We’re starting this week off with an article about being selective when choosing a company to undertake Search Engine Optimisation for your website.

Selecting a company to do any work for you can be a challenge. You need to decide whether you think you can trust them, whether they will give you value for money (not just if they are “cheap”!) and if they will deliver what you want.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) there are lots of companies out there offering services at varying pricing models – most of which have their place and will suit different types of customer.

One of the most important things though comes down to trust. If trust is not there, or the SEO company tries to take advantage, then disaster can result!

It is vital to ascertain the terms of the SEO contract and whether you can cancel the SEO work at any point during the contract. Also, you need to know what action the company will take if you do cancel. You need to make sure that they will not do any of the following which will obliterate your site’s rankings:

1.       Removing all previous on-page SEO work and content from your site including all meta tag changes and optimised text content

2.       Adding a robots.txt file to your site which will block all search engine spiders from crawling your site

3.       Going as far as actually removing all your listings from Google etc.. so that you will not appear anywhere in their listings

These are all pretty damaging to a site, and item 3 will not only reduce your visitors from search engines, it will stop all natural search engine traffic completely!

Unfortunately, there are companies out there that will employ these tactics, so beware. Know your rights, and get your SEO contract terms clear before you commit to any long-term contract.

Hope this proves helpful to someone. We’re here to help!

Over and out…