The Top Questions to ask an SEO Company

3 Expert Opinions – Search Engine Journal, Google, and SEOMoz tell you what you should ask an SEO Company before hiring them.

Tell me about your expertise with SEO.
Tell me about 3 SEO projects that you’re most proud of and why you’re proud of them.
What’s your #1 rule with SEO?
Tell me about your biggest failure with SEO and what you learned from it.
What are your go to SEO tools?
How do you carry out competitive analysis of keywords/SERPs as part of the keyword research process?
Let’s say you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and there haven’t been any improvements, how would you diagnose the problem?
Have you ever outsourced SEO work? Give me one example.
What are effective metrics for tracking return on investment from SEO?

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
What’s your experience in my industry?
What’s your experience in my country/city?
What’s your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Which is more likely to have a positive impact on a page’s search engine rankings and why – 10 links from 1 website or 1 link each from 10 different websites?
Explain the difference between the following items and how the search engines treat them – 301 response code, 302 response code, canonical URL tag and meta refresh.
How can the meta robots tag impact how search engines crawl, index and display content on a web page?
Who are the top 2 search engines (as ranked by share of queries) in the following countries – the United States, United Kingdom, Russia and China?
Name at least 3 elements critical to ranking well in Google Local/Maps/Places search.
What aspects of social media marketing have a positive impact on search engine rankings (apart from the value of direct links from the social sites)?
List 5 tags/locations on a page where employing a target keyword can have a positive effect on search engine rankings.
Describe the distribution of search query demand and what is meant by the “fat head” and “long tail.”
Name 6 tools/sources that will display a list of external URLs that link to a webpage.
What are some ways to positively influence the ratio of pages a search engine will crawl and index on a website?
BONUS! Describe the concept of topic modeling and how modern search engines might use it to improve the quality of their results.