What Questions to Ask in SEO Interview

[timscullin]

Tomorrow morning I have a call with an SEO company interested in doing some work with our company. Its a larger company who do a lot of SEO work, and seem to have good feedback around the place.

But we have been very very white hat in our all our our SEO work so far, and some of their wording on their site talks about "Negotiations and acquisitions of link partners".. which gives me the feel they might be a little grey hat..

What are some good questions we should ask these guys to make sure what they are doing is legit, and not going to get us stung for anything?

And what sort of work should we get them to do, if we are happy to take care of content creation, on page optimisation and social media activities?

Thanks!

[heatherrobinson]

I would ask to see work they've done for other clients, then take a look at their clients' backlink profile in Open Site Explorer. This should give you an idea about their link building tactics if you think that will be a concern.

Content creation would be a good area for them to start as you could sign off any content before it goes live or gets distributed. You'd then get a feel for their professionalism and knowledge.

Hope that helps and good luck!

Heather

[Alex-Harford]

There's some good advice here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

I remember reading a really useful article about hiring an SEO company, I thought it was here on SEOmoz, but I can't find it. This looks helpful though: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066873/Selecting-an-SEO-Firm-The-What-How-and-Who

[timscullin]

Thanks for your responses.

I had a look in OSE as per your sugestion Heather, and looks like they have a lot of directory submissions stuff, and the rest seems pretty natural.

However there was one thing that stood out. They had a bunch of different sites which had a link in the sidebar. All these sites were on the exact same wordpress theme and look like they could have been created by the company for SEO.Is that the kind of "shadow Sites" mentioned in the Google Webmasters pad that Alex linked to? The sites seem to have legit content, but have obviously all been created very quickly and used to generate links back to the site..

Any thoughts?

Is this legit, or should we be concerned?

[Alex-Harford]

Even if it's legit, if there's anything I don't like about a potential company, I wouldn't employ their services - there's plenty of competition. Would you want your company associated with the sort of content you mention? You could always ask them about those links and see what they say. It might be worth paying more money just to go with a company that has a reliable reputation.

There's some good advice about employing a link builder below the video here: http://www.stephanspencer.com/hiring-a-link-builder/