SEO is the foundation of your marketing campaign - at least it should be. Aside from any other marketing that you participate in, you should also make sure your site is ranked in the top of the engines so you can tap into the millions (actually over 400 million) searches performed daily.

So, how do you pick an SEO Firm? It is a very important decision.

I was talking to a man recently who told me the problem was he didn't even know what questions to ask, let alone how to evaluate the answers.

Here is some guidance on what to ask and what to expect in response.

Do you have any initial or set up fees? How much and what are they for? Are there ongoing fees and how much are they?

They should be able to outline all fees and tell you exactly what is included. Different firms price things differently. If they require full payment up front, that may concern me. Most firms will require some payment up front, and that is to be expected. You need to look at what they are proposing, make sure it is clear to you and make sure you are OK with it.

Is monthly maintenance necessary?

Any SEO Firm that knows what they are talking about should tell you that maintenance and monitoring of rankings is required to ensure you don't start losing rankings. If they tell you that you will lose rankings as soon as you leave them, they are lying—or more accurately they are just guessing. They don't really know for sure. However experience shows us that rankings do tend to maintain until the next major algorithm shift and then if no one is maintaining them for you, they may begin to drop. SEO is not the kind of thing you do once and then you are done. To maintain and hopefully even increase your rankings, you need to have someone continually working on your behalf. Alternatively, you could learn to handle some of the maintenance items yourself. But the key is to realize that someone needs to monitor your rankings and work on your in order to hold on to your top rankings and grow them. Don't forget the engines themselves reported that approximately 25% of searches each month are never before seen phrases. So, at the very least you'll want to monitor what new phrases are popping up and make sure you are getting exposure for them.

How long is my term of service?

Typically you should hear anywhere from 3—12 months. Anything less than 3 months isn't long enough to see any matured results. Six months seems to be the industry standard middle ground. With six months you aren't locked in too long, but it does allow time for the campaign to mature.

Do you offer a Guarantee?

Contrary to popular belief, guarantees aren't all bad. You just have to make sure you aren't being promised something that no one can actually deliver.

- Top rankings in less than 30 days? Not likely.

- Guaranteed amount of site visitors or conversions? With regular SEO and no other services no SEO Firm can guarantee the precise number of visitors or the conversion rates.

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