clients competitor – if that’s the case, look in a similar market. Fro example, if your target market is ‘Key West fishing’, choose another similarly competitive market – say, ‘Oahu Fishing’ or ‘Alaska fishing,’ and approach the SEO consultants who have been successful in that market.

What to ask:

Does the company rely on on-site optimization of keywords, meta tags and text alone? You want a company that understands the need for establishing incoming links – this is a critical factor in placement.
Do they promise top ten results? No company can guarantee #1 placement, but they should be able to demonstrate success for many clients in top 1-20 results.
What keywords will they use? You want to rank well for the most searched terms in your market – not for more obscure phrases that are rarely searched.
Ask them to clearly explain what they will do. Be wary of an SEO firm that plans to create doorway pages, mirror sites, or uses cloaking techniques – these are “black hat” techniques and can get your website banned.
How do you feel about the company? Trust your instincts and make sure you feel a strong professional rapport with the person you are entrusting your site – and your business.

You may find it helpful to read Google’s own recommendations on SEO companies.
Written by SEO Consultant M.-J. Taylor, principal for Cyber Key, a web development firm specializing in search engine marketing.