How to hire an SEO company or SEO employee

In all my years of business, hiring an SEO is probably one of the more difficult things. SEO is in many times the make it or break it for an online company and going with the wrong company can have a severe impact on the future and success of your company. Hire smart.

I am going to break this post up into two sections, hiring the SEO company or the SEO employee:

Hiring an SEO company:
There is nothing consistent about SEO companies. You can put up 5 good SEO companies against one another and they will deliver you 5 distinctly different contracts, 5 different prices, 5 different payment terms and a host of different guarantee’s and promises. How on earth do you judge one company vs. the others when you are dealing with apples-to-oranges-bananas-grapefruit comparisons?

Issue 1: Don’t compare on price. This is one of the biggest problems I have consistently seen. Sure, if the contract is outside what you can afford, get rid of it. I will tell you that just because one contract is $5000 and the other is $1000, ‘ mean that the $5000 is better. On the flip side, don’t go with a company because they appear to offer the same service as a more expensive competitor. You don’t want to go on the cheap when it comes to SEO. You are not buying a car here. You are buying a service, one that comes with a very unknown expertise that you hope works. A good SEO firm will break down, with absolute transparency what they will be doing for your company. If they are unwilling to do this, stay clear of working with them.

Issue 2: Verify Results: Many companies claim to have gotten crazy results for a client, but often times they are not verified. There are many ways for a company to verify their results. Speaking to the owner of their said placements is a great start!

Issue 3: Don’t just go off glowing references: Anybody can make this up. One time, a client wanted to hear from 3 companies that we lost because we did a bad job for them. Shocked me but I thought it was genius. Especially in the SEO world, none of us nail it 100% of the time. The best of us (I am willing to admit it) only have success with clients 70-80% of the time, so if they come back to you stating they have no companies they have done a bad job on, stay clear of them to.

Hiring an SEO employee
This can be dicey. Easy for me as I own an SEO company, but hiring one in house to do your sites SEO is a different aspect all together. I typically dont recommend this, but if you are hell-bent on doing this, here are a few tips:

Issue 1: How do you manage this person: If you do hire an SEO employee, figure out how you are going to manage him. Most likely, he will be the only guy in the room that knows SEO, so come up with benchmarks (aside from rankings) to make sure he is doing his job. Tell him to show you links, content, long tail keyword placements, etc. along the way. If you look just at placements, it will take you 6 months to know whether or not he is doing something right.

Issue 2: How to find this person: So, when you get a stack of resumes in, how do you seperate them out? How can you verify what they are saying to be true? Unless you know SEO, it is hard to tell. I would look for a person that has verifiable references, can show 10 websites across a spectrum of verticals that are ranked well. If you are an ecommerce company, I would not hire an SEO that only has experience in the hotel industry as those are two entirely different campaigns. Also, have them write down 10 things he would do to your site out of the gate, see what he comes up with.

Issue 3: Watch out for the entrepreneur-SEO: I am an entrepreneurial SEO and no matter what you paid me, I would be a horrible employee. If an SEO consultant comes to you looking for full time work, and his entire experience is him working on his own, don’t hire him. He will be gone the second one of his sites are doing well enough to pay his bills.

issue 4: Seo Copywriting - I see over and over again companies hiring offshore companies to go on the cheap for SEO copywriting. This is a HUGE mistake for a couple of reasons. 1. the copy does not read well, so you will lose the very visitor you spent time and money getting in. 2. If you develop poor-quality content, Google will eventually find it and either remove it from their index or penalize you. IF you are going to outsource, pay the extra few bucks and do it locally.

This was posted on Danny DeMIchele’s Newsweek profile