All businesses want their company to be the first listed as a search result on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other large search engines. Some don’t know the work that goes behind making that happen, with that in mind there are devious businesses that will try to take advantage of less informed more naïve businesses. To decipher which business is truly working for you and not trying to swindle you is difficult if you don’t know what to look for. There are two consistent and immediate red flags that people should be aware of when acquisitioning an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm.
First and most importantly is to hone in on the “Keywords” sales pitch of the SEO’s representative. Keywords are certain words in headers, web page content, and titles of articles that search engines look for to flag your site. One scenario a representative may use is telling a business that they are missing out on a keyword in their site which is resulting in ‘x’ amount of dollars missed annually. Well there are hundreds of possibilities for keywords and all businesses face this issue when selecting keywords because usually only 3-5 words are relevant and result in the maximum effectiveness. Choosing these words is a time consuming and lengthy process. Most businesses do not have the time and resources to effectively research each and every keyword without some type of financial commitment toward a company that will do it for them.
For example “Midwest Staffing” could select the following 4 keywords “staffing, employment, temporary and agency” which word placement, seekers, and recruiters would identify. They could also add “Midwest Staffing” to the list of key words but then they become dangerously close to exceeding the suggested keyword criteria and would fail to yield the highest search engine results.
The second tactic of SEO representatives is offering a guarantee that they can generate a #1 position in search result. For starters all search engines’ algorithms for search results are substantially different and unknown. A claim of knowing search engine’s algorithms to position your website at #1 is nothing more than fraud.
For example search “Movie Store” on bing.com and google.com.com. As you will notice the search results are substantially different. The top 3 results for bing were “moviestore.com, blockbuster.com and moviegallery.com” and the google results were “blockbuster.com, bestbuy.com and fye.com”. Anyone’s results could potentially be different, mainly because of demographic factors.
A precaution bookmark, this page as a reference to rely on when receiving an email or phone call in regards to your website. You will have a better understanding of when to hang up the phone or delete the email. If you have further questions about “keywords” that help position your website ask in the comment area below.