Hire an SEO Expert - What Really Matters

How To Hire SEO Services in Baton Rouge

Published on October 17, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Whether your customers are local or spread across a wide geographical area you can increase your sales when you hire an SEO expert. Before you hire SEO services it is very important to understand that effective SEO requires a strong skillset. Almost every website company claims to provide SEO but few actually know SEO best practices.

Risks of Hiring Bad SEO Services

If you make a bad decision when you hire SEO services it can cause long lasting and even permanent ranking losses. Poor SEO work, whether intentional or simply done from ignorance of best practices, now carries a high risk of search engine penalties. If you engage an unskilled person or company for SEO you are gambling with your sales.

Is A Local Company Better?

It is extremely important to hire a SEO company that is in the United States, and that does their SEO work in-house. In cities with populations under 1,000,000 it is always a very big challenge to find a very good SEO company. SEO companies in small markets simply don't have top notch talent and rarely have had to perfect their skills by competing against other top SEO companies.

Your chosen SEO company does need to be able to understand your business, types of customers and be able to relate to your marketing area. Ideally they would be willing to sometimes come to your location for a personal meeting, and certainly be able to provide convenient forms of communication.

For top SEO, results are the top priority, location is not. Through phone and email communications, SEO reports and seeing ranking results you will be able to assess how well your SEO company is serving your business.

Finding A True SEO Expert

When you speak with someone who knows more than you do, and tehy have a convincng tone, you can easily begine to view them as somewhat of an expert. The SEO and internet marketing industry is packed with people who espouse unfounded claims, ill-advised practices and mislead clients. We believe that you need to know how to evaluate and hire SEO experts.

Experience matters to some degree but can be misleading. Because SEO changes so much, SEO experience that is over 3 years old does not mean a lot for being able to do current SEO best practices. Ask questions about on-page and off-page techniques. Ask to see live examples of client rankings. Definitely ask about tier inhouse team, tools and processes. If they use outsource services, rely on free keyword tools and can't explain their SEO process then they are one of the places to avoid.

Local Search SEO

For the traditional brick and mortar store it is important to hire a company that understands local SEO. This means how to properly create and customize local search listings and business pages. How to create local search citations and how to improve local search rankings. Local search SEO requires techniques that are unlike what you need for organic SEO.

How well developed is your local search presence? Local search services such as TigerSEO Marketing offer a free local search evaluation and a phone consultation to discuss how to improve your local search presence.

Organic SEO

Is your site ranked well on Google? Organic SEO services improve your search engine rankings for specific search phrases. Organic SEO techniques must evolve in order to keep up with changes to search engine algorithms. In 2012 alone, Google Panda and Penguin algorith updates caused significant turmoil in search engine rankings. SEO companies using sketchy or outdated practices caused their clients to lose a LOT of business, and are finding it nearly impossible to help their clients recover.

These black-hat and novice SEO people rely on meta tags, keyword stuffing, cloaking, doorway pages, exact match URL's, blog wheels, link farms and other bad practices to get their clients ranked on search engines. These bits of trickery did work for a while but their use ultimately generated very negative outcomes.

Even the manner in which white-hat SEO is applied has changed. The proper ways to manage character counts, partial match, latent semantic indexing, content stucturing and off-page techniques have become substantially different in 2012. Companies that upgrade their SEO in 2013 are going to take a lead in search result rankings.

SEO services, and internet marketing services, have become much more sophisticated and complex. To get the best possible results, and mitigate chances of penalties from bad SEO work, you should abandon the notion that a hiring a local SEO company is necessarily better. If you want top tier results, you need to find top tier practitioners - wherever they are located.