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Whether you’ve already hired someone to optimize your site or are considering doing so, trying to discern whether or not they actually know anything about SEO can be rather intimidating.  Assessing the competence of SEOs is often like trying to figure out whether or not a doctor actually knows anything about the field of medicine before becoming a malpractice victim.

Scams abound in the SEO industry and snake oil salesmen are typically adept at baffling you with buzzwords that make them seem knowledgeable.  Doing an SEO audit when you understand little or nothing about SEO can seem all but impossible.  If you’re like most business owners, you have no idea where to begin or what to look for in assessing a company’s true level of competence and understanding of Search Engine Optimization.  The most important thing to keep in mind is: BUYER BEWARE!

Outdated and overtly black hat tactics can pose a great threat to your site’s long term success in the search results, so you shouldn’t trust your optimization efforts to just anyone.  The sad reality is that there are a great number of companies that will sell SEO services with absolutely no understanding of SEO whatsoever.

Protecting Yourself From SEO Charlatans

Knowledge is the best defense against being taken advantage of by a scammer.  If your marketing plan hinges upon potential customers finding your website in a search engine, a bad SEO can endanger the life of your business in much the same way a bad doctor can endanger your health and well-being.

Unfortunately most site owners don’t realize they’ve partnered with a snake oil SEO until it is far too late.  Many companies that claim to know SEO prey on their clients’ ignorance and purposely utilize tactics that will provide short-term ranking results, but can lead to the domain being penalized or – worse yet – ultimately being banned from the search engines’ indexes altogether.

That said, I’d like to share with you some basic (and free) tools that you can use to assess the search engine friendliness of a website.  These tools can be used to assess your website (perhaps to check up on the work your current SEO has supposedly been doing), a competitor’s website or even an SEO company’s website before you hire them.

Please keep in mind that these tools offer basic information and shouldn’t be considered a comprehensive approach to assessing the overall skill, knowledge or competence of any SEO – be it an individual or a firm.

Free Basic SEO Audit Tools

META Tag Analyzer from SEOCentro

Running a META tag analysis can help you to glean some information about the basic on-page SEO techniques incorporated into the development of a website page.  Such an analysis provides a quick glimpse at the length of titles and META tags (like the description and keywords), as well as their relevancy to page content.

Length and relevancy are incredibly basic and rudimentary aspects of on-site SEO. Anyone claiming to know anything about SEO should understand – and follow – the basic on-site SEO best practices as they relate to title, description, and keyword length & relevancy.

While there are no hard and fast “rules” regarding the specific character length of titles and descriptions, using the META Tag Analyzer at SEOCentro is a quick and easy way to determine whether titles and description & keywords META tags for an individual page follow the industry’s accepted best practices.  If not, there is certainly reason to be skeptical of the SEO’s competence.

Website Grader from HubSpot

This tool will give you a snapshot of a site’s overall search engine friendliness.  I like this tool because it assigns a numerical score between 1 and 100, providing virtually any business owner with a general idea of how well a site follows accepted optimization best practices.  The scale of 1-100 helps even the most Internet challenged business owner to understand how search engine friendly a site is, even without fully understanding the importance of the individual criteria used to determine the overall score.

While the score itself is important, pay particular attention to any “errors” indicated by the report.  Issues like titles & descriptions being too long, improper use of headings, and a large number of images with missing ALT attributes are all indications that many basic on-page SEO best practices have not been properly incorporated into the site’s optimization efforts.  Such a lack of attention to detail regarding the optimization basics is a significant cause for concern.

I always recommend running a report on any SEO firm’s website before hiring them.  Why?  Well, the answer to that is simple:  if an individual or company claims to understand SEO and expects you to pay them to optimize your website, there is no excuse for their own site not to pass a basic Website Grader assessment with flying colors.  That’s just my opinion.

That’s not to say that every SEO company must score a 100 in order to be considered reputable.  However, whether you’re currently working with an SEO firm or thinking of hiring one, a score less than 90 should certainly raise a red flag.  Scores of 80 or less warrant a much closer inspection of the individual report criteria before you consider forking over any part of your marketing budget.

So…What’s Next?

Don’t be afraid to ask for references.  Keep in mind that some of the best independent SEOs in the business used to work for other companies – meaning they may not legally be able to provide you with a client list.  If they’ve just started their own venture and haven’t had the opportunity to build their own long-term clientele, this shouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker.

If references are available, use the aforementioned tools to assess their sites.  The same rules apply – if the sites they’ve optimized can’t pass those basic tests, chances are there is good reason to question the effectiveness of the strategy and tactics employed in an attempt to optimize them.  If a firm or individual didn’t properly optimize the sites they provide to you as references, they’re unlikely to do a better job for you.

It’s also important to find out how long their references have been clients.  Six months or less really doesn’t give an accurate view of the long-term effectiveness of the optimization strategy or the SEO’s competence one way or the other.  A client would probably be thrilled if the site jumped from page 1000 to page 1 of Google for the term “DVD player” in less than 30 days.  If you were to ask them again 6 months later – perhaps after the site has been banned for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines – the answer will likely be very different.

Lastly, SEOs using the word “guarantee” in reference to positioning in the search results means only one thing:  IT IS A SCAM.  Absolutely no reputable SEO will offer a guarantee of any kind regarding a site’s position in the search results.  Period.

Search results can change at any time and for a wide variety of reasons – sometimes changing from hour to hour and even from computer to computer, depending on the search user’s individual search preferences or location.  If a company or individual starts making claims that they can “guarantee page 1…” or “rank your site #1 in 7 days…”, the only thing that is guaranteed is that it is a scam.

Guest Post By:  Alysson Fergison, a.k.a. “SEOAly” – Alysson is an experienced copywriter, blogger, and SEO.  Over the past few years she has provided hundreds of hours of SEO consultation and optimization services to small business website owners in a variety of industries throughout the United States.  She currently provides SEO audits, keyword research, copy writing, and WordPress site/blog development services.