If your business is looking to hire an SEO firm, but you’re not sure which online marketing company to go with, asking tough questions will help you make your decision. Here’s the list of 9 sharp-edged questions that each and every reputable SEO firm must have solid answers to. Why is this important? Because there are many fly-by-night SEO agencies with outrageous claims to boost your rankings and crank up your sales like you never thought possible. If you don’t want to end up wasting your money, you must pay attention to the following:

1. Customers and Reporting?

Ask to review case studies based on facts and figures, references, testimonials, and experience record. Digging into this type of documentation is an ideal way to begin your search for the right marketing company. If the SEO company can freely provide this type of measurable information and you can directly speak to their current/previous clients, then you’re off to a great start. After reviewing the SEM company’s experience and hearing testimonials from other customers, you’ll then want to look into the company’s success metrics, analytics, and reports. This is extremely important as you’ll want to get an idea about the potential return for each dollar you invest. Ask the company questions about the reports they provide their customers. What kind of reports are they? How often will you be getting them? What’s exactly do they measure? Talk with the potential SEO vendor to find out how exactly they track visitor conversion, search engine rankings, keyword targeting, and other crucial aspects of SEO.

2. SEO Guarantees?

Run, run, run from SEO guarantees as fast as you can! In the ever-changing climate of the search industry, guarantees are just not possible. While a company may offer a guarantee about the tasks they will accomplish toward achieving a goal, the most reputable SEO companies and experts never offer guarantees on results. Even Google’s own published guidelines clearly say: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google“.

3. What Do You Base Your Trust Upon?

As with many other consulting services, you can ask the SEO company the same type of questions you would if hiring a lawyer, tax consultant, real estate agent etc.:

• Any professional involvement/references/referrals?
• What measures do they take to ensure that their staff is trained and remains on the cutting edge of the SEO industry?
• What are your impressions and instincts about the individuals from meetings?
• What are their opinions of other knowledgeable experts in the field?
• What are the terms and conditions concerning advance payments/billing/charging/planned work?
• Do you have any concerns related to the company’s location or the number of employees?

4. Paid Submissions?

Some SEO folks offer paid search engine submissions for ridiculously low rates—sometimes as little as 50 bucks per month—don’t buy into that! There are 2 ways of submitting a website to search engines—a right way that can result in a favorable ranking and a wrong way that can get your site banned. No company doing submissions the right way could accomplish the task for as little as $50 per month. Some SEO companies claim to submit the pages of your site to dozens of search engines. With automated software, you could submit your site to search engines in just a few minutes yourself—but this is NOT the most effective way to become indexed in search engines! Search engines prefer to find YOU through a link on an indexed site rather than you telling them about your site by way of automated submission software. Additionally, over-submission of your site’s pages might result in a lifetime ban for your website because search engines might think you’re trying to spam them.

5. Link Building

Quality links from other reputable sites related to your business are of utmost importance to Google as well as other SE’s like Yahoo and MSN. There are numerous ways to get backlinks. They can be purchased or rented. Also, you can do reciprocal linking or find partners in your industry that will be happy to exchange links. Discuss link building with your potential SEO firm and find out what methods they employ to continuously build backlinks to your website. SEM firms that do not have an aggressive off-page optimization strategy won’t perform as well as other firms that deploy well-crafted tactics to get those valuable links to your site. Make sure that the company you choose holds their feet to the fire on that.

6. SEO Content Creation and SEO Copywriting?

Content is the meat of your website. Search engines need content to understand the context of your site. Words are the medium of the internet. Regardless of how amazing the products are that you sell, without content your site is virtually invisible to the search engines. SEO content is different from a newspaper copywriting. SEO content has two main objectives. It must perform well both with search engines (targeting specific keyword phrases) and human beings (persuasive online copywriting). If the company offers such service, ask for content samples. Ask about the people who’ll be writing your content. Plus, make sure that keyword research comes with their SEO copywriting service.

7. “Traffic” vs. “Qualified” Traffic?

Ranking, Traffic, Qualified Traffic, Conversion Rate. Those are all interrelated things. Make sure your SEO vendor talks about bringing in QUALIFIED TRAFFIC and increasing CONVERSION RATE. Tons of traffic is useless if visitors aren’t converting to shoppers and high rankings for terms that no one is searching for won’t do you much good. Lots of unqualified traffic arriving at your site is no achievement whatsoever on the part of the SEO company. Ask the SEO company you are considering what their tactics are for boosting your conversion rate after driving traffic to your site. How do they approach website usability, navigation, and architecture?

8. Do They Really Optimize Your Site?

Now this is extremely important. Ask the SEO company about how the optimization of your website is accomplished. Some SEO vendors simply develop their own websites and then optimize them to bring you the traffic. This is NOT what you want! You want a company that will optimize your own website. If the SEO company is simply optimizing their site and sending you the qualified traffic, then you have become dependent on that SEO firm. Should you decide to part ways in the future, the SEO firm could choose to direct all of that traffic to your biggest competitor and that would be a tragedy.

9. SEO Ethics?

Google and other major SE’s are ruthless about SEO scammers who’ll seek illicit ways to get customer sites to rank high. The serious SEO company will have a clearly stated anti-spam policy. Black-hat or even grey-hat wizards of SEO might put your website at risk of being banished from search engines listings indefinitely. Discuss the company’s guidelines for practicing ethical SEO. Ask questions if you don’t fully understand their points. For more information, read Google’s “Why are sites blocked from the Google index?”

Feel free to contact us for our answers to any of these questions!

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Amazon is running tests on the beta version of its PPC advertising program Clickriver Ads, an advertising service that allows businesses to place sponsored links within the Amazon site. Clickriver Ads was created by A9.com®, a search technologies company based in Palo Alto, California. A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

After reading several blog posts and forum discussions, I have found that people are generally happy to see a new player in the PPC marketplace. Some view the advent of Amazon PPC as a new opportunity. They’re hoping that their PPC traffic will convert at a higher rate than with Google or Yahoo PPC because people who log on to Amazon are more likely in the mindset to buy compared with search engines in general. Others are saying that’s its good to have a new player because greater competition means better service for advertisers. Says one person, “every competitor nipping at Google’s heels helps.” That is of course, if Amazon can pose any real threat to search giants like Google.

Though Amazon PPC is still in beta, people are reporting many problems with registration approval. The service is still limited to the U.S. customers only, so the rest of the world will have to wait as the US works out the bugs.

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How often do you come across e-commerce sites that have an ‘Articles’ section on their menus? Websites with sections like articles, resources, tips&hints, buyer’s guides, resource centers, etc that are meant to educate visitors are commonly referred to as ‘Resource Libraries.’

So, why do we need resource libraries full of free information on our sites, if our primary concern is to sell products and services?

Resource libraries provide a whole host of benefits to online stores and service providers. Aside from the fact that informational resources help your customers arrive at more informed purchasing decisions, a resource library is another method of effective SEO designed to drive more qualified traffic and gain important incoming links.

Optimized, multi-topic, multi-faceted articles will increase rankings for business-based keyword phrases. Plus, valuable and free web resources and information have a tendency to be linked to organically. Free, valuable information on the web is also a good reason for visitors to return. All of this is important for raising overall ranking. It will also create an image of your company in the eyes of your business prospects and non-prospects as one that truly cares about meeting customer needs.

To make your user’s online experience even better, you should monitor which information was most helpful for them. Have visitors rate your articles and provide some form of feedback.

While some people are still struggling to understand the underlying value of resource libraries, you can start working on yours by providing free information for your visitors. Some one once said: “The best things in life are free,” and when it comes to SEO free things pay off!

Some good examples of resource libraries:

http://www.djstore.co.uk/ (featuring Buyer’s Guide&Reviews)

http://www.burpee.com/ (featuring Resource Center)

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