What You Need to Know Before Hiring an SEO Agency

by Jay | Updated on March 31st, 2020

SEO is a topic that many have blogged about. This topic is truly fascinating because SEO is like a race to the finish line, the better you are, the more practice, the better the odds of winning. What is so fascinating about SEO is the fact that according to your own work ethic you have the ability to outrank all competitors. It’s not really what you do, but how you do things. This is where different types of SEO techniques like: White Hat, Grey Hat, Black Hat comes to play. Labor cost, time, methods, strategies all come to play.

Whether you hire an SEO agency, freelancer, or do-it-yourself. You need to live and breathe SEO in order for you to succeed.

Maybe you don’t have time to run your business, you might want to hire an SEO agency, but before you do, here are few SEO tips you can do to debunk any tricks and make sure your money spent is spent well. There’s a lot of scam SEO agencies out there that outsource their work that provides services for $100-$200. Most if not all of them still use black and grey hat techniques that can ruin your business.

If the SEO expert is going to outsource their work or use a white-label reseller, just what are you buying? Can they explain to you what they will do personally and what cheap labor is going to do for you or for them? Cost is an issue, but it should not jeopardize the quality of the work, or does it?

How Can SEO Help Your Business Grow?

SEO is all about keyword research and competitor analysis. Before hiring any SEO company I highly recommend that you do keyword research. You need to be able to understand just how difficult or not difficult it is to rank for specific keywords. Have the agency explain to you the process they might go through to help. Do not provide them just the keywords and ask them to rank. Once again, it’s the how they do SEO that you should be concerned about. You can discuss the level and strategies necessary to get you to rank higher. Anyone who cannot explain might be fraud. Anything they say, you can always research to see if the methods are okay.

Keywords are also important because they might tell you that a specific keywords won’t help you. If they don’t explain to you about user intent and how specific content can rank better for specific keyword, then they are a fraud and do other SEO techniques that might penalize you. User intent is very important for both the user and search engines. If they agree to rank you for any keyword you suggest, you can run away. Real SEO experts will want to deep dive to what will truly works and find the best way possible for you to last a very long time and get more leads.

Tools you can use to find some keywords

You can use Google Adwords, UberSuggest, Keywords Everywhere, LSIGraph or KWFinder.

When you do keyword research you are looking for keywords that have a good monthly search volume. You also need to find out how many searches your keyword gets for the country of your choice.

Once you have collected all that data you need, you can now consider hiring an SEO company or do the SEO yourself. There are pros and cons to do SEO yourself and hiring an SEO company.

Pros and Cons To Hiring An SEO Company?

The advantage that you have of hiring an SEO service is the fact the company knows more than you. A good SEO service provider will work to get you ranked as quickly as possible. The con, however, is many SEO companies tend to be greedy. They might tell you that SEO is a very long process. And what I mean by this is they will do just enough work to keep you having to constantly pay for their services each month. Prices for such services can range from $45 to hundreds. Essentially what your SEO service is doing for you would be keyword research and backlink building. They will also specialize in on page SEO. Which means checking for broken links, slow loading pages, etc.

However, a good SEO expert should have some improvements to show you after the initial month. A 1 1/2 month or 2 months of valuation should be considered before hiring an SEO company.

Another con to dealing with SEO companies is clients that stop paying for the services start to notice a drastic decline in their rankings many times. Almost as if the SEO company starts to remove backlinks. You need to ask more questions. Find out if your backlinks will be permanent or temporary. It is natural for backlinks to fall off over a course of time. If 50% of the backlinks are falling off within the first 6 months this is a bad thing. This would be an indication of poor quality backlink building.

As a client, you need to become savvy. Request for a backlink report. Find out if your SEO provider is able to deliver you a report showing all of the backlinks they have created towards your blog or website. Before ordering their services you should have already asked these questions. You can also sign up for an SEO tool to track the quality of all backlinks. Tools like SERanking (Disclaimer: Affiliate link).

Building Backlinks Yourself

There are different types of SEO service providers. Some expect to work on your site each month and focus on on-page optimization while others charge you only for off-page optimization, backlinks. The methods they use is critial for your business, whether it will rise or crumble.

Some will purchase private blog networks and have someone write an article for $5 and charge you $99.

Others have built their blog networks and they will publish your guest post articles or add links to their site.

Others will reach out to others and pay them $30 to post an article.

Some and only a few will reach out to quality sites and write quality articles.

What you can do yourself, contact podcasters, sign up for startup directories, contribute to surveys, create quality and expert content.

Paying looks and sounds like a fast way for your business to rank higher and increase domain authority. But if you are not reviewing each site, examine the site and see if it’s not going to penalize you. You might not sleep at all, in case, Google thinks that the site you are linked to is a paid low quality site. The method that some SEO agency again is how you can determine if they are the right fit or not. If they justify that paying for links is the best option, you can turn the other way. If they are using PBNs then you can also walk away. It’s all about ethics, and whoever can do the work and be the best at it should be the winner.

You Could Waste Money Finding The Right Service

You could waste a bit of money finding a trustworthy SEO provider. This is a good and bad thing actually. The good part is once you find a good SEO agency to work with you, you will most definitely appreciate their services. The bad part is sometimes you end up spending hundreds before finding that good SEO expert.

I know that there are a lot of good agencies out there. The problem is that there’s about 1% of people that actually deliver what they promise and don’t do more harm than good. Which is the reason that I tell people to be really skeptical about marketing agencies. Because when you’re talking about social media marketing or something like that, a tweet isn’t going to sink your site, The wrong tweet isn’t going to get you banned from Twitter.

However, the wrong link can sink you in Google, which is a very big deal. The worst the agency could do is nothing. If agency ‘A’ doesn’t work you then go to agency ‘B’. The problem is by the time you get an agency, you might have been penalized multiple times to the point you don’t even know what penalty you have. And then you have to get agency seeks to try to dig you out of a hole and then try to build your brand and do all that stuff that they just see as a supposed to do. That’s why I recommend that people are skeptical just to give some background, and analyze those that deliver great work for their clients, but the problem is there’s so few and far between.

There’s a minority that delivers quality work. So how would you recommend that somebody navigate that sea of maybe bad choices? It’s simple, just doing your due diligence, getting referrals, and try to do SEO yourself temporarily.

So even if you want to hire an agency, and if you don’t necessarily know enough about SEO, and if you do not have the time to execute on it, I do recommend at least trying SEO yourself.

Learn it, execute some stuff, write some blog posts, do some promotion even if you’re busy because then when you get to the point you’ll learn a million times faster than you will be reading. It’s like anything in life. When you do something you learn a lot more. Then after even a couple of weeks of this, when you start to solicit agencies, you’ll have a really good idea of what needs to be done and you can separate the good from the bad. Because you might end up saying, “hey, I was doing this and this worked great and this proposal has that”.

That’s going to be your focus, to know what they’re talking about. On the other hand, you may be like, well, when I was researching how to build links, I saw that directories were dead and people that aren’t local businesses shouldn’t build a lot of directory links.

Here’s an example, if agency A proposal says we’re going to build directory link straight away. That’s a problem, then you know that they’re not a good fit. And without that knowledge, you’re going with things like case studies and maybe even a for referrals are probably better. But if you just go by what their body of work, what they did for website A or website B or they’re huge clients, isn’t necessarily what they’re going to do for you.

So it doesn’t mean they’re good. But if you send your proposal and you can say, Hey, I relate to that stuff, I tried that, that worked, or I read that this doesn’t work and I tried it and it didn’t work, you’ll be much more informed. And then from then on from for years, you can basically hire an agency, the right way.

You don’t want to be in a situation where you ask an SEO agency you hired what they delivered for you this month. And they say, “Nothing. So we learned a lot. I hope that you’re okay with that. I mean you paid us like four grand this month. We learned a ton. So thank you so much.”

Obviously, no client’s going to be happy with that. What an SEO agency should do is understand your aversion to risk. They should say something like,  look, we can go the safe route. Do something like the skyscraper technique, very safe. It’s pretty much going to work most of the time versus this thing. We have this cool idea, we don’t know if it’s gonna work, but if it does, it’ll be huge. And then have them basically choose option A or B. I think that’s probably the best way to go.

Knowing the client’s risk aversion, I think should be something an SEO agency should understand. If you have a lot of tolerance for risk and then you can be more experimental and the other might have a low amount of risk and then you don’t want to do something more tried and true.

Is Your Blog Or Website Making Progress

I personally have demands that need to be met when I deal with SEO companies. Of course, I don’t tell them everything but I expect to see progress on my blog rankings and Alexa score based off a certain number of backlinks I build and a set period of time. What this means is if I build over 80 backlinks for a client and within 3 months I don’t see progress, such as an increase in ranking or my blog populating for more keywords, in my opinion, the backlinks may not be of quality. You’re not supposed to necessarily rank for your keyword within 3 months; however, you should start populating for more keywords related to your blog niche. You can find this out by checking within your Google Console performance report.

Within your Google Console performance report area, you will see a list of all the keywords your blog is populating for and their rankings. You will also see how many impressions and clicks you have received from Google within the search engines. By default, your performance tab always shows the last 3 months. Always change it to the last 7 days for the most recent data on your keyword of choice. These are the signs you should be looking for when dealing with SEO. I highly recommend that you have at least 20 pages of SEO content on your blog before reaching out to an SEO agency.

Cheap Backlink You Should Avoid

For starters, Fiverr and UpWork. Between the two sites, Fiverr has been my number one site to avoid for backlinks to boost your SERPs. I have encountered some scam sellers that surprisingly had hundreds to thousands of positive feedback. Me being the detective I am, most if not all of the reviews are provided right after the delivery. There’s no way for you to go back 3-6 months and leave a review of the actual results.

What I like about Fiverr is the fact that if you have an issue with your order within the first 15 days even after you have left feedback you have a 99% chance of getting a full refund. But that doesn’t help if your backlinks are not going to be indexed within that 15 days, which is always the case. The funds are always placed back into your Fiverr account where you can make a new purchase. I typically purchase from the sellers that do have good feedback, but never for backlinks, more for design or assistant tasks. I do like UpWork because they have hundreds of good sellers also based on reviews that people can add based on the results and closing of the project once you agreed to ending it. I don’t use them as often but they are another great site to help increase your SEO performance.

Sometimes, SEO tasks can be redundant, adding action-oriented alt text images. Anyone can describe what an image is saying or doing. If there are thousands of images, then that is something someone can do. Outsourcing title tag optimization might not be a good thing since you’ll want to compare your title tags with your competitors to see who will get better clicks. Having someone type in every keyword and looking at all the title tags for that specific keyword is something an SEO Expert should outsource, but not the tasks where expert opinion is how you will rank, good or bad.

Detecting Scam Sellers

As I have stated earlier I have been scammed on Fiverr. I used to write for WooRank and experimented, researched a lot of SEO techniques. I wanted to know what really works and what doesn’t. The Fiverr gig types that you really have to be careful with are the GSA backlink gigs. The sellers promise to deliver, for example, 500k do follow GSA backlinks. However, once you receive the report in Excel and remove the duplicates using excel, you will find 89% of the backlinks were duplicates. Finding this out I have been successful at requesting a full refund every time. Another service type that is a scam often is the search engine submission services.

You will find they have many good reviews but the service is not up to par. In fact, just avoid any backlink services. Nevertheless, you might find some specific tasks. Once you get an idea of some SEO strategies, you can hire more of an assistant type than a so-called SEO Expert on Fiverr. Finding someone to create 100 title tags for couple articles so you can see which one might work the best is something you can hire someone to do. 

For example, I ordered 2000 search engine submissions and the seller sent me a report containing dead websites, inactive search engines, and active blogs that aren’t active. In order to submit to Google and Bing you have to first verify your blog or website by adding a code into your site. Once your site is fully verified you can then start submitting pages and sitemaps. I never gave the seller access to my blog to verify yet his report stated he submitted to those search engines. My point here is don’t be the type of person to trust everyone’s delivery report. Be wise and know how to spot a fraud. I did receive a refund on that purchase as well.

Are Your Backlinks Of Quality?

If an agency is promising you high-quality backlinks check the backlinks to confirm you are getting what you paid for. You can check the spam score and domain authority by using a service called MOZ and Majestic. MOZ allows you to sign up for a free trial. Generally speaking, it’s ok to keep a backlink with a spam score between 1-4%. On occasions, I keep backlinks that have a spam score of 37% and I discard the rest. That’s my personal preference.

A blog full of high spam score backlinks will cause ranking issues in the long run. With Majestic, you want both the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow to be of equal value. If the TF is 34, you want CF to be around 34 plus or minus.

Don’t be afraid to build no follow backlinks. I have seen the power in no-follow backlinks if the link has some level of authority. Take advantage of them because do follow links are not always easy to come by.

How can SEO help your business grow? As you can see SEO helps your site climb to the top of the search engines and become more discoverable. When your website becomes discoverable people searching for your keywords will find you. And if you have what they are looking for you have the potential to make huge profits.

Cheap Labor versus Quality

Cost is a big thing for any business owner. The cheapest price for SEO does make sense if you don’t have the budget, or if you think the value is too good to pass up. But SEO is not like where you can get the cheapest labor, the most important thing about hiring someone for SEO is, how well can they do SEO. You definitely do not want to pay $200 and get stuffed keyword titles and copy and paste it to all titles within your page. That labor versus researching competitors pages, top performing pages on SERP, seeing what titles, metas, are attracting and ranking no.1. What phrases work best for that specific page, what hasn’t been used that might help increase the CTR for that page. All of this is neglected when you are paying someone $200-$500 versus someone who is dedicating their time and effort to build you an optimized site that will make people want to click on your site.

Here are SEO Rank SERP, we take a bit of time going through each page and see what titles will bring the best CTR and ranking. Each page needs the time and care, otherwise, you shouldn’t have these pages. Creating content for the sake of creating content is like being a new publisher versus you, as an actual business should provide quality, relevant content. To spend just one-hour stuffing in keywords to the title is not how you rank well and for the long haul. If you paid an SEO expert to do just that for $200-$500, that makes sense, versus hiring an SEO agency for $200-$500 to do all of SEO.

Your Work Ethic

To become a success with any business you need to have a great work ethic. Your work ethic will take you places. If you’re the type to order thousands of backlinks and hope for the best, best to avoid it alltogether. Having someone find all the links for guest post opportunities and reach out to do guest posting takes a lot of work ethics. Keeping track of all the sites you have written a guest post on, see what sites help boost your ranking and what did not. When you start to do many of the SEO work your self you should become a more logical organized person over time. But most importantly, organizing will help you identify success, which you can duplicate. 

Write About Topics People Care About

As a writer, I care about what my readers read. I always provide tons of value in my content. If you’re not doing the same your wasting everyone’s time. When writing you want your articles to be written with a minimum of 500 words. The more the words the better. Give your readers a reason to keep scrolling.

Writing a guest post on other blogs is an SEO technique that will for sure help your blog grow. Just be sure to check how much traffic the blog you guest post on is getting each month. Often I write a post on my blog and as time goes on I find that my blog ranks for certain keywords. The interesting part is I never purchased any backlinks to the post. When you have good backlinks already and your content is SEO friendly you will perform well in the SERPs with or without backlinks.

I know from personal experience that becoming hands-on with your SEO changes your perspective. Over time you become the type of person that wants to do SEO on your own because you become more confident in your ranking abilities. Because of Google Panda and Penguin updates, every 6 months to a year, SEO is a constant learning process.

When you are eager to become the best you go about your day differently. Often I wake up naturally at around 5 in the morning and I’ll watch SEO related YouTube videos. I’m not forcing myself to do this. I find that it happens naturally as my desire becomes one with SEO. I’ve done research on blogs and I have seen some blogs ranking for over 16,000 keywords. This is a motivation for me because I know that with a strong work ethic and resources I can make it happen. And you should challenge yourself to think the same exact way. My desire to become someone that doesn’t have to depend on a job to earn a living is constantly on my mind.

Do You Have The Tools To Succeed?

Now that I know a bit about SEO I laugh at my past failures and you will too. In order for you to become the best in SEO you need tools. What I have found is that I have needed tools that I never thought I would need. I advise you to start brainstorming about some of the tools you will need for your online business. My writing has gotten better because I use tools that help with punctuation. Try not to think like your typical blogger. Your average blogger wants to use a spin rewriter tool to spin hundreds of articles and then post the content on his blog. That is the wrong mindset to have. Google does not like spun content and your readers won’t like it either.

Let me ask you this question! When is the last time you saw a blog with spun content ranking well on Google? What I have found out in the industry of SEO is there are many SEO expert bloggers that get off teaching people the wrong way of how to blog. I have tried many of the methods that I researched about and I had no success. Enough failures should bring about future wins if you work hard enough. Absorb everything and see what makes the most sense. Learn from everyone and discern what is right and wrong.

Web Design Is Apart Of SEO

I think it’s very important to mention that web design is apart of SEO. I’ve witnessed some website that looked as though they were created way back in 2002 still standing. As the times become more modern so should your blog or website design. You also want to create your blog in such a way that it is easy for your readers to navigate through. If your readers can navigate through your site easily and they like what they have read chances are you will share your content. Your task is to do your research and find some blog posts that have gone viral in the past and duplicate what they did.

Hiring a professional to do the work for you is always an option. When starting out as someone who knows nothing online your task is to hire those who have the talent. You can go on Google and find web designs. From there you can hire a professional to finish the look and feel of your blog.

SEO Is Working

By now you should have done all of the hard work and hired the help. You should have also already hired a trustworthy SEO company. Over the course of a year dealing with experts and duplicating the process, you should now be a believer in SEO. Ask yourself is my business growing? Am I ranking for keywords? Are visitors engaging on my blog? If the answer is yes, then SEO will and does help your business grow. I know in life they teach us that patience is the way to go. But what I have found out about SEO is the harder, smarter, and faster you work the faster results you get.

Mythbusting SEO

Another myth is you have to publish on high domain authority sites. I am in the process of debunking this myth. I have witnessed free blogs with a free domain outranking many high authority sites. It all boils down to the individual performing the SEO techniques. SEO is powerful and if done correctly can reap you great rewards. Maybe some of these sites are doing their own SEO and in few years they might be the next big thing. If you really want to understand Link Buildings, it’s all about having search engine crawlers detect your site, so that they will go to your site and crawl your site. Each site is crawled, and based on the frequency of the crawlers. Everyone is searching and wanting the highest domain, it really doesn’t matter. You are investing in time and in sites you’ve analyzed to see if they are quality. If they are quality and they have a low domain authority of 20, in a few months they might be 27, or 30. Finding sites that does SEO ethically is where you want to focus on. The more SEO they do, the more search engines crawl their site, the more chances for your link to get crawled and indexed.

I know I spoke of search engine submission earlier but I did not mention my recommendation. I highly recommend individuals to submit their site to the search engines themselves. Find the sites you would like to submit to and do the hard work yourself. I started thinking like this after I got scammed by the Fiverr seller I mentioned earlier. You can submit your blog to real search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Bing recently did an update and no longer allows sites to submit individual pages or posts. You have to submit your pages and posts when you submit your sitemap file. It takes a while for Bing to apparently index your site. It’s been well over 2 months and I’m still not indexed yet. You don’t need to submit to hundreds of search engines or directories.

Understanding Social Signals

Many have witnessed the power of social signals. You have to be careful who you purchase from or who builds it, because some scam sellers know how to inflate your numbers. I trusted a seller in the past to make me 10k Pinterest pins. Instead, he posted my pin one time on Pinterest and was able to inflate the pin count to make it appear as if he had done the work. Luckily it was hardly any money lost because I only paid $2 for the service. I often share my experiences because I believe that’s a big part of how we learn.

Social signals are very important. It helps search engines identify trends, keywords, content that might be up and coming. Anything that has to do with providing relevant content to SERPs is a ranking factor. 

Other Things You Should Be Suspicious of

Any discussion of SEO agencies and pricing isn’t complete without a few warnings. To help you guard against indiscriminate SEO agencies with unethical business practices, read and heed. Be suspicious of the following promises:

• Guarantees. SEO freelancers/experts/agency should never guarantee to rank you number one. A recent study from Moz revealed that Google changed its algorithm 15 times in the year 2018. It has already changed it 4 times until June 2019 (Moz). This means that Google is every evolving and depending on their SEO techniques, you can’t know exactly what they are doing to be able to rank number 1.
• Instant results. Well, this depends on your site and how the expert can promise an instant result. True, some SEO tactics can get “instant results” by gaming the system, and there are methods where you follow the webmasters’ guidelines and you can instantly increase your ranking visibility due to the fixes you’ve made. Be warned that the technique is what’s important, if they promise instant results based on their tactics, these can hurt you in the long run. Instant results often involve SEO practices that are against webmaster guidelines put out by search engines. Invariably, Google seeks out these techniques and penalizes them, resulting in lost rankings that can take months to recover. If your site has a ton of SEO technical and on-page issues and if the SEO expert strategy was to fix these issues, you can see some results within the month.
• When it comes to SEO, you shouldn’t shop for the lowest price; you’re seeking the best level of service. One bad link they deliver can penalize you. The real question is how and why is it cheap? Some experts outsource their work who might work on your site .50 cents on the dollar. Others might hire top-notch affordable service and keep their profit margin low. Anything lower than $500 is either automated or copied and paste efforts, keyword stuffing to cut the time and effort. Anything lower than $750/month might be outsourced. If you want the best title tags you would want to spend at least 15-30 minutes per page reviewing other competitors, the type of users, personas, to be able to generate the best title for each page. Times it by 30 pages/articles on your website equals to $45 if you hired someone for $3/hr. $150 if you paid $10, you get the idea. In some cases, people might start charging a premium of $1,500 and all they do is build links for $100 and you do only 10 a month. When you talk with an SEO expert, figure out what their plan is. Majority of the time should be spent on finding the best user intent content ideas and creating multiple contents to help your potential customers. Create an engaging article that people would naturally want to reference. The quality is how and why you would pay for an SEO expert, not the task itself. You can get title tag optimized and be of low quality versus the best quality, versus an ongoing title optimization where you follow the trend and repurpose, reoptimize your old article to maximize your ROI.
• Shady link building services. We’ve already mentioned this here but this is really really really important. Link building is a crucial part of SEO. You can’t have a highly-ranked site without inbound links. But there’s a dark side of link building. Link trust is gaining importance to appear high in the rankings. Before you enter into an arrangement with an SEO agency for link building services, ensure that their link building services are ethical. You might not have the time to monitor the links they’ve acquired, so you might be clueless about how it will benefit you. You might receive a ton of links from the SEO experts report, but no significant value. You may even wish to ask them where they may be able to gain links for a business in your industry. If you focus on high-quality content and building and promote these content, you might be able to acquire more links than from a link building service.

Things to Keep in Mind When Your Shopping for SEO Agency

Before you make your decision, be mindful of the following points:

• Should you pay hourly or month? A monthly retainer is best. Think of SEO as a long-term investment. Aggressive campaigns and major pushes may have their place, but the most enduring SEO results come from a long-term relationship. Most SEO experts might have an assistant or people that can do redundant tasks, or if you hired a freelance, these tasks can get redundant and hourly might be something you should consider. However, creative tasks like reoptimizing content, finding the best title tags might take longer. With a retainer, you can set goals to see if the tasks can get done within the month versus hourly.
• The real value of SEO efforts are, generally, not realized in the first month(s) of the effort.” It’s true. SEO takes time and effort. As mentioned before, there are times when you might see some results but its not a guarantee. Maybe you hired a previous SEO expert and the first week is to make sure nothing was done to penalize you. SEOs don’t wave a magic wand and get instant results. Instead, they perform extensive operations that will produce results months down the road. Asking for a time period like 3 months is you shooting yourself in the foot. You are most likely asking what’s the quickest way versus the right way. If the SEO expert wants to make money, it’s an obvious win for that expert.
• Remember the Moz study? Google changed their algorithm 15 times in the year 2018, SEO changes, and your rankings change, too. The field is full of competitors, and rankings rise and fall with the changing of algorithms and the entrance of new competitors. One-and-done SEO tricks simply don’t work. It takes constant monitoring to keep your website ranking well and performing at top-notch levels. You need to know what your competitors are doing, how they are doing it, why they are doing it, how to get ahead of them how to be on top of them, how to maximize clicks, impression, CTR, how to optimize the content for the best user intent, lower bounce rate, reach out for guest posts, yea, there’s a lot to do.
• Not all SEO services are created equal. Again, SEO isn’t about shopping around for the lowest prices. It’s about finding the best agency you can. Look for an SEO agency that defines its scope of services, and takes the time to educate you. We spent a lot of man-hours to help people understand the level of work they receive from the different price range. Also, as we mentioned before, there are those who will increase their margin to make it look like they bring more value by raising their rates as “exclusive” and jack the price high. If you asked they what their process is, and if they throw a magic software or what they will do, instead of how and why then it’s better off finding someone who can explain the how and the why they do it in a certain way.
• The smart thing is to pay what it takes to keep your site findable by the people who are looking. It’s important for your potential customers to find your site, otherwise, what’s the point? People are looking for answers when they use search engines if you do not have pages/content that can help find what they are looking for then why to create that specific page or have a website. SEO is important and an SEO expert will use your buyer personas to help create and set different buyer journeys to maximize your visibility. There should be no page with no purpose, if an SEO expert is willing to work with what you have and do not recommend and suggest more solutions, you’ve hired the “so-called expert” to be more of a task-oriented expert, simply checking off the list versus providing real value.

Conclusion

When they say success depends on the individual that is the truth. If you want to know if SEO will help your business grow the answer lies in your work ethic and your research. Connecting with the right team can also have a huge impact on your online success rate. Every offline store that you walked into someone else built the store from the ground up. The one who had the dream spoke it into existence and others were paid to be the muscle.

Never assume the job was done right just because a company or service has a good reputation. Always verify your report file and check for yourself your not getting ripped off. It is possible that the company didn’t intend to do a poor job but things just happened to look that way. Always believe in yourself and your ability to have some SEO knowledge. Doing the work and being hands-on with SEO helps you learn faster and become a more logical person overall.

Some things are worth doing yourself such as search engine submission. Learn from others experiences and protect yourself against scam sellers. While you don’t have control over the report they send you, you do have control over checking the file properly or not. And remember failures always lead to a win.

Jay

I've worked for WooRank, SEOptimer, and working on a cool SEO audit tool called SiteGuru.co. Now I have build Linkilo and SEO RANK SERP WordPress theme. I've been in the SEO industry for more than 5 years, learning from the ground up. I've worked on many startups, but also have my own affiliate sites.

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