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 time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
Pixel tags impact on SEO?
I was asked by our IT if switching to a tag management company that removes the pixels from our site and is replaced by a javascript would have a negative impact on SEO. I have not been able to find anything that discusses this: Does anyone have experience with this? Has it caused any issues? Has it caused any issues? How do crawlers see pixel data, and what do they do with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Do these results indicate a problem with my seo?
I've entered my the following search query into Google.co.uk related:mywebsite.co.uk However the resulting website that are brought back are on the whole nothing like our website, nor do they offer similar services to us. If I run this same query on my competitors websites they all bring back similar websites to each other. I read somewhere that gaining links from the websites that Google believes are similar/related to our own website is beneficial. But looking at our results it would seem that Google can't place what our site is about and which sites are similar. So I'm guessing this is a more pressing matter than link building right now!? Other info about our website: We rank fairly well for a lot of our target keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adamlcasey
Domain age = 11 years
PA =38
mR= 4.77
mT= 5.74
DA:= 31
DmR= 3.78
DmT= 3.84
PageRank = 3 Example of how random the results are the 1st website that comes back in our related websites search is for Doctors GP Practice. Our website sells GPS Telematics Solutions. Can anyone shed any light on this or just to confirm how much of a problem this is?0 -
Link Building Question
Hi, I have a 2 month old blog with me, i have submitted a few press releases for the start, later in these 2 months, i got about 40 guest posts, which i've written and submitted at myblogguest site. My niche is in health. Currently my serps are at 16th page which is not a good position. I want to do more link building, but at myblogguest, no one are interested in my niche and don't want to publish content related to my niche, so it becoming hard for me to find guest blogs related to my niche. But i want to get more links in order for my blog to rank well. Is it ok if i write guest posts in other niches as well like technology and put a link in author's resource box? Does it become useful? please help as i find no other sources for my link building task, i tried researching for guest blogs in google also, but i don't find any related to my niche. Seems like, i cannot go further with my link building. Please help me. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt
Dheer0 -
Advanced Squidoo Question
Hi, I am looking for someone with a lot of experience with building links to your money site using Squidoo. I have a ton of squidoo lenses set up, i recently created back linking reports for a number of squidoos to see if the squidoo was appearing as a link. They were not. Only one out of my 53 lenses is appearing. Tons of them are already featured lenses ( Not work in progress) What does it take to get a squidoo to become an active link in a link profile? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
Does a Slider widget harm my SEO?
Does using a slider widget (such as the one Skype uses) harm my SEO? Meaning, is the text still totally readable to search engines or will it be in JAVAscript. Are there any SEO-friendly sliders you would recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Crawl questions
My first website crawl indicating many issues. I corrected the issues, requested another crawl and received the results. After viewing the excel file I have some questions. 1. There are many pages with missing Titles and Meta Descriptions in the Excel file. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/threads/help-us-decide-on-terapvp-com-logo.25/page-2 That page clearly has a meta description and title. It is a forum thread. My forum software does a solid job of always providing those tags. Why would my crawl report not show this information? This occurs on numerous pages. 2. I believe all my canonical URLs are properly set. My crawl report has 3k+ records, largely due to there being 10 records for many pages. These extra records are various sort orders and style differences for the same page i.e. ?direction=asc. My need for a crawl report is to provide actionable data so I can easily make SEO improvements to my site where necessary. These extra records don't provide any benefit. IF the crawl report determined there was not a clear canonical URL, then I could understand. But that is not the case. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/forums/news/ If you look at the source you will clearly see Where is the benefit to including the 10 other records in the Crawl report which show this same page in various sort orders? Am I missing anything? 3. My robots.txt appropriately blocks many pages that I do not wish to be crawled. What is the benefit to including these many pages in the crawl report? Perhaps I am over analyzing this report. I have read many articles on SEO, but now that I have found SEOmoz, I can see I will need to "unlearn what I have learned". Many things such as setting meta keyword tags are clearly not helpful. I wish to focus my energy and I was looking to the crawl report as my starting point. Either I am missing something, or the report design needs improvement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0