Are you looking to hire an SEO company? How about social media marketing, or general Internet marketing for your business? Hire the right company using my ten easily verifiable, online indicators of SEO and marketing competence.
SEO and marketing are crucial services for any business hoping to get traffic and make money online. This article shows you free tools, tips and tricks to grade the SEO, social, technical, and marketing skills of the people you entrust with the success of your enterprise.
The basic litmus test for deciding whether an SEO consultant, or digital marketing company can do a good job for your business, is whether or not they do a good job on their own business.
1. High Google PageRank
Any SEO company that promises to help your performance in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), should be able to muster a good Google PageRank for their own site, right?
In general, don?t consider working with an SEO company with a PageRank of lower than 4. Ideally a PR of 5 and up is ideal.
It?s easy to test the PageRank for any domain using one or more of the following:
Some prominent SEO website PageRanks
PageRanks do fluctuate up and down from time to time, but usually only by a point or so, so it?s worth taking a look at the Google PageRank of some prominent SEO companies, consultancies or services:
2. Blog popularity
As Google?s Panda and Penguin algorithms continue their march against webspam SEO, so high quality content and blogs are starting to benefit.
If your business needs marketing and SEO, then only companies that can demonstrate their own blog popularity are showing that their methods are Panda and Penguin compliant.
There are a number of Key indicators of blog popularity. One the easiest to use is Technorati. Any good business blog should have a presence on Technorati, and this makes it easy to ascertain their popularity.
Popular business and small business blogs on Technorati
Let?s take a look at some of the blogs leading the way on Technorati (bear in mind that Technorati rankings move up and down on a daily basis, so the rankings quoted here may have changed by the time you read this):
Remember that these rankings relate to the topic ?small business? only. Sites like Social Media Explorer are huge, and will rank highly for other topics too. However, if you?re looking to grow your business online, then the bloggers in the ?business? and ?small business? categories are relevant to you.
3. Social media clout (Klout)
These days, social media plays an important role in growing and marketing a business online. Fortunately, it?s super easy to get a rough idea of the social marketing oomph, your potential SEO and marketing company has built up for themselves using Klout.
I have to stress that Klout is not always accurate and can be used as a rough guide only. You can also check on the number of Twitter followers, or Google+ followers.
4. High rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
Is there much point in hiring an SEO company or service that can?t get their own content to rank highly? While, by definition, not every good SEO company can get to the top position for ?SEO company?, most good ones can still rank highly on the content they do create.
Recently, Google?s Penguin algorithm update was released. It caused, in many cases, a violent reaction among SEOs and generated plenty of debate. As you can imagine, a lot of content was produced in a very short amount of time.
Do a search for ?Penguin friendly SEO?. You?ll see my article entitled ?Panda & Penguin friendly SEO: A business guide to recovering from Google?s algorithm updates? in first place. Not bad, right?
5. Evidence of technical ability
Proper SEO requires technical ability and experience. SEO is not only about making great content, it?s also about ensuring that your business platform is optimized correctly. Any good SEO will have the following implemented on their site:
- Canonical URLs
- Dublin core creator and publisher
- Analytics
- Keyword and Description META tags
- WWW Resolve
- Social sharing
- ALT & TITLE tags on all images
You can test for most of these by right clicking on any page and selecting the ?View source? option.
6. High WooRank score
Go to WooRank and type in the domain of the SEO or marketing service you are considering. WooRank will generate a fairly useful, automated SEO and social analysis of the website and spit out an overall score out of 100.
The WooRank score is not necessarily entirely accurate, so again use it as a guide and not gospel. However, you should only consider companies who can muster a highly competent score of 65 or more.
By way of comparison, Site prebuilder generally scores in the low 70s, which is far higher than some very large SEO & marketing companies.
7. Google Authorship
Google authorship is not necessarily an indication of technical competency, or any type of competency for that matter. It is very easy for anyone to set up Google authorship for their content.
However, Google authorship provides an excellent advantage for content producers to get more traffic, trust and authority because it embeds your Google+ profile into Google search results, next to any content that you have created.
This means that people can a) see who you are, and b) read more articles by you. Any SEO that doesn?t have this implemented is simply not? experienced or aware enough. Think of it like a basic test of ?keeping with the times?.
Refer back to my earlier Google search example (?Penguin friendly SEO?) to see an authorship result in action.
8. Performance
To my mind, a complete SEO service should be technically competent. They should have development and programming experience. Even if they are not hardcore PHP programmers, they should have solid HTML skills.
For example, page speed is an important aspect of Google?s PageRank algorithm, so a good SEO should know how to:
- aggregate CSS and JavaScript files
- Compress CSS and JS files
- GZip web content
- Cache static content
- Optimize server performance
You can test the page speeds of potential SEO companies using something like YSlow. Check out this article that compares the performance SEO of Site prebuilder and five of the biggest SEO and marketing sites on the net.
9. Experience
Well duh! Experience is important. But, as mentioned you can verify the claims of any SEO company by checking out all the criteria laid out in this article against their website.
Since any company should be able to achieve what they claim for their own blog or business website, the only real experience you need to verify is if they have done it for themselves.
10. English and language
SEO is actually about creating a quality browsing experience for humans. The better your site?s content, the more likely people will be to convert into fans, followers and paying customers.
Is there much point in hiring an SEO firm that can?t write English? Or, if your site is targeted at Spanish or German speakers, is there much point in hiring an SEO who can only speak Chinese?
Look for evidence of high writing abilities in your chosen language. Has your SEO company published any books internationally that have gone on to be bestsellers, and translated into many different languages?
When I wrote Drupal 6 a few years back, it was reviewed with 8 out of 10 on Slashdot and went on to be a bestseller, translated into French, German, Polish, and more.
The global success of that book helped put me on the map, and continues to generate speaking requests and consulting prospects to this day.
Your business relies on quality SEO and Internet marketing. Is your SEO firm of the highest caliber? Share your thoughts in the comments on join the discussion on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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