6 Questions to Ask: Before Choosing the Best SEO Company in USA

Here are six questions to ask when choosing the Top SEO companies in USA

The First Question to ask:

What is their mission or vision, and does it line up with yours as an organization?

Very simply put, just ask them, “What is your mission?” or “What is your vision? What is your goal as a company?” and see what the response is. You’d be surprised to find out how many organizations don’t know this, or haven’t defined it. If that’s the case, most likely their mission is probably just to make money. So it’s good to ask that question and find out if their mission or if their goals are aligned with what your goals is as an organization.

The Second Question to ask is:

How long have they been doing business or SEO professionally, and how many clients have they served?

If they’ve only been in business a few months, or even a few years, that may not be enough time to really understand SEO and really be able to provide a good SEO service.

There’s no license, like with a realtor, you have to have a realtor’s license. There’s nothing like that in SEO. There are no certificates, there are no graduate programs. All you really have to do to become an SEO is put up a website and say you’re an SEO. So that happens a lot.

There’s people that are just these fly by night companies; they just pop up out of nowhere and they claim to be experts in Search Engine Optimization, but they haven’t ever done it.

Right. Yeah, and it’s also helpful to go with an established business simply because you want to make sure that they’re going to be with you, by your side, and partnering with you for a long time.

Number Three is:

What will they be doing for you?

This is incredibly important, because SEO varies. One person’s definition of SEO is probably quite a bit different than what another person’s is. So why don’t you share a little bit about that?

Yeah, SEO is a very vague term. There’s really no distinct definition of it. Web hosting companies says that they do SEO, and all they really mean is that search engines can crawl your site, they can read your site, and maybe there are some automatically generated Meta tags. They’re not really doing anything for you. This isn’t really SEO, but they claim it.

Then you can go from there to the broad spectrum, where people are doing link building and content creation and social marketing and all kinds of other elements to it. There’s a broad range of what can be included in SEO, so you really need to make sure that you know what exactly you are going to be doing.

Fourth Question to ask an SEO company is:

Do they have any client references who are ranking well?

Simply ask them for references. Granted, this will probably be a list of their very satisfied customers that will say the best things about them, but even that being the case, often times when you have a customer that’s talking to another customer and you don’t have the SEO company there to listen in, they’ll let you inside and give you a little bit of an insider tip.

Number Five is:

What are their ethics? How do you ask this question?

Asking them is probably not going to get you the best answer. Like you said, they’ll probably just tell you what they think you want to hear. But you can ask questions that are a little more subtle.

If they say that there are, and “Yeah, we can do some things that are going to get past this,” that should be a red flag to you, that they’re willing to step over certain boundaries that the search engines may have said, “Don’t do this,” and they’re willing to then risk your website, your organization, to do this. This is a very dangerous thing, because you can literally be penalized or even kicked out of the search engines altogether. So it’s important to be able to ask that.

Another way to do this is just be aware of the some of the blackhat things. We say black hat; that really just means things that the search engines have said, “Don’t do this to try to game our system.” Just be aware of some of those things, so as they describe what they’re going to do, you can know, “Oh, that’s one of those things that the search engines say don’t do. That’s going to risk my site

Some of those things might be buying links; it might be getting spammy links which are just low-quality, no value type of links; maybe some on page, things like that. Stuffing keywords, or hiding text.

Then the Sixth Question is:

Do they have a history and understanding of your type of organization and your niche? How does this differ from the question of how long have you been in business, and is your mission and vision lined up with that of ours?

Well, just being in SEO doesn’t necessarily mean that you know all the different aspects of SEO. There are actually several niches within SEO. One of the most obvious ones that you’ll see is national SEO versus local SEO. They’re very different animals, so you may have been doing national SEO for a long time, but if you’re a local organization, a company who hasn’t been doing local SEO may not know what to do. They may try to apply national SEO to your site, which is not going to cover all the bases.

You can get even deeper, to where it’s your organization. If you’re a church, it can be a little tricky. Obviously, I deal with churches a lot, and when you’re trying to create content for a church, you have to be very careful because churches have specific beliefs.

Unlike with a pizza shop, where I can just write anything about pizza and they’re probably not going to be bothered by it, with a church, if you have someone who’s writing things that are contrary to your beliefs, you’ve got a big problem. There are things like that where if an organization hasn’t been dealing with churches, they may not recognize that. They may not know that that’s an issue.

Yeah, so it’s very important to make sure that the organization that you choose, the SEO company, has a history and has a good understanding of your particular type of organization, or they might either do things that aren’t going to help you that much or, quite honestly, they could do things that would hurt your reputation.

At the end, to keep these things in mind will help you possibly in your decision as far as which SEO company to choose.