Questions to Ask your SEO Professional

You pay your SEO professional, and sit back wondering what happens next if you are like many people. You wonder how fast you’ll see results, how they are going to get you to the top, and if it there will be any problems. Not every question has a definitive answer, but if you read on, you’ll learn a lot about what your SEO should be doing.

Ideally your site soars in the rankings naturally, and you start to receive higher traffic and more importantly higher conversions. That is what everyone is after, right? Everyone wants traffic, conversions, great page rank and top slots in the SERPs. A recent conversation in a forum I frequent got me thinking about it all though. The two people involved in the conversation were an SEO and a freelance writer.

The writer was shocked that the SEO had provided a service and was patiently waiting for payment instead of demanding instant release of funding provided. The SEO kept saying. ‘No – it’s cool. They’ll pay me when they see the results’. The writer couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that the SEO was willing to let their work be judged by its results. The SEO knew that what they had done would deliver the desired result, and that the proof was in the pudding. In fairness though – the SEO did take a portion of the payment and held the rest in escrow – it wasn’t strictly and honor system deal, but you see the point.

Demand more than empty words from your SEO. Don’t be satisfied with vague promises such as ‘we will make your site rank #1′ or ‘we will get you a thousand back-links’. There is more to it than that, and anyone that gives an iron clad guarantee of #1 on Google is either exceptional or foolish. You need to find out which one they are, because if they are a fool, you are as much a fool to entrust them with your SEO.

Ask the following questions to see if what you are told will meet your needs and makes sense to you:

Will you be using organic SEO or PPC to make my site #1? This does make a big difference in your wallet!

Where do you get links from? Are they from directories, submission sites, a combination of those and others, etc..

What kind of PageRank do the sites my back-links come from have?

How much will my traffic increase? Can you get a rough estimate of what to expect – even in terms of a percentage?

How much will my conversions increase?

When can I expect to see results? Is this going to be something I see immediately or will it slowly grow over a period of weeks or months? Knowing this can take a lot of stress out of your life.

By asking all these questions, you gather valuable information about what your SEO actually knows, what they can do, and how fast they can do it. Your LAST question should be ‘How much will it cost?” – not your first. Stick to this formula and you’ll do well!