If your SEO company guarantees your ranking on the first page of search engines or any of the above statements, you better run far away from them. Because SEO is always in flux, the search engines alone are responsible for and privy to the rankings’ methodologies, not SEO companies.

Things change quickly in the search engine world. The SEO practice that worked great on Tuesday might not work well on Thursday. SEO companies absolutely cannot guarantee page one rankings.

If you’re curious about what your SEO company is doing, and you should be, ask them. If you ask them questions about what they are doing or ranking techniques, and their response is one of the following, you’re dealing with a scam company and run away as fast as you can.

• As per our company policy, our efforts on your behalf must remain confidential.
• Due to the industry’s nature and our competition, we’re not allowed to disclose our techniques and strategy.
• Well, we do a variety of things, but it involves basically optimizing your site for search engines.
• Oh, tons of things take me too long to explain.
• I’m not sure exactly, but I’ll get back with you.
• Our SEO practice only focus on high-quality backlink building

An Optimized website gets a better ranking in the search result. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic you attract.  If your SEO agency does not prepare your website for SEO means you won’t rank, and you wasted all the money and time spent on your SEO, Period.

In some cases, you may work with an SEO agency and later on see your traffic drop. A decrease in traffic can raise a concern, but only if your revenue goes down. In some cases, your traffic may drop, but your revenue increases. 

The main goal of SEO is driving targeted traffic, not just lots of traffic. If you receive less traffic, but it’s good traffic, that means your revenue increases too. 

Here is how good traffic look like:

1. Consistent traffic from the right longtail keywords
2. The right audience traffic
3. More traffic that converts on your site

SEO agencies should have something to show in the first few months. We’re not expecting to see results or a rise in rankings. Instead, the agency should be able to provide you the actual SEO practices they are doing. 

Since you’re paying the agency for their SEO service, you have the right to ask for deliverables and progress reports.

Your SEO goal is to grow your targeted traffic by ranking relevant keywords that deliver results. If your ranking declines significantly, your traffic drops suddenly or ranking for wrong keywords, it can be for one or all of the following reasons:

1. Signs of an algorithmic penalty (this is a bad thing), 
2. Your SEO agency does black hat SEO.
3. Your SEO agency used spammy, wrong, or suspicious actions. 

If any of these happen, start asking questions from your agency. If their response sounds, looks, feels or smells suspicious, ask them to stop immediately and contact a reliable SEO company to recover the damage.

Every SEO strategy needs your help to be successful. When your SEO company recommends that you do certain things for improvement, this tells you the agency doing white hat SEO and doing it in the right way as well as wants to build a partner relationship.

Recommending extra services does not necessarily mean they try to upsell you or scam you. Sure, it might cost, but it isn’t throw away money on your part. If you comply with their requests, you will most likely see the results you’re hoping for.

Here are a few of the things that quality SEO agencies may recommend:

• Start utilizing social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
• Integrate social media sites with home page
• Launch a content marketing plan
• Start a blog
• Add content to your homepage
• Integrate internal linking into your existing content
• Optimize all site content
• Add alt tags to images
• Change your robots.txt to allow crawling on other portions of the site
• Improve site speed
• Disavow spammy links

An SEO agency that’s doing good stuff will need your help from the beginning of the process. You’re the site owner, so here are the accesses that they might ask you to grant them:

• Editor or admin access to your CMS
• View or admin access to Google Analytics
• Access to Google Webmaster Tools
• Access to social accounts
• A list of target keywords
• Past audits/penalties/work

If they don’t ask for anything and or any access, there is a good chance they are adding linkbacks from their network of spammy sites and performing potentially harmful actions. We highly recommend being cautious about their activities before your site gets penalized.

SEO and content marketing are two sides of a coin. Your SEO campaign will fail unless you integrate content marketing into your SEO strategy.

If your SEO agency does not include content marketing, on-site blogging, or guest article writing in your strategy, you should start finding an agency that does.

You can do the SEO in-house or hire an SEO company, but we recommended you work with an SEO company specializing in the dental industry for the following reasons:

1. The SEO agency should be familiar with standard industry rules and regulations, such as HIPAA.
2. Your SEO company should understand your business’s unique demographics and needs.
3. The dental SEO company can provide insights into what tactics will work for your practice based on the industry benchmarks.
4. By hiring a dental SEO agency, you’ll save a lot of human resources of the staff.
5. An SEO agency can help your business resolve the SEO challenges faster, leading to a quicker ROI.