You're meeting with a SEO company....what's the most important questions?
 

Give them to me, please.

What would you ask and what would be the answers you are looking for to those questions?

Q: "Who are your other clients?"

Q: "Did you track their results and can you show me?"


I know very little about SEO, so telling me all the tech stuff does not help me as much as others.

:2 cents:

"Can you guarantee top 10 listings for my search terms?"

If they say yes, run... Because nobody can.

How do you plan on developing relevant, quality backlinks?
Excluding on-page SEO, what methods will you be using to improve EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)?
What is your estimated timeline to see improvements?
Have you worked with other clients in the same verticals, if so, how do you intend on increasing performance to competing brands?
Do you use 3rd party apps/platforms to handle any aspect of SEO?
WG

An SEO company would be the first thing.

I know enough not to ask that silly question or expect them to be able to do it.

Good questions. I think I am pretty good with SEO but I am not consistent and at this juncture in my life, I don't want to be, I'd rather let someone else handle that, but that in itself is scary.

Thank you Wired. I appreciate your feedback.

As in I made a grammatical error? :upsidedown no I didn't.

My line of questioning would be about operations as most seo companies will charge for the analysis tool which is how you measure improvements. I would ask about online efforts and offline methods. I can offer free analysis at submit.services I don't care about upsell i promote domains to webmasters it will point out problems which give you ideas for next fix.

how can i target my niche?

These are basically the best questions you could ask. It would cover almost everything you need to know and weed out shitty SEO companies.

Yet many so-called 'SEO Companies' will still claim to be able to do so :2 cents:

"If you're so good why don't you start your own websites and SEO those instead of doing it for what you're charging me?"

:winkwink:

Like :thumbsup PLUS 1000

Pretty much.

I understand for instance SEO companies that are positioning brick and mortar businesses, and ok you can give that a shot. Not everyone has the resources or know-how to fire up a bakery or some ceramic tile business - but when it comes to asking someone doing SEO in adult, given the low cost of entry into most types of websites you need to question if they know what they are doing. Why are they SEOing your tube site when the entry point to making a whole network of tubes is a few hundred dollars in software and $200/mo server? Makes no sense. If they take the job on it just means that they don't trust their own abilities enough to invest the chump-change required to run a few sites.

:1orglaugh

But someone can also ask "If your tube scripts are so good then why sell them to competitors?"

:warning

They did start their own website but maybe all they want to do is sell SEO services and not products.

If they have just 50 recurring customers a month (and we all know SEO is not instant) for what they want to charge, that comes out to quite a pretty penny. Ranging from 65k a month to 175k a month with 50 customers.

There is no need to have a website selling products just because you're good at SEO. Ya know?

The companies I have met with so far have not done adult work and they are vastly different in price. That's a bit of a red flag.

I've been asked that in the past :) To put it simply - I don't have the infrastructure built up to drive traffic to sites. No feeder sites, no SEO network, etc. We are constantly doing custom stuff from customers and I don't have the time to build that stuff up. I could have done it years ago and had I done it I probably would only be coding for myself now. I have considered in the past hiring some webmaster and having them do that stuff for me though just never got around to it.

Most SEO companies have a network of sites, hundreds of blogs that they write articles on that backlink your site in an effort to gain favor in Google. If they don't have a network of adult sites, then they probably won't be able to effectively SEO your site - and if they do I would question why they don't just run their own adult sites instead of promoting competitors.