How do you go about finding a trustworthy SEO expert for your site?

As a business owner, you know very well that trust is very important in any partnerships or business relationships. There are many SEO firms out there and you need to be very careful in choosing the right one to do business with.

We will talk about the technical skillsets below, but they really need to have some soft skills, because SEO, done properly, is not an overnight solution which then lasts forever – there is monitoring, reporting, and tweaking as things change.

Important attributes include:

• Are realistic as to what’s really possible for your rankings? For example, if you are trying to rank #1 for the keyword “online MBA” in two months, it’s just not possible, as companies and universities have been working on this for years with a ton of money and resources behind them. They should be able to evaluate and analyze the competitive nature of your keywords and recommend a realistic timeframe and budget to get you ranked.
• Communicate to you regularly on the status. This can be either weekly or monthly depending upon how often you want to monitor your rankings. Start of with at least once per month. See below for what you should be monitoring.
• Speaking of communications, they should have at least a couple of blogs on their site about SEO, what it takes, etc., to educate you on not only what they do, but on what SEO really means. If they can coherently write about it, chances are they’ll be able to coherently communicate with you.
• Understand what your needs are. It may take only a slight increase in traffic to sell a few more of your items to make a big difference in the revenue of your business. Here is one place where you must understand the Lifetime Value of your clients so you know how much to spend and how often. We’ll have more on that in another SEO post.
• Have a grasp on the difference between strategy and tactics, and communicate with you on that difference. Basically, the strategy is a long-term goal and should not change much, but the tactics are short-term and can change depending upon what works to accomplish the strategy.