Many businesses outsource their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts because professional companies have the time and skills to keep up on the ever changing demands of search engines and are knowledgeable about some of the more technical aspects of how to effectively optimize websites. Unfortunately there are quite a few search engine optimization scammers out there that end up getting online businesses in trouble or even blacklisted from the top search engines by using tactics that are considered bad practices.
While many search engine optimization professionals do have high integrity and use safe SEO techniques, you might want to keep a close eye on whoever you hire to do this work for you just to be on the safe side. Reviewing analytics for your website often will help you do this and the first thing you want to notice is if the traffic coming to your site is through organic or paid means. If you notice that your website’s traffic is mostly coming through paid online marketing, it tells you that your SEO professional isn’t doing enough to boost the natural SEO benefits for your site.
Another way to tell if your SEO professional is not as professional as they originally promised is if they are using any sort of automation to acquire inbound links, social media followers or social media posting activity. The search engines will penalize your site for suddenly getting thousands of inbound links coming in, this practice should only be done through high quality, manual methods, not an automatic link building program or link exchange program. Getting hundreds or thousands of social media followers does not help your social media efforts either because generally the accounts are created on the fly to use to look like real people, and aren’t even real people. They will never purchase a product or service, or engage with your site. It is better off to have 50 loyal followers than 1,000 fake ones. Also automatic posting of quotes or other types of generated content is just in bad taste. Chances are it will do little less than annoy your followers who sift through hundreds of the same stale quotes or content every day, you will end up being ignored and by them and quite possibly by the search engine.
Your best bet with search engine optimization professionals is to make sure they use ethical and best practices to optimize your site and social media sites. These professionals will be the ones that have a well established business, with customer reviews and testimonials and do not promise you the number one position at Google, anytime soon if at all. They will promise more reasonable results and will let you know that SEO is a building practice, not an overnight success tactic.
