Hiring An SEO Firm After Google’s Hummingbird Update

Here are some tips for hiring the right SEO firm: 

1. As a rule, the older SEO firms are wiser than newer ones.

Older, well-established SEO companies are more adept and better at catering to certain client requirements.

Many new SEOs conduct fly-by-night operations, read the latest official statements from Google and the latest gobbledygook to impress clients, but they do not have the skill or time to deal with the exact needs of a website.

In addition, several SEO companies who are still new to this line of work use old strategies that may hurt the client’s business in due course.

A good way to measure SEO knowledge is asking the firm about key figures in organic search communities. Ask potential SEO consultants if they have encountered the names Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, and Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO Moz and Moz.com. About 75 percent of companies are acquainted with those names and can talk about them at great length. This simple question already helped you drop the 25 percent that will try to discredit Matt’s and Rand’s contributions or drop the topic altogether.

2. Learning often comes first before doing.

Prior to hiring an SEO firm of your choice, conduct a research to compare features and advantages to figure out what each company has to offer against the competition.

By studying the changes brought by the latest major algorithm updates, you are preparing yourself to ask relevant questions and evaluate various SEO service offerings.

Google’s free webmaster videos provide some of the best questions to help you speak with confidence about SEO.

The following questions allow you to compare companies that are updated with Google search algorithms and provide a good grasp about what products and services to expect and if these deliverables are safe for ranking your website.

1. When Google rolled out Panda and Penguin, what did you do right after? Did you do the same things with Hummingbird?

2. What reporting do you use to measure coding, linking, positioning, and so on?

3. What Panda- or Penguin-friendly backlinks will you provide?

4. Will you show client samples in my industry or something similar?

3. SEO does not revolve only on rankings.

There are several websites that rank for many keywords and key terms, such that they appear on the first page of search engine results, but do not experience traffic that reflects their high ranking.

Analytics is the primary code for a website because it provides the most realistic, practical figures. The marketer or advertising firm has to know whether or not your keywords are searched by your target audience.

The data provided by analytics allows you to make more intelligent campaigns for organic search engine ranking. It helps you target keywords that generate the most traffic and remove phrases that waste time and resources. Ensure that the chosen SEO company remains focused on things other than the ranking of keywords.

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