Consider this: if the person who is your primary contact is working on 10 clients, chances are that you are only getting a few hours per week of their time. Is that really all your site needs? This may work if your are looking for SEO for a small law firm, or a small local business, but for most other sites, it’s just not going to be sufficient.
Other Warning Signs to Look For
Hopefully, you will not encounter any of these warning signs on the list below, but if you do, you should also back away from working with these types of SEO consultants:
- They propose to create tons of pages using some form of automation. At the beginning of launching a new e-commerce site, or local business directory, something like this could make sense, but other than that, automatically created pages are almost always a bad thing!
- Their proposal focuses on creating tons of inbound links to your site. The only good way to do that these days is through very successful PR/content marketing, or a successful viral marketing effort, but in any other context the notion of hundreds or thousands of links coming into your site is likely a bad idea.
- They send you a proposal that talks about “submissions†or “listing your siteâ€. This is pure spam. Just delete any such proposal on the spot.
- Metadata is a focal point of their pitch. Meta keywords are of no value whatsoever, and meta descriptions are not a ranking factor either. The descriptions can help click through rates you get from listing in the SERPs, so they are useful, but it is only one small part of a much larger SEO picture.
- The pricing seems too good to believe. Quality SEO costs real dollars. Of course, higher pricing does not guarantee better work, but if someone is offering to do SEO for you for $500 per month, how much of your attention do you think you will get? Two to four hours per month? Is that enough?
- The proposal talks about price per link. Inbound links should be about quality, not quantity. The best links result from relationships and the value of the content you offer, well executed marketing campaigns, or the web site experience you deliver. This is not “price per link†type of work.
- They say they have inside info on the algo. They don’t. It’s that simple. They may have learned aspects of Google’s algorithm based on hundreds or thousands of hours of experience working on web sites for clients, but one thing you can be sure of: they did not get any special information from Google on how things work.
Summary
Unfortunately, it can be quite hard to determine if you are working with a quality SEO firm or a bad one. Before you sign with an SEO firm, get references, or case studies, or talk to people you know and see who they recommend. If you are already engaged with them, hopefully this article will help you identify if it’s time to move on.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericenge/2014/09/11/12-warning-signs-of-a-bad-seo-firm/