SEO has become one of the fastest growing techniques in recent times. All businesses, big and small, have realized the need to ensure higher rankings for their website to ensure growing business for themselves. With the growth in need for SEO, there has been a huge growth in the number of companies that are ready to do SEO for you. What started as a highly specialized field has now become similar to a cottage business with a lot of players in this. So, in such a situation, as a website owner need to build traffic to your website, how do you a SEO company? There are some things that you need to look out for when you go searching for such a company.
If any company promises you that they would make your website appear on the first page of search listings for your niche, then it is clear that they do not know anything about SEO and you need to keep a safe distance from them. SEO, as any real expert would tell you, is a long term process. It takes at least a few weeks for the results to start showing up. The time taken to achieve results is long and so is the effect of SEO which is lasting. SEO optimizes the site from the foundation and ideally begins right at the beginning of the life cycle of a website. So, results within a short term are quite impossible.
Next, discuss with the company on how they plan to do SEO. There are many companies that do what is known as black hat SEO. It is a kind of SEO where techniques that are not liked by search engines are employed to improve traffic. They mask content from the search engines (cloaking), change color of text and employ other methods which are not allowed by search engines. Though this may yield short term results, there is always the danger that this might be found out by the search engines and in those cases, the website would be blacklisted and this literally means the end of your business. So, stay away from such companies as well.
The first step in SEO is finding out keywords and their variations that describe your business in the most appropriate manner. This is an extremely important step and needs to be done with care in consultation with you. If any company tells you that this isn’t their first step, then again, it means that they do not know how SEO needs to be done. Likewise, SEO is not only about content building but it’s an ongoing process of build links, back links, forum postings, blog postings, building fresh content etc. Verify whether all these are listed as steps by the company when you discuss the process with them.
Finally, as with any business deal, do not work with a company that requests the entire cost upfront. It is highly possible that such a company is trying to scam you. So, the best way to choose a SEO company is to discuss thoroughly with them about your needs and asking them to explain how they are going to go about it. Any company competent in doing SEO should list the above processes for you. Of course, if you can get references or reviews from other customers’ offline or online, that would be an added bonus as well.
