Agreed. SEO, like insurance, is a business with plenty of bad eggs, and I'm afraid their sales techniques aren't the only things that skirt the edge of good ethics.
Here are some questions to help you sort out good SEO firms from charlatans or shady characters!
I actually am an SEO specialist in North Texas. Up to now, our firm only has one dentist, but these questions are helpful for researching SEO in almost any niche. And here's the good and bad news: SEO can make and break your practice.
The best way to weed out wheat from chaff is to become educated yourself. Here are some questions that I think will sniff up a rat right away.
1. What is your strategy to rank our practice? Good SEO firms will have a strategy and a process they've used enough times to tell you about it. It will, or
should, begin with a total site audit looking for anywhere there can be quick wins.
Next you will want to hear about their linkbuilding strategy. If you hear the words "private blog network" or anything like that, please do be careful. SEOs that build PBN's run against the Terms and Conditions for Google, Bing, and most other search engines. If a PBN links to your page and Google discovers it, they will slap you back to page 24 for six months, and you can say goodbye to ranking until you've done a tone of work to get rid of the links. That's money down the drain.
Third, they better have a very clear idea what keywords are going to be best to target and why. If you get educated in this stuff, it won't be long before you can know when you're getting snowed.
2. Do you follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Best Practices? This is crucial to long-term growth and future-proofing your SEO work. If they're flouting the rules, they may get you rank quickly. But Google is out to get people like that, and you will go down with them. It isn't worth it. As the infographic below shows, every Google Algorithm update is getting closer and closer to moving rule violators (black hat SEO's), out of the field. And when they get you -- it hurts.
3. Can you GUARANTEE that we will rank #1 for a major search term? If someone just wants to make a sale, they will say anything. But if you hear this, RUN!
Why? Several reasons:
a) There is no SEO who knows Google's algorithm. There are a lot of tools and a lot of smart people who know what Google wants. But Google's algorithm is known to almost no one!
b) Google's Algorithm changes all the time. They roll out several updates per month. Incidentally, you'll want to hear from them that they know the difference between, say, the Penguin update and the Panda update. For SEO pros, this is as much everyday information as composite fillings are part of every day dental practice. If they can't give you those differences right off the top of their head, they're not for real.
4. How will they report? You want to know, I'd guess, what their email campaigns have been, what new links they have landed, what content changes they have made to your website, and what the successes and failures have been. BTW, any SEO company who speaks to you as if everything works or will work without fail is selling you a bill of goods.
5. MOST IMPORTANT: Can you share reviews or testimonials on past clients? You want to know who the clients were, what they did to get them ranked, and what the client's ROI was. What was the increase in traffic? In conversions?
Anyway, I hope these questions help you ferret out BS SEO. The good stuff can grow your business by 10% a month. The bad stuff could leave you at best with a lost investment, at worst with a penalty that may take months to make right.
