Managing SEO Partners

[Yozzer]

Hi,

Up until yesterday my main role was to implement & create SEO strategies and analytics for varying clients, and our own agency.

Going forward I have been tasked with sourcing and managing SEO partners for our existing and future clients.

This is totally a new concept for me, and I was wondering if any mozzers out there have been tasked with similar roles and could give me some ideas on what questions I should be asking, or maybe have an SEO matrix to rank agencies to help match to clients?

Your help as always is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Sean

[Yozzer]

Hi Keri, and thank you.

All is going really well. I had a mail from Rand on this subject which has been a big, big help.

We're focussing all our energy on building relationships primarily.I find that you can get a good feel for the partners knowledge and skill sets through the conversations you have rather than shooting questions at them, which feels a little stiff and interview like, which we don't want.

Our partners {so far} are passionate about the industry Keri, and I can talk SEO till the cows come home, so you get a good feel for their experience, whilst building solid relationships, which I'm sure will stand the test of time.

You may well see my first YOUmoz post very soon!

Best Regards

Sean

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Sean,

I hope the new role has been going well! If you have more questions now that you're two months into this role, feel free to start another thread. You're not limited to two questions a month in public Q&A, and Q&A is a lot more active since your question here, so you'll probably get some great discussion. Also, if you have interesting things you learned, consider submitting a post to YOUmoz about your experiences. Thanks!

[Yozzer]

Excellent, Thank you very much Saibose, I'll add these to my list.

Thanks for your time

Sean

[Yozzer]

Hi Richard,

These are great questions, I particually like the question about Rand :¬)

Also the I think the test page is a great idea.

Thanks for taking the time out Richard to share your views as ever, very informative, and greatly appreciated.

Best Regards

Sean

[saibose]

Every client is different. Never judge a client by their profile or website name or even by the nature of their website.

You must talk to every client and understand what their accurate needs are. Then only, you will be able to understand which provider will be good for the given requirement.

I like the question set that has been posted by Richard here. Some questions to add maybe:

1. How would you deal with a content heavy website which requires URL rewriting?

2. What measurement tool (free) would they use to measure social engagement?

3. What would be a website's most important success and failure metric?

Based on that, you will be able to judge which agency best fits your client's requirements

[Getz.pro]

Hi Sean

I have not myself, but some questions to ask might be:

1. What are canonicals and how should you use them?
2. When should you use an internal no-follow?
3. Which is more important? A followed link with poor anchor text, or a no-followed link with good anchor text?
4. What are the top 5 on-page factors?
5. How much time should you spend link building?
6. What are the top 5 places to obtain good inbound links?
7. How important is social media and why? [they better be able to site some recent SEOmoz blogs on this]
8. Some analytics questions also if they are going to be working on that as well.

Hold up a picture of Rand and ask if they know this guy? : )

I think you get the idea. I would even set up a test page on your site and say, how would you fix this? Give me the metric on this page? See if they can spot that you use poor SEO tactics in the test page. Ask them on this test page, where would you start looking for inbound links?

I hope that helps