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seo agency review - eflaunt

Before you get all excited, we're not going to review specific SEO agencies - mainly because we would be *slightly* biased, and it's not entirely professional. However, what we are going to do is give you a few pointers which will enable you to run a health check on the activities of your SEO agency.

While these points may not change your mind about your existing SEO agency, they may give you better understanding of the industry in general. Hopefully for those without an SEO agency, this guide will help you through the decision making process.

Step 1 - Google them!

Google doesn't lie! Well sometimes they may miss stuff, so try out Yahoo, MSN and Ask as well. Simply do a search for the company name (or the URL without the "www." or ".com" parts). Have a browse through a few of the search results and see if anything interesting pops up.

Suprisingly, most SEO agencies aren't too hot when it comes to brand protection, so it's usually not too hard to find something juicy about them. Are past clients unhappy? Have they been banned from search engines?

If you find there are too many results, then try refining your seach with the following terms:

• brand + forum (this should return any forum mentions of the company)
• brand + spam (this should return any mentions of the company spamming)
• brand + banned (this should return any mentions of the company being banned from search engines)

Be sure to check through the top 50 or so results (you don't need to look at every page) - some older items may get burried deeper in the results. Also note that you might find the same press release repeated over multiple sites - this is an old link building technique and should be ignored.

Step 2 - get full disclosure on what they are doing for you

There are a few reasons an SEO agency may refuse to disclose what they are doing:

• They are up to no good and don't want you to know
• They perceive their work as unique and don't want to reveal their secrets

The first one there should automatically set alarm bells, but the second point is deceptively reasonable. Here's a secret - there are no secrets. Apart from that one...

All the information you need to SEO your site is freely available on the web, including the majority of the stuff SEO agencies will give you. What you pay for is the fact that the agency has weeded through the vast amounts of bad information and created a strategy for you to apply based on the good information.

Now the issue here is that potentially what your SEO agency is doing can harm your site in the long term (search engine optimisation has many differing techniques - some short term, some long term). This is what you need disclosed.

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