Picking the right SEO company can be very difficult. I recently had a new client call asking for a quote, he had already spoken to around eight different SEO companies in the UK. He was pretty upset by the fact that each SEO company had told him differing stories on how his site should be optimised (a couple had even suggested he should only link build!) and his quotes varied from £50 a month to in excess of £1000 a month. The words snake and oil come to mind. It is no wonder it is becoming increasingly difficult for business owners to make a decision.

The following post should help most people take a step in the right direction to selecting the right SEO company.

The first step in SEO should be a website analysis. Is the SEO company you are talking to offering to analyse your site? They should be. They should also offer a Website Analysis Report for you to read over. This will highlight problem areas in your site and how the SEO company intends to rectify these problems if you take them on.  The SEO analysis should be free of charge and should be provided to you BEFORE you sign up, in fact you should not feel obliged to sign up even after receiving it. Areas which should be covered in the report include use of META data, keyword density analysis, use of headers, use of alt tags, use of site maps and information on back links.

Reputable SEO companies in the UK will also provide a proposal document which will detail the work which will be performed, this should include fixing the issues raised in the SEO analysis report. It should also specify how much link building will be done, where the links will be placed and how long it will take. This proposal should also contain information on payment terms. Watch out for work which is shown in the document but not actually included in your package. Some companies have been known to show work which ‘can’ be done, but will actually cost you more. Ensure you know exactly what they will do and how much it will cost.

An important point is to check how much of the work the company will actually complete. Ensure the company has the developers in place to deal with your site and the technology it is built on. It has been known for companies to simply tell clients what needs to be done then ask them to get their own developers to complete the work. This will end up costing you more.

Once you have narrowed down your choice of SEO companies it is best to check their results. The best SEO companies will have a SEO results page showing rankings achieved for clients. The trick here is not to look at how big the clients are but to look at each term optimised, how many competing pages there are on Google and what position they have achieved for the client. The reason for not looking at the size of the client is that large clients will often lots and lots of money to spend and will naturally be attracted to the larger SEO firms, these large firms will often neglect the smaller fish. Try to select an SEO firm that will look after you and treat you as importantly as someone spending 10 times as much.

The next step is to ask for a reference from an existing client. If possible you should speak to someone. Ask them how long they have been clients, if there are any problems and what kind of results have been achieved.

Hopefully these pointers will steer you in the right direction to choosing the right SEO company.

Yahoo! Adevertising have been sending out emails informing clients minimum bids have been reduced for a number of terms in the UK market. Here is an extract from an email:

“In this economic climate, we understand that you need to stretch your marketing budget as far as possible. So we thought you’d be happy to learn about some changes that we hope will help lower your costs and increase your clicks.

After a thorough review of our keyword marketplaces, we have opted to lower the minimum bid requirements on a number of terms in the UK market. This review process is a part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our search marketplace.”

Could this be more about them trying to drum up more business than it is about helping advertisiers?

One of the most common questions we come across from people looking for PPC management is “how can I get it done cheaply?”.

Bullseye Media offers fixed price PPC management packages starting from as little as £200 a month.  However this is not as low as prices go, it totally depends on the size of the campaign.

Of course cheap does not mean you get less of a service. We treat customer equally and provide a high level of service to everyone.

Check out our fixed cost packages here.

Matt Cutts of Google reported the new PageRanks should be released soon. The interesting point about the responses to this post was that so many people don’t actually understand how PageRank is determined and what it represents. Yet when it drops clients are always on the phone wanting to know why it has dropped and what has gone wrong.

Maybe Matt will write a new post on how PageRank works?

Cuil (pronounced cool) is a new search engine hyped to be the Google Killer.  However on first sight I have found the search results badly layed out, and perhaps relevancy needs to be looked at.

On the plus side they treat users privacy very seriously:

” when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”

For the time being however, Cuil should not be putting a dent in Google’s search figures, not unless they have a hidden secret weapon…

Lane Ellis of SearchEngineWorld reported a couple of days ago that Internet giant Google and its collection of webproperties held on to the top spot for online destinations. Google first achieved this postiion in May from Yahoo! according to web analytics company comScore.

Start-ups are often faced with the difficult decision of investing in one or the other. While PPC can bring in immediate sales and leads, no one can dispute the importance of a well implemented SEO strategy for long-term gains.