How to check up on your SEO company

If you have been asking yourself any of the following questions about your SEO company then this article is for you:

• Is my SEO company giving me value for money?


• Is my SEO company doing any work?


• Is my SEO company ripping me off?


• Is my SEO company giving me value for money?


• Have I fallen for an SEO scam?

One of the problems with hiring an Internet marketing company is that many customers have almost no idea what they are buying or how to evaluate the services they get, or whether their SEO company is living up to its promises. While it is true that there are no absolute guarantees in this profession as to the ultimate results of your Internet marketing campaign, it is possible to get a fair idea of how hard your internet marketing services provider has been working for you and to get a pretty good idea of whether they are living up to their promises.

There are many great SEO companies and internet marketing agencies out there, but there are also a lot of cowboy SEO companies, lazy SEO operators and ones who use dirty and risky techniques to give you what you want, but potentially at a huge cost to you if they get found out. While there is a lot of information available on line about chosing the right SEO company and also what to do if your SEO company rips you off, there seems to be comparatively little about how to evaluate your SEO company while they are working for you - sure there is advice out there, such as to make sure they provide you with reports, communicate well, etc etc, but what about the actual work they are undertaking? If you have mistakenly hired a bad SEO company, then you need to be able to tell so that you do not go on paying them needlessly and indefinitely, for work they are not doing or are doing badly.

Here are some of the things you can check up on your SEO company has done for you.

Content and code changes

If your SEO company was supposed to make changes to your website in order to help it to perform better in the search engines then the place to check this is the WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Have a look at your website as it appeared shortly before they commenced work, and then over intervals of time when they have been working. Changes might not be immediately obvious so also look at the source code and look for changes to the title tag. meta keywords, meta description and heading tags h1,h2 etc as well.

Unfortunately you can only do this for up until about 6 months ago - but its better than nothing, and at least gives you the opportunity to compare before and after month by month.

You can also check how strong your website is onsite using a tool such as this: http://whois.domaintools.com/. If you can do this before your SEO company starts work and afterwards then you should be able to see if there is noticeable improvement.

Link building

Your SEO company probably promised, or was contracted, to do some link building for you. They may have promised to find you a certain number of inbound links every month, or they may be working on a more ad hoc basis. The place to check on the links they have obtained for you is LinkPopularity.com. Choose the Yahoo option since the results are more accurate.

You need to check how many links you have, but also look at the web pages that are linking to you. If anything looks suspicious about these web pages then dig deeper. Do all the websites linking to you look the same, for instance? If so you may have been the victim of an SEO company that uses link farms.

If the websites linking to you are part of a link farm then they have very little value indeed and, entail the added risk of associating your website with bad linking partners. What's worse you are paying for nothing.

You also need to check that the websites linking to you are cached in Google's index. Link farms have a tendency to get identified and penalised by Google, and if this happens you may find that all the webpages with links to your website have been removed from Google's index. You can use a tool such as SEO for FireFox to check that these websites are cached. if the number of cached web pages show up as zero then you know you have a problem.

If the websites linking to you are not in Google's index then the links have no value and you are paying for nothing.

Bear in mind that each link your SEO company acquires for you will not necessarily show up immediately or even the next day. Some will take several weeks, others maybe even months.

Unique visitors

The ultimate test of how well your SEO company has done for you is how many more unique visitors they are bringing to your website each month. If your SEO company is not providing you with stats for this then you need to check your Google Analytics account, if you have one, or the web stats provided by your webhost. Have a look at how many unique visitors you were getting before your SEO company started work and then have a look at how many you have been getting in the months since then. Bear in mind that it can sometimes take a couple of months to start seeing improvements here.

Search engine placement

If your SEO company is not providing you with information about where you appear in the search engines for your major key phrases then you need to find this out. You can do this manually, or Google Webmaster Tools will be able to give you some idea of the main terms that you are ranking for. Ideally you need to check this before a campaign starts, and at regular intervals (say every two weeks) while a campaign is underway. This way you can tell whether your search engine positions have actually improved since you took onboard your SEO company.

How to react.

Now this is the important bit - if you have found anything during your investigation that makes you uncomfortable then do not immediately jump to conclusions. If you are reading this you are probably a lay person and are going to need some professional independant advice before you can say anything for certain. The best place to look for this is on large SEO forums such as the Search Engine Journal or WebProNews which you will need to join. The helpful people on there will soon tell you whether or not your suspicions are justified, and give you a good idea of whether you ought to leave your SEO company.

If you are still in any doubt then now is the time to challenge your SEO company about the work they have been doing and see what response you get.