To people who may be unfamiliar with SEO services, the whole world of internet marketing can seem extremely complicated and questionable when it comes to value. With a variety of questionable black-hat tactics still in use by some “SEO” firms, coupled with unrealistic promises related to instant SEO results, it’s no wonder that many company’s feel at a loss when it comes to SEO. Thankfully, the professionals at Einstein SEO have been Minnesota SEO specialists for more than a decade. If you’re looking for the most effective return on investment for your marketing dollars, Einstein SEO should be at the top of the list when it comes to hiring a reputable SEO services company. If you get an email, phone call, or even a direct face to face sales pitch claiming instant results, read on to the bottom for some warning signs and questions you should ask.
When Can I Expect SEO Results?
The most common question that we’re asked by potential clients is, “when can I expect results?” While we wish that there was a crystal ball that we could point to that would show us exactly when your website would begin to rank for the variety of terms that we’re targeting, the reality is that high quality, effective SEO services take time. When working with a reputable SEO company you should be able to see results almost immediately. Do you know why?
It’s because as far as cold hard SEO results go, the beautiful part is our results are public, almost no matter what stage of search engine optimization you’re in. There are a few general guidelines you should be aware of. Typically once any on page/site SEO project is finished, or a new SEO campaign has started, you should start to see the results in movement of your pages on search engine results pages within a week, but due to the nature of how search engines crawl, index, and rank, these early results can be very sporadic. We recommend giving the search engines 21-30 days to “settle” enough to gauge progress. This will not be the case if you are starting completely from scratch, or if you’ve been penalized or “blacklisted” previously. In those cases, it may take longer to see changes, as you’re working your way up to under #100 (or page 10) where most of SEO results tools stop looking. You can can try to track this through the search engines manually, but it can become very tedious.
But When Will I See RESULTS?
Ahh, you mean (if you’re like any other business owner I know) “When will my site be the only result shown on the internet?”… I’m kidding, and all joking aside, the real question is when will my site be receiving enough organic traffic that it is generating enough business to cut other advertising, hire more staff, generate ‘x’ amount of dollars, or [insert goal here]? That depends on your goals, and specifically where you are at in the process of attaining those goals. There are almost infinite possible starting points, and stages depending on what you’ve done up to now…
What Stage of the Optimization Process Am I Currently In?
To answer this, we first learn about your company’s current online presence including current site ranking, what types of marketing or SEO campaigns you have used, or are currently using, and what your exact goals are. Next we would look at what kind of competitive market the keywords you need to rank for are in, and what different SEO and marketing strategies we can utilize to get you to the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines for those keywords organically; without paid ads. (You say, but I’m probably paying you, so what’s the difference? I talk about that a little later down the page.) All of this allows us to establish a starting point, and be able to set reasonable goals going forward.
How To Tell My SEO is Working
That is the easiest one. We can track traffic, e-commerce sales, phone calls from, emails, and forms submitted through your site by way of Google Analytics and other software. You won’t need to ask that question when you work with an Expert SEO Company like Einstein SEO. You’ll know the SEO is working because your site will be a 24/7/365 salesman generating leads. Back to when will I see the results question; once again, I can only generalize, and I think I’ve givin enough supporting information to back up, that every situation is different. I can tell you that once a baseline SEO ranking has been established, that typically an ongoing SEO campaign for targeting a medium competitive market with White-Hat only SEO techniques can take up to 6 months to fully secure. I can also tell you I’ve spent much, much longer getting top level keywords that had established owners. While that may seem like a long time, there are stop-gaps.
Supplement with Google Adwords
If you said “I can’t wait 6 months or longer! I have to have that keyword now!”, we can do that too. In fact there have been many times when a client wanted to know if we could do any of those “Overnight 1st page ranking” schemes. Sure we do, they’re called paid ads. When you are a client at Einstein, we can help you setup, and optimize your Google, Bing, or Yahoo paid ad accounts to get you the best return for your money. We do not offer these services for pay as we feel there is already enough overhead, without another middle man here. Supplementing your site’s traffic with paid ads is fine to do while your SEO campaigns are building, or to target harder to reach keywords you don’t want to invest the time or money into getting organically, but remember, when you shut off the ads, the traffic goes away. That’s the real difference with SEO, you keep reaping the benefits. Unfortunately, it’s time to get to the bad part.
Warning Signs of a Bad SEO Company
Some other SEO “specialists” may claim that they can have your site ranking for loads of keywords in just a few weeks, but sadly they’re simply taking you for a ride. Even if they could get your site to rank within a few short weeks, chances are they’re using a variety of black hat tactics that will get you knocked lower than you were, or worse, banned from showing up with the major search engines. If your business relies on internet leads being banned from the search engines this could be very bad. At Einstein SEO, we only employ the most above board, white hat SEO tactics to ensure that your site will stay clear of any search engine penalties.
Duplicate/Advertising/Marketing Sites
This one comes in many forms, but you should never have another live copy of your site for marketing. Any marketing you do should be driven to your site. I’m not talking about building new, unique, content rich sites to target different markets, but companies that want to clone your site for ads, or to put it in their marketing format, or to use for “landing pages”. Even larger “Web” companies (I hope you get the reference, I don’t want to get sued) that create these sites sometimes do so without you knowledge. If you bought the whole site and design w/ SEO package, they set it up then clone and move to your domain, while keeping the development one running as the marketing site! I have literally moved clients away and found links still referencing the dev site on the live one so users can actually accidentally be taken to the dev site, and be actively using it. Tell me that’s not duplicate content? Now, it gets worse, those monthly SEO services that are actually just Paid Ads, they point those to their marketing version of your site. Do you know why they do this? So that when you wake up and leave, and they turn off the ads, not only does the ad traffic stop, but you have no actual real SEO value in your site as all traffic has been going to the other, and your real one? Probably lowered in rankings for duplicate content reasons now. Seriously makes my blood boil, and I think it’s wrong to sell paid ads as SEO. Paid ads are Search Engine Marketing.
Additional Bad SEO Warning Signs
- Anything ‘Secret’ – SEO Secrets or insider knowledge claims are flat out lies, or black hat techniques that will hurt you. Google, and all search engines tell you exactly what you need to do to be found on the internet. I’m not saying there aren’t techniques and methods that work better, but I’m also telling you there isn’t a silver bullet secret.
- Link Scams/Backlink Tools/Software – Anything, or anyone, that’s going to automatically, instantly, or in any way quickly add thousands of backlinks to your site will not be doing you any favors. If you see an initial bump in traffic (after the software, or room full of paid workers, bombard your site) it will soon die away as all of the links are flagged by search engines as spam. If you’re lucky, your site won’t get penalized and drop.
- Anything that sounds too good to be true – When it comes to SEO the old saying rings pretty true in my experience. Good and Fast ain’t Cheap; Cheap and Good ain’t Fast; and most importantly Fast and Cheap ain’t Good.
Einstein SEO – Reputable SEO Specialists
If you’re tired of dealing with companies that don’t stand behind their work, or are hard to find at the end of the month when you’re looking for results, it’s time to call Einstein SEO. We’ve been a veteran in the SEO business for years and would be happy to earn your business. We look at our customers as family and we do everything in our power to look out for our “family.” To learn more about our local Minnesota SEO services or to setup a free consultation with one of our SEO specialists, don’t hesitate to contact us today at 763-951-2200.
