|
| Recent
Articles |
A Reasonable Price To Pay For SEO?
SEO Question: What is a reasonable price to pay for professional SEO services? SEO Answer: There is never a cut and dry answer to the question, but typically the range should be somewhere along the amount of value...
SEM And Lateral Thinking Skills
Joe Sinkwitz, also known as Cygnus, has a great post explaining how the polarized view of SEO is quite naive and inaccurate in nature. Rather than explaining SEO as black or white, a more accurate representation of the SEO market is those who can think laterally, and those...
Principles For SEO Success
There was a great post by Andy Beal about Five Secret Strategies to Add $1M in Revenue to your Interactive Marketing Agency in 2007. Rand later supplements this with some great additional suggestions on how to grow your business. I really like what these guys have..
Optimizing Pages For Link Or Profit Potential
Each web page can be optimized for conversion or linkability, but few pages are well optimized for both. That is part of why search as a business model works so well. The signals of quality that search engines...
Duplicate Content SPAM
QUESTION: We're a very small company with an 11 year website history, with web development resources somewhere between quite miniscule and non-existent. Nonetheless, SEO has been a keen focus of awareness since before it was called that, and up until that...
SEO Conference Tips And Tricks
The number one tip would be - don't be shy - talk to people, and talk to LOTS of people. There are few opportunities to discuss all your pressing questions about SEO/SEM with people that ACTUALLY might...
Microsoft Search SEO Tips
There are many things you can learn about search engine marketing from infamous rich girl Paris Hilton, who some have called the Queen of Links. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz puts it another way - "This falls under my Paris Hilton Law of Visibility, which states that even the least....
|
|
02.08.07
Finding SEO Companies
 By
Lee Odden
When KeywordRanking was still in business, we used to get calls about once a month from disaffected clients asking how to get out of contracts and to see if they were getting value for the $2,000 being spent.
Most of those situations were the result of overzealous sales people, cold calling businesses and making promises that were a bit ambitious.
In most cases though, the business owner had not allowed enough time for their SEO and link building to gain momentum. Even quality SEO firms can suffer if expectations are not set correctly.
Now that the subsequent iteration of KeywordRanking (MarkeSmart Interactive) is no longer doing business as usual, we are getting contacted again by companies looking for reliable, trustworthy and results oriented SEO vendors that can help improve their sales online. This is on top of the 2-5 daily inquiries we get from other sources.
There are a variety of resources online that list SEO firms and I've listed several below. However, if you're a company looking for a new SEO agency, I would recommend going the referral route first. Referrals are a win win situation for the company as well as the agency. I am biased about this somewhat because referrals are the biggest source of long term and successful client engagements for TopRank.
However, if you don't have a network that includes people that are satisfied with their SEO agencies and prefer to go the search, evaluate, selection route via a larger universe of vendors, here are a few resources:
topseos.com - Ranks the top 30 SEO firms world wide each month based on competitive advantages, services and pricing levels support, unique attributes and performance.
SEOmoz - Recommended SEO, web development and support firms.
SEMPO - This is the leading search engine marketing industry association web site. You can submit a project request and SEMPO members will reply. There are currently 500+ members world wide.
SEO Consultants - Strict inclusion guidelines for this directory of search engine optimization specialists and companies makes sure vendors do not engage in search spamming. They claim to reject 70% of the consultants that apply. After 7 years, there are only 140 SEO consultants and firms currently included so the process of inclusion is indeed selective.
Marketing Sherpa's Guide to SEO Firms, 2007 Edition - Offers a very detailed look at 106 Organic SEO firms. Yes you have to pay $199 for the guide, but the information allows you to compare firms on may levels ranging from clients to pricing to tactics.
Marketing Profs Vendor Selector - A list of the top SEM and SEO firms with additional information on each. There are 48 world wide SEO firms listed.
semlist.com - This vintage list was recently revised and is part of Incisive Media's Search Engine Watch web properties.
seopros.org - This is an older list and somewhat like seoconsultants.com.
Check out this article from Search Engine Watch on SEO Vendor selection based on a past Search Engine Strategies session.
Next steps would be to establish specific criteria and gather a list of SEO companies from a variety of sources: referrals, industry resources, forums, and even conferences and then interview each candidate firm according to the criteria you've established.
This can take some time, but the payoff can be a high value, appropriate cost relationship with a SEO vendor that best meets your needs in the short and long term. If you're looking for more advice on selecting a SEO firm, leave a comment or email us using the contact form.
Comments
About the Author:
Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He's been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.
|
