If you've ever been burned by an SEO company who promised great things and didn't deliver, you already know that the SEO industry faces a crisis of credibility.  The abnormally high percentage of unreliable SEO companies in the industry are fueled by a few things.  So let's be honest about our industry for a minute and discuss why this fact does and may always exist, but more importantly, how you can find an SEO company that actually performs.

Let's do that now.

First of all, there are a never-ending number of small businesses who are looking to grow, and most know that having their websites rank at the top of search engines, especially Google, is one of the fastest ways and long-lasting ways to capture potential customers' attention right when they are ready to buy.  For the unscrupulous SEO company, this means there are an unlimited number of businesses to hit one time with a long-term contract.  They don't care how bad their organic reviews are, meaning Yelp and Google reviews.  They point potential new clients to other review sites that are easily manipulated to fool SEO clients into signing 3-month, 6-month, or even 12-month SEO contracts.  At UnhideYourSite.com, our contracts are month-to-month.  We must perform every single month to keep 100% of our clients.  But for many SEO companies, these long-term contracts mean they can continue to swindle other small businesses while guaranteeing that clients for whom they are under-performing are stuck paying for services that are not working for them.

So what should an SEO company be doing if they are following proper SEO strategies?

The short answer sucks...

You ready?

It depends...

Ugh, we know this isn't helpful.

The reality is that there are different ways to do SEO properly depending on your business niche.  For instance, there are things that Google looks at differently depending on the industry.  For instance, Google has a whole different standard for local service businesses than they do for what they call YMYL businesses, which stands for Your Money or Your Life.  This makes sense if you think about it.  Your Money Or Your Life Businesses are businesses that deal with, well... your money or your life.  As you can imagine, Google sees websites advising people on matters of personal finance or medical issues as different than companies wanted to maintain your lawn or paint your house.  

While the standards may be different, the aim is the same.

Google wants to give their user the best, most relevant and reliable answer to the question they were really asking when they entered their search query.  Getting that right is the reason Google dominates the search industry.

UnhideYourSite.com can unhide any website in any niche in any geographic range, but we have decided to stay with the reason we got into business.   We focus on local SEO for small businesses who depend on the phone ringing to survive.

Good local SEO in any location in the United States starts with a website that is helpful to potential customers and hosted in the United States.  A website optimized for search engines is critical to ranking at the top of Google and other search engines.  This is where most SEO companies go wrong.  You'll be sold a pitch about "technical SEO" which usually means the SEO company is following one of the many reports generated by a plethora of websites offering their own tool.  These tools look at things like the number of characters on your meta titles or descriptions and how many times your targeted keyword appears on your site.

This approach has some merit, but it is often used to make your think that some simple tweaks can make your site rank better in search engines.  This is rarely fully true.

A lot of the information is old and no longer relevant.  

For instance, many reports will tell you that your keyword is on your page too many times, which is considered keyword stuffing.  To respond to this advice, you may make your content confusing by removing important words from your text.  The reality is that long ago, Google quit using the number of occurrences of a keyword as a ranking factor, either positively or negatively.  Now, Google looks at the quality of content.  Once they see a particular search term (keyword) 3 or 4 times, they know that your page discusses that keyword.  Beyond that, they are looking for quality of the content.  Is your content helpful to users?  Ask yourself, is your content forcing a particular keyword or are you talking about your business and a particular keyword happens to show up in the discussion naturally.  If it's natural, you aren't keyword stuffing.  We are not counting how many times "SEO" occurs on this page, but we do know that we aren't forcing it.  If you see it, it's because it fits in the sentence and the sentence fits in the paragraph.