Samuel Edwards

The term “SEO agency” can’t tell you much. I’ve seen all kinds of operations refer to themselves this way, from one-man operations to firms with thousands of workers and contractors, and including both groups of talented professionals and glorified extortionists peddling false promises and bad strategies. With SEO, it’s not just your money at stake—it’s your reputation. Going with the wrong agency won’t just waste your money; it could potentially harm your domain authority in the long-term, sabotaging your visibility and status for months and years to come. The good SEO agencies out there can do amazing things for you, building your reputation, changing with the times, and keeping your audience loyal and interested, all at a fraction of what it would cost to hire someone full time. But how can you know if your prospective SEO agency is worthy of your trust (and your money)? Use this five-step process to tell for sure. Search For Them Online, Read Reviews No matter where you heard about the agency in question, run a few quick searches for them—not just for their brand name, but also for their line of work and geographic location. This will tell you two important details. The first is the self-service capacity of the agency. Most traditional and white label SEO agencies take care of their own needs first, maximizing their own visibility before trying to use the same tactics for their clients. If you can’t find their site or an info page with a simple search, it could be a bad sign. If an SEO agency claims to be the best, their own online presence should reflect that. Do a quick check: Do they rank for relevant industry keywords in Google? Is their site well-designed, fast, and mobile-friendly? Is their content thoughtful, well-written, and updated regularly? How’s their backlink profile? (You can use free tools like Ahrefs’ free backlink checker or Ubersuggest.) If they’re not applying strong SEO practices to their own site, what does that say about how they’ll handle yours? The way I always like to put it is: NEVER TRUST A SKINNY CHEF!  This test is more than just an evaluation of skill, however. Run some brand name searches alongside your organic searches, and see what people are saying about the agency. If you run into a particularly bad agency, like a low-quality link builder, you’ll likely find plenty of complaints to confirm your suspicions. Look at Their Promises, Check for Ethical SEO Practices Head to their website and look at what they’re promising their clients. The goal here is to look for indications of unnatural sounding or too-good-to-be-true kinds of promises. There’s a big difference between promising “increased organic traffic in the first few months” and “a number one ranking guaranteed by the end of the week.” It’s impossible, even for the best and most experienced SEO providers, to concretely predict results within a specific timeframe or achieving a certain number. There are too many variables in play. SEO shortcuts may seem attractive in the short term, but black-hat techniques (like buying spammy links or cloaking content) can get your site penalized—or even deindexed—by Google. Ask the agency directly: What kind of link-building do you do? How do you approach on-page SEO? Do you follow Google’s webmaster guidelines? The answer you’re looking for includes white-hat practices like high-quality guest posting, content creation, technical site optimization, and clean code—not private blog networks, link farms, or keyword stuffing. Any agency promising “guaranteed rankings” or “fast results” without explaining how they’ll get there is likely cutting corners. Generally, the more outlandish the promise, the less likely the agency will be able to fulfill it. Or, if they can fulfill it, it’s probably through illegitimate means. For example, if an agency promises 100 new links to your site in a week, you can bet those links won’t be good for your site. Start a Conversation, Ask the Right Questions If your prospective SEO agency passes the first two steps, your next step should be to get in contact with a representative. Send an email or make a phone call, and prepare to make a number of judgments based on your experience. First, see how long it takes to get back to you. If you receive a response quickly or get in contact with a person immediately, take it as a good sign. Have a natural conversation about your needs and the SEO agency’s capabilities, and trust your instincts. Trustworthy agencies: Break down their approach step-by-step. Provide regular, transparent reporting. Offer a dedicated contact for questions and feedback. Aren’t afraid to say “we don’t know yet, but here’s how we’ll find out.” If you’re being left in the dark or feel like you’re constantly chasing updates, it’s time to move on. Bad signs to watch for are: long delays to get in contact with you, hasty pushes toward closing a sale, promising whatever you ask for, difficulty communicating, egregious spelling and grammatical errors, and frequent subject changes. Again, trust your gut here; are these people you want to deal with long-term? Scrutinize Their SEO Strategies In the conversation or shortly thereafter, find out what types of strategies they use. If they refuse to tell you, you know you’ve stumbled on a questionable agency. Listen for a combination of many different strategies, like onsite optimization, content creation and syndication, high-quality link building, social media marketing, and other peripheral services. If you hear anything about excessive manual link building, the use of a content farm, or anything else that sounds like it might be a scheme, abandon ship. Bad tactics aren’t just risky shortcuts—they’ll compromise the integrity of your entire strategy. Ask for References and Testimonials You never can be too careful. If your agency has passed steps one through four above, it’s almost certain that they’re a reputable, white hat organization and you can trust them with your domain. But sometimes it pays to do that one final check. Ask your agency contact for a handful of

A significant and sudden drop in your Google rankings can create feelings of rage and fright. It’s especially terrifying if you have no idea why your Google rankings dropped so suddenly. With 200+ Google ranking factors, there are a multiplicity of reasons why a site’s Google ranking might suffer an abrupt plunge. If your Google rankings dropped overnight, it doesn’t have to be permanent. Luckily, a majority of Google ranking issues can be remedied with a bit of time and effort. Although, if your Google rankings drop overnight, it can sometimes take months to years of heavy work to fully recover the lost ground. But, don’t despair! Recovery from a sudden drop in Google rankings is possible! Let’s look at some of the most common issues that could cause a site’s search engine ranking to plummet AND how you might fix them. Your Website is New(ish) The number one issue we see when it comes to drops is typically related to new websites. New sites get a lot of love from Google. And a lot of hate. It’s complicated. When your site launches, Google will have never heard of it, and it won’t have your site indexed, which means you can’t show up in any search results. When Google first indexes your site, the Google algorithm might give you an artificial ranking boost (since Google’s algorithm naturally favors new sites temporarily), leading you to believe you’ve earned those ranks all on your own. After that introductory period, your rankings will probably drop again as Google tries to make better sense of who you are and how authoritative you are. If your site is less than five years old, chances are there will be much more volatility than other established websites, regardless of other factors like your link profile, internal linking structure and site dwell-time. Remember, new websites compete with authoritative brands that have been on the internet for a very long time (some more than 30 years). Don’t expect to beat them with a few links and some well-written copy. AI can likely do it better! When it comes to flux and drops in Google rankings, volatility (a.k.a. Google dancing, which we discuss a bit more in detail below) is expected and normal for new sites. You’re Not Diversified in Your Google Ranking Factors The second most common reason for a Google rankings drop is an over-focus on one ranking factor to the exclusion of all others. For instance, it is possible to have too many internal links and over-optimized content. Did you know that the most important Google ranking factor is diversity across the overall factors? It’s not backlinks as some would erroneously suppose. So, when a site focuses too much of their SEO efforts on building backlinks, to the exclusion of other factors, they are more likely to see a drop in their rankings. Excessive backlinks (particularly if they are not natural or diverse enough) can look like unnatural links to Google, which might be a factor if your Google ranking dropped dramatically. We cover this in more detail in our complete list of the most statistically significant Google ranking factors. Canonicalization Issues Problems with canonicalization are somewhat similar to issues with duplicate content. These problems crop up when Google has indexed a page from your site with multiple different URLs. Canonicalization issues can occur when two versions of a domain name are indexed or when a single domain name is indexed with both HTTPS and HTTP. Unfortunately, this type of problem is easy to encounter through no fault of your own. Anyone who links to your site with an incorrect version of the URL can cause canonicalization trouble for you. If this happens, it’s important to reach out to the webmaster of the site with the bad link and attempt to have it changed. Host Server Problems Google is typically quite forgiving of short-lived server problems on your site: If your website is down for maintenance or experiences a day or two of availability problems, your ranking should be unharmed. However, if the webcrawlers have trouble accessing your site for several days, it could have a negative impact on your ranking. If you’re planning to take your site down for maintenance, you should make changes on your server so that a 503 code is generated; this indicates to the outage is temporary. Detection of Malware The presence of malware on your site won’t directly harm your ranking, but the impact it has on the traffic you get from search results is just as significant. If Google observes the presence of malware on your site, it will add a warning for users next to your listing in the search results. If the problem becomes too extensive, Google may blacklist your entire domain. Various tools are available for finding and removing malware on your website. Once you succeed in dealing with the infection, Google will be able to remove the malware warning from your search results listing. Google Updates & Search Algorithm Changes If you’ve been playing by the rules with your website, and your site hasn’t been experiencing any technical problems, your drop in ranking may be due to an algorithm change by the search engines. SEO rankings usually drop after Google algorithm updates and unfortunately, many people experience a dramatic Google ranking drop. In an effort to improve the overall quality of their results, Google and the other engines have made many adjustments to the way they index and rank web content. It’s not just about backlinks and site speed. Google updates and Google Core Updates, in particular, can cause immediate and sudden changes to Google rankings, regardless of the industry. It’s hard to find a business owner who hasn’t been impacted by a Google algorithm update ranking drop. Take a gander at any Google search sensor to tell whether or not major flux is occurring: While most of these algorithm tweaks result in a more gradual impact on rankings, an overnight rankings drop could occur

Spammy backlinks are as old as the internet. But how do you stop spam backlinks and keep your link profile clean and pristine? We’ll find out in this guide to spam backlinks. Determing Spammy Backlinks with AI Anyone who’s engaged in link building for SEO can tell you the anxiety of getting penalized (manually or algorithmically) for having spammy links. With the help of AI, Google can now more easily determine whether your link is built “naturally,” with the intention to increase value to web users, or “unnaturally,” with the sole intention of increasing your rank. Google has also gotten better at devaluing and demoting links from shady sources. Which is a good thing and a bad thing. Let’s explain, but let’s first determine and define what a spam backlink is. What is a spammy backlink? SPAM backlinks are as old as the Internet itself, so most people will know what it is, at least in a general way, just from hearing the word in context. Still, not everyone is so Internet savvy, which is why it’s important to define exactly what a SPAM backlink is. To be succinct, SPAM backlinks are like fleas on the hide of your digital puppy (or the analogically challenged, the puppy is your, or indeed any, website). They take without giving anything in return and are a major nuisance to anyone plagued by them. If you’ve been hit by a spam link attack, you’re not alone: SPAM backlinks usually manifest in the form of comments to blog posts, replies to forum threads, and so forth. They can even appear as “ghost” link redirects wherein a competitor or nefarious party seeks to harm your website by redirecting a site with thousands of spammy links to a page on your website. We’ve also been the blessed beneficiary of this type of link spam. Visit VIAGRAATAB.com and you’ll see. It’s more than frustrating. Even though Google has gotten better at discounting these types of links, they can still harm your website’s Google rankings. How spammy links harm your website The offending SPAM backlinks– which, by the way, is just another way of saying “junk” – will contain a backlink. Backlinks are like breadcrumbs or a signpost pointing from one site to someplace else (usually the spammer’s own site or its affiliate(s). The goal of such things is usually monetary, but it can vary. For instance, SPAM backlinks may also be created on behalf of one’s own website without the knowledge or consent of the owners or administrators. Wherever they point to in the end, these SPAM backlinks will hog site resources, damage your site’s credibility (no one likes to read machine-generated gibberish!), and generally cause a lot of unwelcome maintenance / clean-up headaches for those affected. Worst of all, if your website gets a reputation with Google for allowing, promoting, generating, or otherwise engaging in SPAM-based activities, they may just decide to de-index your website, which is a fancy way of saying “Now you see it, now you don’t”. De-indexed websites can obliterate years of hard work in a millisecond. Not all links are created equal, however. Some backlinks pass on positive ranking juice, others pass on negative ranking juice and still others are ignored by Google altogether thanks to SpamBrain. Toxic backlinks are backlinks that harm a website’s search engine optimization (SEO), or the ability to rank well in a Google search. Paid links, links received from link schemes, link wheels and private blog networks, and links from porn, gaming or payday loans sites are all considered toxic. Difference Between High and Low Quality Backlinks Unfortunately, not all backlinks are created equal. High quality backlinks are extremely valuable, increasing your reputation, improving your domain authority, and ultimately increasing your visibility in Google. But low-quality backlinks can actually have a detrimental effect on your SEO, lowering your authority and earning manual penalties that can seriously compromise your inbound traffic. Knowing the difference between high- and low-quality backlinks is crucial if you want your SEO campaign to succeed. Pro tip: use our free backlink checker to test the proportion of your high to low quality inbound links. Low Quality Backlinks Low quality backlinks can damage your reputation with Google and compromise your visibility in searches. Typical Source The source you use to build your backlink is the most obvious indicator of its quality. As a general rule of thumb, the lower the quality of the site, the lower the quality of the link will be. Posting a link on a disreputable, very low-ranking, or poorly designed site is going to carry a negative impact. Similarly, posting any link on a source designed specifically to manipulate rank is sure to earn you a penalty. However, you’ll have to consider more than just the quality of your source; you’ll also have to consider its appropriateness. Anything completely unrelated to your industry could qualify your backlink as low quality due to its lack of relevance to the source. Intention. The intention of your link is also a contributing factor to its quality, and yes, Google has ways of telling why you build the links you do. The biggest thing to watch out for here is the intention to directly improve your domain authority or rank; if Google determines that a link has no purpose other than to artificially generate traffic, it will be treated as low quality. Structure. The structure of your link usually correlates to its intention; for example, if your link is posted by itself in a blog comment, with no introduction or explanation, it will usually be seen as spam. However, if your link is structured in the context of supporting content that’s free from spam indicators like “click here,” you won’t have to worry. Link Type. If Google starts to see that you’re posting the same link on all your external sources, such as a link to your homepage, it can be treated as a bad link. You want your links to be relevant to specific

Of course, you want to improve your rankings for a specific, target keyword. While some aspects of SEO, including link building and quality content creation take time and effort (which has a huge cost), the following three tips are quick, easy and can yield results VERY quickly. 1. Internal Links Internal link building is perhaps one of best ways to boost and target for specific keywords and the good news is that it is immediately in your control. Don’t be afraid to target specific words or phrases with your internal links. 2. Title, Meta & H1 If your web pages aren’t performing for the keywords you want, try A-B testing tweaks on your titles, meta descriptions and H1 headers to include direct targeting of your keywords. We have seen as much as 80% traffic improvement from this alone. 3. Backlinks From External Sources While less in your control than some of the other sources above, you can still engage in white hat link building services or perform link building outreach on your own to target publishers that are relevant to your niche and who have sufficient domain authority to move the needle. Keep in mind: the highest-volume/value keywords with commercial intent may take years to rank for. And, you may never rank for the short-tail due to incumbent competitors. That said, there are many strategies that can still garner you revenue and leads! All is not lost. But, What Keywords Should You Target? Ultimately, you’ll want to narrow down your target keyword list list to the top potential candidates, zeroing in on a dozen or two strong keywords with the highest potential return. You’ll want to look at three factors here: Relevance. Realistically, how close is this keyword to your client’s products, services, and target niche? This is going to be a subjective question, but you can ask more critical questions here; for example, how far along in the buying cycle would a customer be if they were searching for this? How informed is a customer who is searching for this? Who wouldn’t be searching for this? Volume. The volume is another important factor, as it controls how many people could ultimately be influenced by a high-ranking site for this query. However, there’s one limiting factor that could compromise volume’s effectiveness, and that’s competition. Competition. A keyword with a lot of competition will be nearly impossible to rank for. On the other hand, lower competition keywords tend to carry lower volume. You’ll have to find a balance if you want your strategy to work. Now, let’s consider a few other factors when it comes to targeting specific keywords in SEO. Keyword Density You’ll want to include keywords in your blog posts, and meta data, and really, throughout your site. But thanks to various Google updates, if you include too many, you’ll end up getting your client’s site penalized. What’s the solution? The old method was one of percentage, making sure your targeted keyword phrases don’t appear more than 2-3 percent of the time. However, a better solution is to avoid stuffing keywords at all; the less you think about it, the more naturally you’ll write, and the less you’ll have to worry about a penalty. For starters, only choose keywords that you can work into your content naturally, and then, work them into content titles only when they’re appropriate. From there, they’ll probably appear naturally as you complete the content work. For some keywords, this is easier said than done, but your first job is choosing the right keywords to begin with. Your keyword density should mirror the purpose of the miniskirt: Long-tail Keywords vs. Head Keywords First, you need to know the difference between basic keywords (sometimes called head keywords) and long-tail keywords. These are long phrases, sometimes colloquial, like “where’s the best place for chicken tacos” instead of the basic “chicken tacos.” Generally, the longer the query becomes, the lower the volume and competition become. This makes them easier to rank for but also makes them yield a lower potential traffic rate with a high rank. Compared to head keywords, they offer fast-paced gains, but a lower long-term payoff (assuming you invest sufficiently in the basic keywords). They’re also great material for topic-based optimization. The biggest risk between the short and the long tail in keyword targeting is keyword cannibalization. Why Too Many Keywords is Killing Your SEO Strategy In many ways, “more is better” is an ideology that dominates the SEO world. If you have more high-quality links pointing to your domain, you’ll have a higher authority. If you have more content on your site, you get more attention. In most cases, if you invest more time and money into a strategy, you’re going to see better results. Applying this thinking to the realm of keywords, many businesses select a broad range of subjects and key phrases on which to focus their campaign. However, the “more is better” philosophy can actually be counterproductive when applied in this context; in the majority of cases, focusing on fewer topic keywords is going to yield the best results. There are many factors responsible for this dynamic. Worse still is that AI is changing how SEO works. How Keywords Have Evolved Over Time Today, Google operates under an entirely different algorithm. It uses a process known as “semantic search,” which analyzes the intent behind a search query, then tries to find the most relevant answers for that query. Because of this, being relevant is no longer a matter of direct keyword frequency—for example, to rank in search engines for “cheap sleeping bags,” you no longer need to focus on “cheap sleeping bags” specifically. Instead, you must focus on topics for your content—for example, “sleeping bags” could be a broad topic keyword, and you could use that keyword to generate articles like “The best sleeping bags for camping” or “10 qualities every sleeping bag needs.” Your keyword choice doesn’t have to match on a one-to-one basis; instead you can focus on

There is a common misconception that to rank highly in search engines you have to build lots of backlinks. While the data DOES show that backlinks are a critical factor website rankings, the truth is, there’s no instruction manual on how exactly to outrank your competition that has more content, more brand recognition, more backlinks, and more experience on the web. Ranking without building backlinks is akin to trying to get backlinks without quality content. It’s possible, but not likely. There are metrics that you can learn about through Google though, that will let you rank without backlinks and otherwise outrank your competition for competitive terms, even if they have a much more dominant presence on the web. We’ll break down the strategies on how to rank without backlinks to help you better understand them and so that even without backlinks, you can rank highly in search engines. 1. Be Patient It can take a long time to rank. In our experience, it can take 3 to 5 years for the most competitive keywords. NOT heavily building manual links in the first couple years is actually better for your long term viability. Take our client in the “video production” space. Their website has only had 81 referring domains over the last four years. We spent most of our SEO services budget tuning pages, optimizing for visitors and mostly doing on-page SEO (more on this below). The result: The company now outranks its top competitor for the industry’s most coveted keyword, all by building a very strategic number of inbound links.  Could they have gotten their faster if they had built links aggressively over that time period?  Maybe. It depends on the execution. Are they ranking for long tail keywords?  Absolutely. When you are able to capture the money terms by SEO tuning, the long tail keywords take care of themselves. SEO ain’t a microwave, it’s an slow cooker. As such, if you’re a new site, you should plan on being in it for the long game. Build links to increase organic traffic, but remember links can hurt if not done with the right strategy. 2. Internal Links are Underutilized What we mean by this is using internal links to point people towards the most important web pages on your site. Google sees large numbers of internal links pointing to a particular page as that page being more relevant and thus Google tries to rank it higher. Using lots of internal links to a target page and the right content, using the anchor text of your target keyword, shows its importance to you and helps to drive search engine traffic. Google sees this as a positive sign of content quality and content relevance. It’s basically about using what you already have available to make yourself rank higher. Internal links are free while the right inbound links can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. We typically advise internal link building in the following ways: Focus on your money terms first, using anchor text that aligns with search results, search volume and cost per click metrics that will drive leads and sales Don’t worry too much about over-optimizing for anchor text on-site. You can certainly get in trouble if too many of your off-site links have the same anchors, your internal links can be heavily weighted toward your target keywords. Make sure all of your most important web pages have multiple (if not many more) internal links Make sure the largest volume of your internal links point to the web pages you want to rank, including those with the highest search volume and cost per click from your keyword research. 3. On-Page SEO Tuning The second most underutilized tactic for ranking in search engines without backlinks is using a good on page SEO strategy as well as technical SEO. The great thing about on page SEO is that it’s inexpensive and completely within your control. Focus on things like the following: Optimize your title tag, H1 tag & meta description. Make sure you have enough H1-H6 tags, the right keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions and that they’re fully diversified. Keep URLs and titles, straight, short, to the point and fully optimized. Make sure your URL strings target high volume keywords, but that your initial strategy is aimed at low competition keywords until your site is fully vested. Optimize images, including alt text and exif data Add schema markup to pages Place outbound, external backlinks to other quality resources Implement and optimize your sitemap and overall site structure for crawlers Install an SSL certificate Make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console fully implemented Focus on page speed, load speed and other Core Web Vitals (CWV) Optimize for local SEO, including Google Maps Get the right target keyword density comparable to other top-ranking web pages Disambiguate your content with the right entity keywords and semantic keywords. Make sure your bounce rates are low and dwell time is high. This will throw off the right signal for the particular keyword rankings to the search engines as long as you are able to nail user search intent. These on page SEO items represent very low-hanging fruit in your overall SEO strategy. We discuss these and others in our complete on-page SEO guide here. 4. User Data is Key Everyone pretty much knows by now that Google controls the search engine market and that user experience is one of the main ways they judge the value and ranking of your site. Many sites use a lot of backlinks to prove their domain authority on a subject and generate traffic from external links and external sources, but that doesn’t mean they provide the best user experience or even that they fully understand their audience. Google Analytics provides all the data you need about user experience to optimize your site so that users click on links to your site, stay on the site longer and click to other pages on your site to acquire

What happens when someone runs a Google search for your brand, industry, product, or service? Which results pop up in the Google search results page? Is your website ranking in the top position(s)…or has the competition laid claim to these top results? These might sound like questions of vanity, or they may feel irrelevant in a world of social media marketing and paid traffic, but the reality is that organic traffic from search engines is still the most powerful, cost-effective, and sustainable form of traffic on the internet. And if you aren’t ranking on page one of Google for target search terms, it means one of your competitors is. And that’s bad. Because 31.73 percent of all clicks go to the search result in position number one. Another 24.71 percent of clicks go to the search result in position two. Results three, four, and five grab 18.66 percent, 13.60 percent, and 9.51 percent, respectively. If you’re doing your math at home, the top three Google search results get 75 percent of all clicks. To further compound the importance of ranking well, consider that almost nobody visits the second page of Google results. And if they do, they aren’t clicking! (Just 0.78 percent – that’s less than 1 percent – click on a result from page two.) Top Qualities of a Great SEO Company Characteristics of the best SEO companies include conducting a comprehensive website audit to identify areas for improvement, developing a customized strategy based on your business goals and target audience, providing regular and transparent reporting on your website’s performance and rankings, using ethical and up-to-date SEO techniques to optimize your website’s content, structure, and links, and offering ongoing support and maintenance to ensure long-term success in search engine rankings. All of that to say this… You can’t afford to ignore search engine optimization (SEO) any longer. And while there are certainly some SEO and link building techniques and strategies that can be implemented on a DIY basis, you’re much better off outsourcing your SEO so that you can focus on the core tasks of your business. But therein lies the problem. Your digital marketing agency is not the only one on the market, but how do you know which one to pick? In this article, we’re going to attempt to clear the air for you a bit by showing you precisely what sets the best SEO companies apart from the rest of the competition. In other words, we’re going to highlight the features and characteristics that make the top one percent of digital marketing agencies different. Then, based on this information, you can make a more educated hiring decision. How to Cut Through the Noise and Find the Best SEO Company Before digging into the best search engine optimization company characteristics, it’s important that we set the table a little more for you. Because we’d be doing you a disservice not to mention the fact that this is an incredibly crowded market. In the early 2000s, when Google was first rising to prominence and small businesses were beginning to develop some awareness for the importance of having a web presence, the SEO industry went from a simmering little industry to a boiling pot of potential. Savvy entrepreneurs and digital marketers saw an opening and they took it. With low barriers to entry and relatively few industry regulations, entrepreneurs who understood how the search engines worked started selling SEO service. And because Google was still relatively unsophisticated (compared to today), it was easy to manipulate the algorithms and get quick results for clients. A company would come to a small business and tell them that they could get them on page one for an important keyword, and within just a few weeks that’s precisely where they’d be. Many SEO agencies were seen as miracle workers…but that wasn’t the case. In reality, most of these early digital marketing services were simply gaming the system. They didn’t really understand how search algorithms worked or the understanding of developing sound digital marketing strategies that would stand the test of time. They were simply in it for a quick win here and there. They used spammy practices and took advantage of low hanging fruit. (Which Google eventually caught on to and nixed and/or penalized.) As the SEO industry has grown and matured, it’s become more challenging to rank on page one. Despite this, the number of SEO agencies, and “experts” offering freelance SEO services has ballooned. It’s become an oversaturated industry with high competition, which has simply created more noise for clients, who are uncertain of who to work with in the first place. If you want to find the best seo company, it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Do you run a Google search? Do you browse social media? Do you work your professional network and search for referrals? There’s so much noise – and so few qualified options – that many businesses give up before they even start. They push SEO to the side and continue investing in other areas, like social media marketing and paid traffic. And while there’s nothing wrong with this, it simply makes the problem worse. Now is the time to invest in SEO. It’s not getting any easier to rank for high-level keywords, but it is becoming more important. And we’re going to show you how to cut through the noise, so that you can overcome the issue that so many of your peers have: Selecting the best SEO company to work with. 17 Characteristics and Features of the Best SEO Companies What makes the difference between an average search engine optimization company and one of the best SEO companies? It’s a question that we’ve all contemplated before. And it’s a question that we’re going to answer for you in detail. In no particular order, here’s what makes up the DNA of the best SEO agencies in our industry: 1. Honesty and Transparency Let’s start with two characteristics that aren’t traditionally keystones of the