How to Choose a Search Engine Optimization Provider
SEO providers are often guilty of over promising and under-delivering.
Make Sure You Find One that Does the Opposite
In an excellent post on a MediaPost blog, Jonathan Ashton offers 10 practical tips for maximizing your changes of getting what you need from your SEO provider.
My favorite is #8 on the need for collaborative benchmarking. It’s all about helping your provider help you:
Set collaborative benchmarks. Winning top placement for some specific phrase is not the real goal. Quality traffic is the goal. Visitors to the site need to convert into customers. To make your SEO partner both effective and accountable, share your site analytics and set meaningful benchmarks.
If you follow Jonathan’s advice, your potential providers will take you a lot more seriously–and you’ll almost certainly get much better results.
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Comments [2]
It seems to me that SEO has become the snake oil of the 21st Century. So many fast talkers and hype-sters over-promise what they can deliver and hide behind the technological green curtain to justify their fees. I regularly hear offers that “guarantee” to get a web site to the top of the “search engines”. Upon further investigation, the search engines they refer to are some obscure ones and the high SERPs are for obscure search terms. (Even that, they won’t “guarantee” if you push them.) In fact, as an optimizer myself, I find that SEO isn’t all that difficult. If you build a site with valuable content for the people you want to attract, and you write it to feature the search terms your desired audience uses, they will find you. Even then, when Google shakes the jar of beans, you may find your site slipping in their all-important SERPs. With apologies to Thomas A., perspiration is more important than inspiration.
Bill,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Unfortunately, there is way too much snake oil on the internet. You may want to check out our related post on Google and relevance, also on the front page today.
Newt