Top 3 things to look out for when hiring a SEO company

Guest post by: Lyuben Georgiev

So you have a business and you want to develop it further by hiring a SEO agency to take care of your website’s performance. This is great but choosing the best company can be a little bit hard nowadays. I have heard complaints from different people saying they have a lot of bad memories from the last company they hired and they will never try SEO again. It is a shame that these companies give the whole industry such a bad name.

When hiring a company to handle SEO for you, beware of those things:

1. Splogging – In an attempt to generate more links for you so you can sign a long term contract, many companies use splogging. This is the kind of spam that usually affects blogs. An example of splogging is putting your website’s name and link on various useless pages that have absolutely no value, page rank or domain authority all over the web. Most of the times these companies would use programs to automatically make blogs and post your link somewhere surrounded with a bunch of words that don’t even make sense. That can not only bring no value to your website but it can also be pretty bad for your reputation.


2. Short term links – That definition comes from the companies that would link to your website from site they have created and own. This is generally not a bad idea if the website is one that has high authority. The problem comes when you are no longer happy with their services and want to end the contract. Then these companies will take your links off their websites. This can be very bad depending on how many links they have put there. What if it is a blog and they have posted a lot of articles with links to your website and they delete them all when you no longer have a contract? Beware of those situations as they can be very dangerous.


3. Comment spamming – Another form of spamming is comment spamming. A company that uses that method would go on different blogs and post useless comments (you will be lucky if the comment even says something that makes sense like “Thanks for the post”) and put your link there. These comments can be very bad for your reputation and you should avoid companies that spam in any way at all costs.

So, the only way to find out what these companies are up to on time is to ask for reports. Tell them that you want to see what they have been doing for your business and see where the links are coming from. It is your right as their client to know what they are doing for you and end the contract if you are not happy. You should take control and be on top of things because once it is too late you will regret it very much.

For more information about mistakes to avoid when choose SEO firm follow link.

Lyuben Georgiev works for one of the largest SEO companies in Europe - Outrider. He also blogs at popular blogs like Search Engine Journal and RINF.