Outsourcing SEO
-
I have decided to give my website a boost by outsourcing some of my SEO.
Especially looking for building quality backlinks and help with Google Places. Any good recommendations?
-
I'd also say read the Beginner's Guide to SEO (from SEOmoz). This will help you be able to judge if the people you are looking to hire know what they are talking about or are just telling you whatever they think you want to hear.
-
Look for a local SEO if possible...at least to get started with. Later, when you know more about working without outside SEOs, it might be easier to go with someone remote. Also, I'd probably question hiring an SEO that just says, "Yeah," "We can totally do that," etc, etc, etc to everything and never pushes back on what's realistic, the benefits and drawbacks of certains approaches, and so on. If I'm working with an outside SEO, I want someone that will educate me a bit, be as open as possible, and help me understand when I'm being too conservative (avoiding all risks) or too daring/questionable/etc.
It sounds to me like you might be looking for 2 SEOs as well...depending on how much your budget is. Some people only specialize in local, while others only specialize in LB. Certainly, you can find someone to do both though. It just depends on how much of each, and how much specialty, you want.
-
Wait, there are sooo many SEO experts out there, it should be easy! OK, just kidding about one of my pet peeves.
I would first take a step back and ask some questions of myself, just like I would do if I were going to hire someone into my company: What do I want to accomplish by this hire? How will I know when it is accomplished (what metrics will be used)? What measures will I use to know this is the right hire? What are things I cannot accept in this position? Etc.
Anyone who has been in business even a short amount of time has made a poor hiring decision. Do all the things you would do to avoid making a poor hiring decision. Then, begin looking for companies/people who fit the initial picture of what you want: quality backlink strategist and Google Places expertise.
If they are a quality link strategist, they will be able to point to sites they have handled and explain how they got the links that are there now. If they are knowledgeable in Places, they will be able to show you that knowledge in sites that are clients. I would not tell anyone what your site is until you interview them if there is a way to avoid it. (Maybe you just keep it general and say you are looking for a marketing company, not sure what you need, etc and don't stress SEO). The reason is I don't want them to go get the knowledge from someone/somewhere else and come back to me with it. I want experience.
I would set up to interview a minimum of 3 companies. I would pick those three from at least ten or twelve. I do not necessarily agree that those who are ranking high in SEO are the best providers of SEO services, but I do not think they are excluded from being the best either.
I would then have a specific set of questions around, How would you......? Get backlinks onto my site? Improve my ranking? (This would be loaded in that if they say we would..... before they say which pages, what key words or phrases...then, oops)
I would give them 15 minutes alone with the site a piece of paper and a pen and ask them to come up with a plan that would improve the site/rankings, etc. Then, I would ask them when that would be accomplished. At what cost?
Lastly, I would ask for a slew of references of clients. The real issue is if they are truly experts at SEO, there will be a string of clients ready to recommend them even if 75% of their clients require confidentiality. I would then CHECK the references with specific questions about what they did for you, how they did it, how long it took, what they did not like, etc. Just like a job hire.
Now, I realize the answer is long and the task list is longer. But, I have hired large marketing firms and 6 months and a lot of dollars later had to kick myself for not asking more questions and interviewing more companies and checking more references. So, fool me twice, shame on me.
Good Luck,
Oh, yeah, If they make more statements about how good they are than they ask questions about you, your company, your needs, and what you are doing now, they are probably not a good fit.
-
If their site looks dodgy, they probably are! And reject anyone that claims 'guaranteed' rankings. Speak to a couple of agencies and make a decision on how well they explain what processes they would use to improve your site, not just generic examples. As Ryan says, somebody with experience working with clients in your industry would be a good start.
-
I'm guessing you'll get some good responses from this forum. If not, try doing a search for SEO and your city, or SEO and your industry (ex "SEO retail"). Those at the top of the results have already proven they can rank for their target keywords, so they should probably be able to help you as well.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Youtube SEO Resources
Does anyone have any recommendations for Youtube SEO Resources in 2016? I've done a lot of work with Local SEO on video but having to move up a notch to national SEO in a competitive field
Image & Video Optimization | | abisti20 -
SEO And Images: 2014 Tips
What is a good "image" strategy? All I really know is to make sure to use images that you create yourself and/or images that are approved for free commercial use and add alt tags. Right now, just making sure all our pages have images and updating some of the lower quality ones would surely help us, but I'm hoping someone can add a little detail into how best to use images for seo, conversions and how to avoid slowing our site way down by adding more (we do have the smushit plugin which helps some). Thanks, Ruben Our site is www.kempruge.com
Image & Video Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Local SEO NAP issue
Hello, All of my citations addresses have the street address 913 S. Latah Street except there are other businesses in this building with the same address. Should I have included "Room H"? Also, is "S." different than "South"? Is "St." different than Street? Looking for correct consistent citations.
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?
Hi There! We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus. This is what we've done to date: Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis) Ensured internal linking is strong Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it) Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place) URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone" What we're working on: Link building Site speed Social signals Rich media (videos, more images) Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective 😕 Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on! Questions: Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire? Have we missed something obvious here? Any help will be greatly appreciated! PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..
Image & Video Optimization | | whatphone0 -
What's the best way to host video for SEO purposes?
Hello SEOmoz folks, I'm curious as to whether it will be more beneficial for a website to host a video on the site itself or to host it on YouTube and then embed the code on your site. The options so far, as it seems, are: 1.) Host the video on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever else, then embed the YouTube code into your own website's HTML. 2.) Host the video on your own website by itself. 3.) Host the video on your own website AND YouTube AND Vimeo. I'm wondering which option is best. And if hosting your video on your own website is a good way to go, whether to go that route solely or in addition to hosting on YouTube, what is the best way to go about that? Do I have to embed a player AND the video info into the HTML of my website? What player is best for this? Flash, or something else? And once I get the video on my site one way or the other, how do I write the code to make sure the video thumbnail shows up next to my search results in Google to maximize the SEO potential for the video clip? Sorry for the long question, but I've been searching everywhere for this and I'd love just a direct answer on it. Thanks for your help! Cheers, Dani
Image & Video Optimization | | MountainMedia0 -
Local SEO address question - adding a suite number for shared address for office building
Hi, I have a client that has an address that is shared for a few different businesses in the holistic health field. My client is a chiropractor. There is an eye doctor, massage therapist and acupuncturist aslo sharing the same address. It's a subburban setting with two buildings all sharing one address. In the interest of preventing any merged listings down the road, I recently added un unofficial suite number to his website and Google places business listing. I also did this for all of his online directory listings, and for Bing and Yahoo as well. Did I do the right thing here? It seems to be having a positive impact on his local SEO as far as I can tell. Or at least there has not been any negative impact in the last 6 months Your thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | MozMan20 -
Dynamic image serving SEO
We often use images from a dynamic image server, to cater for image asset management, multiple sizes etc. Similar to Adobe's Scene7, although that came out after we chose our product. So widgets.com may have all its images with a URL like myimageserver.com?src=widgets/catalogue/productname.jpg;width=100;height=100;angle=90, instead of widgets.com/images/productname.jpg. A potential client wants to capitalise on traffic from Google image search. We could build an image sitemap, listing the images on each page. What should we place in the image:loc field? The code: myimageserver.com?src=widgets/catalogue/productname.jpg;width=100;height=100;angle=90 Apparently we have to verify the hosting site in Webmaster Tools, but I can't see where. I have a single Webmaster Tools account, where most of our sites are defined. Would I have to verify it for each site using the dynamic imaging program? Love to hear from anyone with solutions for getting images indexed when they are hosted at third-party dynamic imaging programs.
Image & Video Optimization | | ozgeekmum0 -
Video SEO: Videos in Multiple Sources
Frist time question, so excited! 🙂 We are hosting videos on Wistia for a new series we're calling Tatango University - Very similar to Whiteboard Fridays as you can tell - thanks Rand for the idea. My question, should we also be uploading the videos to YouTube or will this somehow we looked at as duplicate content or video spamming? Also, if we host them on YouTube will they always come up before our videos on our own site, therefore driving all the traffic to YouTube? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Image & Video Optimization | | Tatango0