How to find a trustworthy and experienced SEO expert?

If you are looking to outsource SEO campaign, it is wise to follow certain guidelines that will help you to find a trustworthy SEO company or an individual SEO expert. If you are not certain in a person you are hiring, you may end up with loosing your money or, even worse, failing the whole project.

So here are the guidelines that I recommend to follow when choosing an SEO expert to outsource your website promotion.

Communication Qualities

Responsiveness. Responsiveness is one of the key qualities of a reliable SEO, whether this is an individual or a company.  If it takes them more than a week to reply to a simple request from a potential client, it’s a sure sign that when and if you become their client, answering your emails may take even longer.  If the company does not reply to your within 2-3 days, I wouldn’t bother reminding them and just end up any liaising with them immediately.

Politeness. A prospective SEO should be reasonably polite.  He shouldn’t be too flattering, obsequious  or anything like that. Just polite and well-tempered like any other professional.

No pressure. It’s also no good if you feel pressure or a hidden desire to entice you into buying his services.  Ideally a prospective SEO to hire should be calm, ready to help and not apparently trying to sell you anything.

Personal Qualities

Adequacy. An SEO your are going to hire  should be a completely adequate person, i.e. he should seem to be the expert he claims to be.  There are should be no conceived discrepancies between how the SEO presents himself and describe his professional qualities, and how he looks like to you in reality. Any weird behaviour, comments or answers are alarming signs of inadequacy.

Punctuality. If he promise to get back to you with an answer, a quote or anything like that by a certain time, he should do so. If he fails to keep terms at the stage of negotiation, there is no guarantee he will do this when you hire him.

Honesty. Ask the SEO if he ever had any failures (everybody does from time to time!) and see how he responds to this. A good professional should be realistic and ready to admit his mistakes. In no case should he shift the blame for his failures onto his clients, even if it was indeed their fault.

No excessive boasting. If an SEO swaggers all the time about how great he is, how many clients he made rich and how many websites he brought to top ranking, especially if when doing so he doesn’t offer any tangible proofs, this is a sign of poor professionalism, and I wouldn’t  recommend you to deal with such a person at all.

No unrealistic promises. Does the SEO promises you top rankings or make you rich within weeks or even days after you buy his services? Does he promise you something else that  sounds too good to be true? If it does, it is most certainly is! A professional SEO expert or company would never promise you top rankings or any certain rankings at all, nor would it guarantee a financial enrichment, as those are beyond anyone’s control. If the were not, ask yourself, why wouldn’t that SEO bring his own sites to the top positions and make lots of money by, say, affiliate marketing, instead of doing this rather tiresome and not so lucrative  SEO job?!.. Isn’t the answer obvious?..

So abstain from dealing with “experts” promising you the moon and the stars and stay away from them. This is clearly a concealed fraud.

Professional Qualities

Portfolio. A trustworthy SEO should be able to demonstrate at least a few sites successfully promoted to the top positions on Google and/or Yahoo on a number of competitive keywords. You can check the keyword competitiveness using Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If a term has over a few hundred searches per day and is encountered over ~100,000 times pages on the Internet, it can be considered to be competitive.  The higher the two parameters and the lower the ratio of the former to the latter, the more competitive the keyword is. To find out more about keyword competitiveness, have a look at my artilce How to discover keywords that pay - A must for any online business.

References. Does the SEO have any references that can be verified and/or testimonials from the  former or current clients? This is not as obligatory as the portfolio, because often it’s not so easy to get a testimonial from a client, as many clients are rather reluctant to write anything.  But if the SEO does have references or testimonials and they are positive, this is a strong extra evidence of his reputation.

Provable Experience. Ask the SEO if he is a member of major SEO and webmaster forums, and if he is, ask for his nick. Then go to those forums and find out for how long he has been registered,  check his posts and discussions he has been involved in, as well as his rating (reputation) at those sites. If all that seems fine, he is probably an expert to trust.

Summary

When choosing an SEO expert to outsource your website promotion campaign, it’s wise to consider his/her personal and professional qualities, as well as communication skills. The  guidelines to follow are outlined above.

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