With all the discussion of individuals ratting out websites and or certain seo companies you probably think this post is about just that. Don’t worry, you can breathe a sigh of relief, I wouldn’t waste yours nor my time with such a post. However, I absolutely will take this time to help you sniff out seo rats that are looking to take advantage of small businesses by promising top search engine rankings. A realistic promise is a great point to start off with…
Seo expectations and promises
Everyone wants to rank for trophy keywords but I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you’re a small business you probably don’t stand a chance. With that said please don’t let these seo rats come into your office swearing up and down that they have the magic tools to get your site ranking for “Book” (which I cover in a previous youmoz post as a top 25 competitive keyword!). A good seo will be able to take a look at your existing site and link profile to determine the Chinese Australia Phone Number List appropriate keywords for your site to target. When targeted properly – long tail traffic will generate not only more traffic but higher quality traffic. In fact, artificially inflated traffic as a whole is another signal of a shady rat seo we need to cover.
Quality traffic doesn’t always come in large quantities
Which one of these would you rather have? One hundred visitors to your site netting one phone call, e-mail, sale — or 25 visits in which 10 convert to a phone call, e-mail or sale? You’re all salivating over the second scenario right? Some seo rats promise certain benchmarks for traffic which they can easily inflate by paying overseas contractors pennies to pay a visit to your site. For this reason it’s important that you not only avoid the ‘traffic’ promises but also require access to your sites analytics if you don’t have it available already.
Access to site analytics
Most seos will forward some Email Lists type of ‘seo report’ on either a monthly or quarterly basis. While the good seos accurately depict your sites data not all do. Some seo rats will hide “Bad” information or purposely leave out data that may look them look badly. It’s important that you demand access to your sites analytics. It’s your responsibility as the site owner to keep an eye out for your website at all times. Access to your analytics will not only allow you to see how much traffic is coming to your site but where it is coming from as well! If you proactively monitor your analytics you should see referral data from websites your seo is building links from as well.