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
-
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
HTTP to HTTPS Question
Hello, I have a question regarding SSL Certificates I think I know the answer to but wanted to make sure. One of our clients’ site uses http for their pages but when they started creating Registration forms they created a full duplicate site on https (so now there are two versions of all of the pages). I know due to duplicate concerns this could be an issue and needs to resolved (as well as the pros and cons of both) but if they are already set up with https does it make sense to just move everything there or in some instances would it pay to keep some pages http (using canonical tags, redirects, htccess…etc)? – Most of the information I found related to making the decision prior to having both or describing the process but I couldn’t find anything that specifically related to if both are already present. I thought that the best approach because everything’s already set up is to just move everything over to the more secure one but was curious if anybody had any insight? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Negative seo problem
Hello, Someone attacked our website with negative SEO and our website fell drastically. If i use bing webmaster tools link explorer i see dozens and dozens spam links but if open a link i don't find this link in that website. Is it possible that someone added the links and then remove thouse links when we got hit? Or is it possible to hide the links that they don't show up on webpage but they are still there? How can i use Google disavow links tool if there is no links in thouse websites but Bing link explorer shows spam domains pointing to our website. BR, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | otsinguturundus0 -
SEO for interior page
Is it possible to be penalized on an interior page but not the whole website? Here's why I ask, I have a page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/domestic-violence.html that is not ranking well (p. 21 of Google) while the rest of the site ranks well (b/w p.1 to p.3). I checked the link profile in opensiteexplorer, ahrefs, and majesticseo but can't find any problems. I have also checked the HTML code, CSS, keyword optimization, but can't find any problems there either. Can anyone give me insight into why this might be happening? Of course, I'm working under the assumption that this page SHOULD be ranked higher for "San Diego Domestic Violence Attorney" - at least higher than page 21.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Bizarre iframes question
I've been asked to do an audit of http://www.equipment4garages.com/. The first thing I did was check the code, and saw that the whole thing has a clone of the original site in an iframe. I can't for the life of me think why anybody would do that, so I was wondering if someone here could shed some light on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
SEO-friendly WordPress Templates
Hi, I usually build WordPress sites and I was thinking about buying one of those ready-made Wordpress templates I found on a site that sells them to the public. FYI, the site at issue is: yootheme.com. I'd like to make sure that building sites using ready-made templates is NOT a bad thing. Could you please confirm? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Advice on further SEO
I am frustrated by a lack of progress for a major keyword I want to rank for. I have made several pages, optimized with Onpage and even a whole site but I can't seem to get my ratings up. I am hoping somone can take a look at my pages and efforts and offer me some advice... Keyword is "National Currency" One site is devoted to this keyword: NationalCurrencyValues This site is ranked 30th and is down 9... and this page on another site is devoted to the same keyword ranked 26th is: http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/National-Currency.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
What are the best joomla seo plugins?
When optimizing a joomla site what is the best plugins etc for seo tweeking
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0