What Questions to Ask in SEO Interview
-
Tomorrow morning I have a call with an SEO company interested in doing some work with our company. Its a larger company who do a lot of SEO work, and seem to have good feedback around the place.
But we have been very very white hat in our all our our SEO work so far, and some of their wording on their site talks about "Negotiations and acquisitions of link partners".. which gives me the feel they might be a little grey hat..
What are some good questions we should ask these guys to make sure what they are doing is legit, and not going to get us stung for anything?
And what sort of work should we get them to do, if we are happy to take care of content creation, on page optimisation and social media activities?
Thanks!
-
Even if it's legit, if there's anything I don't like about a potential company, I wouldn't employ their services - there's plenty of competition. Would you want your company associated with the sort of content you mention? You could always ask them about those links and see what they say. It might be worth paying more money just to go with a company that has a reliable reputation.
There's some good advice about employing a link builder below the video here: http://www.stephanspencer.com/hiring-a-link-builder/
-
Thanks for your responses.
I had a look in OSE as per your sugestion Heather, and looks like they have a lot of directory submissions stuff, and the rest seems pretty natural.
However there was one thing that stood out. They had a bunch of different sites which had a link in the sidebar. All these sites were on the exact same wordpress theme and look like they could have been created by the company for SEO.Is that the kind of "shadow Sites" mentioned in the Google Webmasters pad that Alex linked to? The sites seem to have legit content, but have obviously all been created very quickly and used to generate links back to the site..
Any thoughts?
Is this legit, or should we be concerned?
-
There's some good advice here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
I remember reading a really useful article about hiring an SEO company, I thought it was here on SEOmoz, but I can't find it. This looks helpful though: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066873/Selecting-an-SEO-Firm-The-What-How-and-Who
-
I would ask to see work they've done for other clients, then take a look at their clients' backlink profile in Open Site Explorer. This should give you an idea about their link building tactics if you think that will be a concern.
Content creation would be a good area for them to start as you could sign off any content before it goes live or gets distributed. You'd then get a feel for their professionalism and knowledge.
Hope that helps and good luck!
Heather
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Pop up question and link flow?
Does a pop up like the one on this site www stressfreeprint co uk (top left corner about us, who we are) count as an external link or would link juice not flow to it. I like to have a few pages that i don't want to waste link juice on but would still like to have them and hope this is the answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
2 menus Responsive website Seo question
Hi there Thanks for reading my post. İ am fairly new to SEO and dont know much coding. İ purchased an opencart theme and am working with a developer to modify it to make it more user friendly. The website is responsive and İ modified the menu for the desktop but now it doesnt have categories but just products. So it doesnt have URL for categories but just filter. So the developer recommended to add the mobile menu which has categories, and subcategories back to the desktop menu. İm not sure if this is a kosher approach to seo. Here is the link: As you can see there is a menu in the top menu and menu on the Main Menu. THoughts? will this be problem for duplicate content? The Main menu keywords are crucial and is what the website is revolving around. New website
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socratic-goat7770 -
Metatags on drupal question
Hi Im quite inexperienced on drupal (normally an umbraco user!) and im having some difficulty with the Metatags on the CMS. I have been applying Meta Title and descriptions to the individual pages however they only appear when i preview the page and not when the page is saved. When i go into the metatag section located at /admin/config/search/metatags i am given a list of settings including Global: Front Page and Node. Im sure the reason it keeps defaulting the metatags back is to do with this but im not sure what to change to apply my own Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheZenAgency1 -
SEO and Internal Pages
Howdy Moz Fans (quoting Rand), I have a weird issue. I have a site dedicated to criminal defense. When you Google some crimes, the homepage comes up INSTEAD of the internal page directly related to that type of crime. However, on other crimes, the more relevant internal page appears. Obviously, I want the internal page to appear when a particular crime is Googled and NOT the homepage. Does anyone have an explanation why this happens? FYI: I recently moved to WP and used a site map plugin that values the internal pages at 60% (instead of Weebly, which has an auto site map that didn't do that). Could that be it? I have repeatedly submitted the internal pages via GWT, but nothing happens. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Panda Recovery Question
Dear Friends, One of my customers was hit by the Panda, we were working on improve the tiny content on several pages and the remaining pages were: 1 NOINDEX/FOLLOW 2. Removed from sitemap.xml 3. Un-linked from the site (no one page on the site link to the pour content) As conclusion we can't see any improvement, my question is should I remove the pour content pages (404)? What is your recommendation? Thank you for your time Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Ask a Question
We use DNN and we have case studies ran from our CMS. This is so we can have them in lists by category on service/market pages and show specific ones when needed. Then there is the case study detail page, (this is where the problem exists)to where you read out the case study in full detail and see the images and story. We enter our Case Studies into the CMS and this determines which website they show, and it creates URLs from the titles. However, on the detail page, the case studies all share the same page, Case Study.aspx, and they resolve to that page with their respected URLs in place. As seen here, http://www.structural.net/case-study/1/new-marlins-stadium.aspx Because they all share the same page they are being pulled as duplicate pages. They do show in the SERPS with the right title and URL and it all looks great, but they get errors for having duplicate page content and titles. Is there a way to solve this, or is this something I should even worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
SEO for Log in Sites
Hello, I just lunched a website where you have to sign up and to log in in order to use it. So I have the home, also a blog but then the rest of the pages are let's say it "hidden".How would you do the seo for it? I have been cheking facebook, foursquare and some others and they use different approaches. Facebook uses the same description in every single page for example. My site is similar to foursquare users have profile, stats, history, ranking. Well, what is your advice?? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome0