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Hi, and welcome to OurChurch.Com's "Questions and Answers", where we have the answers to
your questions. Today we are going to discuss choosing an SEO company.
Hi, I'm Mark Steinbrueck, and this is Kurt Steinbrueck. He's our Director of Marketing
Services at OurChurch.Com, and I've asked him to be a part of this video where we're
going to talk about Choosing an SEO Company. The first question to ask an SEO company is:
What is their mission or vision, and does it line up with yours as an organization?
Very simply put, just ask them, "What is your mission?" or "What is your vision? What is
your goal as a company?" and see what the response is. You'd be surprised to find out
how many organizations don't know this, or haven't defined it. If that's the case, most
likely their mission is probably just to make money. So it's good to ask that question and
find out if their mission or if their goals are aligned with what your goals are as an
organization. The second question to ask is: How long have
they been doing business or SEO professionally, and how many clients have they served?
If they've only been in business a few months, or even a few years, that may not be enough
time to really understand SEO and really be able to provide a good SEO service.
I would also add to that there really isn't any standard for SEO in a sense. There's no
license, like with a realtor, you have to have a realtor's license. There's nothing
like that in SEO. There are no certificates, there are no graduate programs. All you really
have to do to become an SEO is put up a website and say you're an SEO. So that happens a lot.
There's people that are just these fly by night companies; they just pop up out of nowhere
and they claim to be experts in search engine optimization, but they haven't ever done it.
Right. Yeah, and it's also helpful to go with an established business simply because you
want to make sure that they're going to be with you, by your side, and partnering with
you for a long time. Number three is: What will they be doing for you?
This is incredibly important, because SEO varies. One person's definition of SEO is
probably quite a bit different than what another person's is. So why don't you share a little
bit about that? Yeah, SEO is a very vague term. There's really
no distinct definition of it. I've seen webhosting companies that say that they do SEO, and all
they really mean is that search engines can crawl your site, they can read your site,
and maybe there are some automatically generated meta tags. They're not really doing anything
for you. This isn't really SEO, but they claim it. Then you can go from there to the broad
spectrum, where people are doing link building and content creation and social marketing
and all kinds of other elements to it. There's a broad range of what can be included in SEO,
so you really need to make sure that you know what exactly you are going to be doing.
Yeah, and I'd recommend even asking for that in writing. Write it down so you know exactly
what they're going to be doing, and that way it's not a "he said, she said" situation.
Fourth question to ask is: Do they have any client references who are
ranking well? Simply ask them for references. Granted, this
will probably be a list of their very satisfied customers that will say the best things about
them, but even that being the case, oftentimes when you have a customer that's talking to
another customer and you don't have the SEO company there to listen in, they'll let you
inside and give you a little bit of an insider tip. There might be some things that will
help you make your decision, possibly some positive things or some negative things that
would help you in your decision as far as which SEO company to choose.
Number five is: What are their ethics?
How do you ask this question? It's something that if I just came up to you and I said,
"What are your ethics?", you're going to tell me what you think I want to hear. So how do
you go about that? This is a little tricky. And yes, there are
ethics in search engine optimization. Asking them is probably not going to get you the
best answer. Like you said, they'll probably just tell you what they think you want to
hear. But you can ask questions that are a little more subtle. Maybe you say, "I've heard
that SEO takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time, but I don't really want to
wait that long. Are there things that we can do to speed up the process?" or "Are there
things where we can get around some of this hard work?"
If they say that there are, and "Yeah, we can do some things that are going to get past
this," that should be a red flag to you, that they're willing to step over certain boundaries
that the search engines may have said, "Don't do this," and they're willing to then risk
your website, your organization, to do this. This is a very dangerous thing, because you
can literally be penalized or even kicked out of the search engines altogether. So it's
important to be able to ask that. Another way to do this is just be aware of
the some of the black hat things. We say black hat; that really just means things that the
search engines have said, "Don't do this to try to game our system." Just be aware of
some of those things, so as they describe what they're going to do, you can know, "Oh,
that's one of those things that the search engines say don't do. That's going to risk
my site." Some of those things might be buying links;
it might be getting spammy links which are just low-quality, no value type of links;
maybe some on page, things like that. Stuffing keywords, or hiding text. Things like that.
Just make yourself familiar with that. There's a lot that I could go into. I actually go
into more of this in a video that hopefully we'll be able to make available to you. I'm
sure Mark would be willing to send you a link to that, if you'd be interested. But just
some of those things that you can be aware of and look out for.
Sure, yeah. Then the sixth question is: Do they have a history and understanding of
your type of organization and your niche? How does this differ from the question of
how long have you been in business, and is your mission and vision lined up with that
of ours? Well, just being in SEO doesn't necessarily
mean that you know all the different aspects of SEO. There are actually several niches
within SEO. One of the most obvious ones that you'll see is national SEO versus local SEO.
They're very different animals, so you may have been doing national SEO for a long time,
but if you're a local organization, a company who hasn't been doing local SEO may not know
what to do. They may try to apply national SEO to your site, which is not going to cover
all the bases. You can get even deeper, to where it's your
organization. If you're a church, it can be a little tricky. Obviously, I deal with churches
a lot, and when you're trying to create content for a church, you have to be very careful
because churches have specific beliefs. Unlike with a pizza shop, where I can just write
anything about pizza and they're probably not going to be bothered by it, with a church,
if you have someone who's writing things that are contrary to your beliefs, you've got a
big problem. There are things like that where if an organization hasn't been dealing with
churches, they may not recognize that. They may not know that that's an issue.
Yeah, so it's very important to make sure that the organization that you choose, the
SEO company, has a history and has a good understanding of your particular type of organization,
or they might either do things that aren't going to help you that much or, quite honestly,
they could do things that would hurt your reputation. It is very important.
Yeah, and there's also language. Christians tend to have their own take on certain words,
and not knowing that, if you're dealing with a non-Christian company, they may not understand
some of the terms that we use. So that's another way that it can affect us.
As a summary, here are six questions to ask when choosing an SEO company.
What is their mission or vision, and does it line up with yours?
How long have they been in business, how long have they been doing SEO professionally, and
how many clients have they served? What will they be doing for you? Get that
in writing. Do they have any client references who are
ranking well? What are their ethics? We talked about how
you probably need to ask that in a more subtle way.
Lastly, do they have an understanding of your type of organization?
Thank you, Kurt. I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to us. And also I appreciate
you taking the time to watch this video. I hope that it has been informative. If there's
anything that we can do here at OurChurch.Com, we would love to hear from you. You can fill
out the form below to request a free, no-obligation consultation.