If you’ve been cheated by an unethical SEO firm, it’s easy to feel burned by the industry as a whole. A lot of people who have been the victim of an SEO scam think that the firm they worked with is representative of SEO companies in general. Well, we can promise you that isn’t true. There are plenty of SEO firms that use only White Hat (or Google-approved) SEO strategies to improve their clients’ traffic.
Here are some tips for ensuring you don’t get cheated again:
- Don’t choose an SEO company that guarantees rankings, offers absurdly cheap plans or can’t point to success stories.
- Ask the SEO companies you’re speaking to what their strategies are for improving clients’ search rankings. While whoever you speak to probably won’t get into the nitty-gritty of SEO with you, they should be able to explain the companies main SEO tactics. While they do this, listen for phrases like “Content-based” and “White Hat.”
- Ask for a few clients who could give you a reference. If the company seems hesitant to give you this information, it’s a big red flag. When speaking to the business’ references, ask how long they’ve worked with the SEO client. Long-lasting relationships are a good sign that the company is reputable.
- Find out if your agency knows about technical SEO as well. Ask what they know about the canonical tag (it’s a tag that specifies the prefered version of a page and is usually used for sites with www before the domain name and sites without www before the domain name) and robots.txt (a file that tells search engine spiders whether they’re allowed to crawl a page) to get a good idea of their knowledge.
After getting cheated by an unethical SEO firm, it’s understandable to not want to try again with a new firm, but we hope that you’ll try. At Fahrenheit Marketing, we use only content-based strategies to improve our clients’ online visibility. Contact us today for a free consultation. We would love to show you why we’re different.