Choosing an SEO Firm To Drive Traffic to Your Online Store

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July 16, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Reviews Content Team
(Part 1 in a Series of SEO Tips for Ecommerce Success)

One of the most daunting tasks for anyone with an online business, is that of choosing an SEO firm to drive more traffic to their site. SEO, stands for search engine optimization and relates to how your website ranks in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. SEO firms and individual SEOs, improve the code, content, and structure of your website to help increase its position in search engines for traffic driving search terms (keywords). SEO requires a large investment of time and analysis, which is why many merchants turn to an SEO firm to handle this time consuming task, so that they can focus on the other aspects of their online business.

Unfortunately, finding the right SEO firm to work with is not as easy as deciding you need an SEO expert at your disposal. This is because the SEO industry is not regulated by any governing body, which can sometimes lead to a few snake oil salesmen that promise big, yet under deliver. Those who are amazing at SEO and have years of experience under their belt, tend to charge a minimum fee of $150/hour, which can be very hard to swallow for the small business merchant. Because of this, many people get swept up in firms that offer things like “10,000 links for $100″ or “Guaranteed #1 Position or Your Money Back!” Unfortunately, in these instances, you do truly get what you paid for, which can be very detrimental to your standing in Google.

What NOT to Look For in an SEO Firm
The easiest way to determine what to look for in an SEO firm, is to first understand what not to look for. If someone has sent you an email promising to help improve your search position, you can generally ignore it as junk mail and cross that firm off your list. Most of the SEO firms that try to get your attention via email, are using a spam tool that grabs domain names and email addresses and then sends a dynamically created email to your inbox. These SEO’s have never looked at your website, they just want to get your attention and make you think that you need their help. Often, they say that you aren’t ranking for an obscure search term that either isn’t relevant to you site at all, or won’t drive traffic to your site even if you do rank number 1. Matt Cutts, the head of the Google Spam Team, gets these emails all the time! Yes it’s true, SEO’s are emailing the head of Google’s Spam Team telling him that they can help him rank in Google.

Another tactic worth ignoring is the SEO that promises number one rankings. The fact is, obtaining a number one rank is easy… for a search term that nobody else is trying to rank for. Let’s assume you sell oranges on your website and the SEO promises a number one ranking for the term “spectacular oranges for cheap.” You get super excited because after only a short time of effort, you are suddenly ranking number one for that term. The SEO charges you an arm and a leg and guess what… weeks, months, and years later you still don’t see a return on your investment. Why? Because nobody searches for the term “spectacular oranges for cheap.” If there’s nobody competing for the rankings of a given keyword, an SEO can get you ranking number one fast, but if there’s nobody competing for the rankings, then nobody is searching for that keyword.

Other SEO’s may promise a great deal of inbound links really fast. Getting inbound links to your website (especially ones with the keywords you’re targeting in the anchor text), is incredibly important for a successful SEO campaign. That said, too many inbound links at once can set off a red flag for Google. Google doesn’t take to well to websites that gain inbound links by purchasing them. In fact, Google has been known to kick websites completely out of their search index when it’s clear that the websites participated in buying links (websites that sell links are called link farms). Buying links is considered “black hat SEO” and carries many risks. Other forms of black hat SEO to steer away from include hiding content from users, keyword stuffing, and publishing duplicate content (to name a few).

What to Look For in an SEO Firm
Luckily, the reputable SEO’s outweigh those that are just trying to make a quick buck. The SEO firms that are worth their salt have many defining factors worth looking for. To begin with, an SEO firm worth doing business with has a history of success with previous clients. These SEO’s should be able to show you the following:

1. Websites that they’ve worked with in the past as well as provide you with at least 3 references that you can call and interview yourself
2. The keywords that were targeted for their various SEO campaigns including original ranking in search engines, final ranking after the campaign was through, and current rank
3. The projected traffic volume for each keyword, gathered from a reputable source like Wordtracker, SEO Book, or Keyword Discovery (KW Discovery shows a much higher estimated search volume than others, but still provides a good idea of what KW’s work and which ones don’t).
4. The traffic analytics of the website that they worked with, before, during, and after the SEO campaign.
5. The amount of links gathered for the website they were working with before, during, and after the SEO campaign.
6. The return on investment for their clients – if the SEO firms tries to use traffic to validate their ROI and not actual money, then start searching for a different SEO firm because in the end, money is what counts when running an online business.

If the SEO firm can provide you with examples of everything listed above, and those examples are impressive, then they are most likely worth working with. You should also ask them what tactics they plan on using to optimize your storefront. A good SEO will tell you what they plan on doing, because the secret sauce is in how the SEO does their job, not the tactics they choose to implement. For instance, the SEO may not tell you exactly how they are going to get you inbound links, you just need to know that they are going to make that a large part of their strategy and that the links won’t be from link farms.

A good SEO won’t promise quick results. SEO takes a great deal of time and hard work. It does not provide overnight success. If you want to rank in search engines fast, consider using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), which will get you ranking in minutes. The problem here is that the investment sometimes ends up being larger than SEO because you have to pay every time someone clicks on your ad in search results.

Paying for an SEO firm
Paying for an SEO firm is where things get a little tough, because they can be expensive. If the firm can prove that they have provided a return on investment for clients in the past, then it is most likely worth putting forward the bulk investment now, for a very large payout in the future. You may consider cutting corners by working with a freelance SEO that is not as seasoned. Generally, a freelance SEO has at least 3 years of SEO experience under their belt and still a proven track record. If you try to work with an SEO that has only a few clients under their belt, you should know that they may still have a learning curve to get over and could use your website as part of their overall lesson. So if budget is an issue, search for an SEO consultant that is willing to teach you how to do some of your own optimization. There are many SEO’s out there who want to help empower their clients. Yes, you will probably still pay the $150/hour (at minimum), but your overall hours used will be less simply because you will learn how to manage parts of the SEO campaign.

One of the great aspects of using an SEO firm or an SEO consultant is that they have the time to invest that you may not. SEO is a full-time job, so if you need to manage customers and your storefront, then taking on your own SEO campaign as well could be difficult.

Luckily, ecommerce solutions provide many facets of SEO to optimize your storefront without the knowledge of code. Ecommerce solutions like CoreCommerce and 3dcart let you create optimized URLs, meta tags, title tags, and image attributes. All that you have to do to get started is research the best traffic driving keywords for your storefront, which is a topic that will be covered in part 2 of this series: SEO Tips for Ecommerce Success.

Posts in this Series
Part 1: Choosing an SEO Firm To Drive Traffic to Your Online Store
Part 2: Finding Profit Driving Keywords to Optimize Your Online Store
Part 3: Optimizing Your Online Storefront for Search Engines
Part 4: Understanding PageRank to Optimize Your Online Store
Part 5: 13 Ecommerce Link Building Tactics For Your Online Store