Things to Consider When Choosing an SEO Consultant

If you are a business owner, it can be a hard task to figure out the best SEO consultant or company for your online business. There are so many choices, and it seems like everyone is doing SEO these days. The question is, who do you hire and which companies can you trust with your success? We will give you a few tips or things to look out for when choosing an SEO service.

Ethical tactics – There are a lot of different strategies for SEO. Some include on-page optimization, but 80% of the SEO campaign should be done off-page, meaning links pointing back to your site from another site. 

Off-page SEO

There are many ways to do this and to make sure that you are doing SEO off-page the right way, you can consider hiring a reliable houston seo consultant. You can build web 2.0 properties with decent page rank on sites like Weebly, Hubpages, Squidoo, etc. Also, writing articles and submitting them to article directories is another excellent way to get natural links pointing back to your site.

Guarantee

While guarantees are excellent and give you that warm and fuzzy feeling that you are safe, there is something wrong when someone says they will guarantee what someone else will do. In this case, it is Google. I can not ensure I can get someone on page 1 any more than the next guy because I am not Google, and I can not control what they do. Neither can anyone else. However, with that being said, most people can show results from clients they have helped and got rankings, so this is what you should look for when considering an SEO company. The results should speak for themselves.

I am not going to go in-depth here on strategy. Still, the point is the above-listed techniques are considered “white hat,” meaning they have stood the test of time, and Google likes this approach. You have to be careful about finding a company that will give you too many links too quickly and using strategies that could seem unethical or known as “black hat.” These services are often used to gain page rank quickly by “fooling” the search engines. Chances are you will have to ask the company you are considering if they are using these techniques, and hope they are truthful with you.

Report

You are a customer paying for a service, so you want to make sure the company you chose has a regular reporting feature to know you are getting what you pay for. It could be something as simple as a monthly report listing all the links they created or a complete analyst of the campaign. You should at least be able to see your rankings for the major search engines on the keywords you are targeting and a list of activities or links the company has been doing for you over the last month. Beware of a company that does not give you reports; it is the only way to see what they are doing for you.

In general, what you are looking for is a company you can partner with long term and build a relationship to do that you have to find someone that is ethical, truthful, and has your best interest and success at heart.