I’m An Online Marketing Expert Because I Say So: How To Tell If Your SEO Company Is A Good One
Digital Marketing

I’m An Online Marketing Expert Because I Say So: How To Tell If Your SEO Company Is A Good One

It is a pity that there is no regulation in the world of online marketing and there will not be in the coming years. Yes. Google has penalized some of the biggest SEO companies for not keeping their promises, but the search engine can’t police the entire web.

That said, how do you know that the company you just hired has any authority on the subject? Well, actually, it’s not that hard to measure your online marketing acumen. Here are some ways to figure out whether or not your new provider knows what they’re doing:

1. Check the company’s Alexa rating
An Alexa Rating is a rating given by the alexa.com site that attempts to measure the online reputation of a business or website among web browsers who seem to know the web a little better than the general public. You can easily find the exact measurement through a basic web search, but the rating has to do with your site visitors who have downloaded an Alexa toolbar. With this rating, the lower the better.

If an online marketing/SEO company’s Alexa rating is over 1,000,000, stay away. This is a telltale sign that they don’t know their way around the web. In reality, your company should use 0.5 million as the break point, however, anything over 1,000,000 is like recruiting an NFL pitcher. The two do not fit well.

2. Check the company’s backlinks
Checking the backlinks of any company can be done quite easily through two different ways. The first is to go to Yahoo Search and in the toolbar type the following: site:www.domain.com. Upon pressing enter, you will see two buttons. The button to the right will say “InLinks”.

The number inside this button will give you a rough estimate of how many backlinks this SEO company has created for themselves. If the number is less than 1,500, then the link building acumen of the company is quite weak. Any reputable online marketing/search engine optimization company should boost 5,000+. Since effective link building is about 50% of the generic online marketing game, your new online marketing vendor should be a wizard.

Along with Yahoo, you can see a sample of the backlinks that Google associates with the company’s site by simply typing links:www.domain.com in the search bar. When it comes to counting links, Google always formulates a very different number than Yahoo, although Google more easily shows you the sites your new SEO company is linking to. Do some research on these links and ask yourself the following:

Do the links have high PR? Are the links relevant? Are these links the ones you would like? First of all, has the company been mentioned in any seemingly worthwhile SEO-related articles?

Also, when you first checked the company’s Alexa rating, alexa.com will give you its own version of the link count for each site you search in the directory. Try to stick with signatures that have 50 or more Alexa links. 50 links +/- should be your line in the sand.

3. See where the business ranks for specific generic SEO searches
First of all, the most effective SEO companies, if someone searches Google for “SEO companies” or a variation of it, it should appear in the first three pages of results. There are search engine optimization companies that consistently stay on the first page of searches, but that doesn’t mean that your potential provider can’t be included in the first 3 pages. Unlike many of the rules I’ve established, this is not a hard and fast rule, although the search rule I’m about to mention is of great importance.

To see what searches your online marketing company is looking for, simply check some of the backlinks you have through your link search through Google, Yahoo, or both. If the backlinks say “San Diego SEO Company” then you will know the keywords your new provider is searching for and see the subsequent results. If the company is attacking very niche search engine optimization terms and it doesn’t rank, move on.

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