If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO company and / or a PPC company check out a company’s credentials and results carefully. Unfortunately there are all too many companies who call themselves SEO or PPC experts that use deceptive practices that could easily get your site banned by the major search engines. If that’s the case, you’ll basically be starting your e-business over from scratch.

With potential SEO companies, stay away from the ones that promise you that your business will rocket to the top of the search engines effortlessly, particularly if they don’t tell you how they plan to get you there. Oh, and when they say “search engines,” make sure they’re talking about the major search engines that people actually use. Think of it this way: if an SEO site is willing to engage in shady practices to artificially boost your search engine rankings, they’ll think nothing of rerouting your domain to a scary malware site if their relationship with you goes bad.

Many of the same principles apply when you choose a PPC company. Make sure their “results” have to do with the major search engines and stay away from cloaking and other deceptive practices. It’s bad enough to throw your money away on a bad PPC consultant, but it’s worse if they do things that get your site banned by search engines.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Marketing, SEO, general business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.