Choosing a professional SEO Company in the San Francisco Bay Area can seem daunting. One of the big dilemmas is how to test the SEO company without making a big commitment. I think of search engine optimization through the prism of physical fitness, and myself as a coach for students in my real-world classes in San Francisco or my online classes with the JM Internet Group. So my vision of working with a client as an SEO Company or SEO Consultant is as a personal trainer, helping the target company learn how to really do SEO itself. In contrast, many SEO companies, both in the San Francisco Bay Area, and elsewhere think of SEO as doing it for the client, rather than doing it with the client. So in choosing the best professional SEO Company in the San Francisco Bay Area, here are my thoughts for identifying a company that will work with you rather than attempting to do it for you. For example, if you’re going to be running your own hotel or taking over an old one, you will want a company that can explicitly offer you hotel SEO based services to get your hotel ranking at the top of Google.

By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor – JM Internet Group
Posted: July 19, 2010

Contents:

For vs. With: Professional SEO Companies and their Philosophies
Discovering Your SEO Objectives, and Implementing Them via SEO
San Francisco Bay Area – Does Geography Matter for Choosing an SEO Company?

For vs. With: Professional SEO Companies and their Philosophies

The first big philosophical issue in choosing an SEO company is what I call the for vs. with dilemma. Many SEO companies eagerly seek to do the entire SEO process for the client. Now for in and of itself isn’t a bad thing – the reason that you are selecting an SEO company is because ultimately you do not want to do the work yourself. You really do want someone to do it for you. That said, however, this isn’t entirely possible.

Most SEO companies – whether in the San Francisco Bay Area or elsewhere – will not know your business in any serious detail. Like myself, they will work with many, many different companies with different products and services that they seek to SEO-optimize and thereby climb to the top of Google’s free listings. So your first objective on the for vs. with dilemma is to determine how good your potential SEO company is at figuring out your business and your needs. If you are looking for comprehensive information on search engine optimization, we recommend you visit this site.

In abstract terms –

  • Do they ask a lot of questions about your business?
  • Do they ask a lot of questions about your marketing goals, and ultimately about the objectives of your website. Is it to get a registration? Initiate a purchase? What are your customers like, and what are they seeking on Google?
  • What is your sales and marketing process? Your SEO and your website are two critical, early, aspects of your marketing process. Your SEO company should thus be interviewing you about this process, and ensuring that your website fits well into the big picture.

I think of myself as a personal coach or trainer as an SEO company, and I spend a lot of time in this early phase. I ask a lot of questions, map out how the website fits into the business / marketing strategy, and ultimately end up with a detailed keyword worksheet that I share with my clients. I want my clients fully informed of their SEO objectives, so as to not waste time SEO-optimizing on something that doesn’t matter. A good keyword worksheet is the ultimately manifestation of an SEO strategy that seeks to work with the client and not just for you.

Discovering Your SEO Objectives, and Implementing Them via SEO

After we have worked together to discover your SEO objectives, and reflect these in a detailed keyword worksheet, we are ready to move to the implementation phase of SEO. Here, again, the strategy of working with the client is a big difference as a professional SEO company vs. other SEO Companies whether in the SF Bay Area or elsewhere.

Building on the keyword worksheet, we will discuss how to implement proper SEO-friendly content, tag structure, and website structure. The keywords / key phrases of your SEO are our foundation, but we must implement the on page SEO as a team. I usually work hand-in-hand with the webmaster or content specialist at the company to help build out SEO-friendly content. These are the phases –

  • Identify target content; whether this is revising existing content or brainstorming new content that will build upon your SEO keywords.
  • Manipulate tag structure. Taking the SEO-friendly content and weaving it strategically into key SEO tags such as the TITLE, META DESCRIPTION, H1/H2 tags and others.
  • Organize website structure. Making sure that the website naming conventions, depth, and hierarchies reflect the SEO priorities, especially for the home page.

The tragedy for many SEO companies is that they want to preserve their employment by keeping their clients in a state of dependency. Some even charge monthly fees, and do not work hand-in-hand with their clients to build out SEO-friendly client. The problem is that you cannot succeed at SEO without effective on-page tactics; and to do effective on-page tactics, you must 1) know the client keywords, and 2) implement effective SEO-friendly strategies via tags and structure.

The bottom line here is to ask your potential SEO companies how they envision working together with you not just to brainstorm your target keywords, but to implement these keywords on your website. The answer should be concrete and not mysterious. They really can’t do it for you, but they can do it with you, which is my preferred method of operation!

San Francisco Bay Area – Does Geography Matter for Choosing an SEO Company?

At this point, let’s leave the physical fitness analogy behind because of one big difference between going to the gym and doing SEO: location. While I am physically located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and can certainly act as a local SEO company, most of my clients are actually not physically located in the Bay Area.

With the Internet, telephone, and especially the Gotowebinar software for online meetings that share computer screens, there isn’t really any reason why I can’t work as an SEO company for a client not just in the San Francisco Bay Area but practically anywhere in the world. What I do do is extensively interview potential clients, and make sure that I understand their SEO objectives and keywords – this is done via email, telephone, and one-on-one web conferencing.

My background has historically been in technology (not a surprise since the South Bay Area / San Jose / Silicon valley is heavy into tech), but I have worked with companies as diverse as genealogy, golfing, hospital outsourcing, book publishing and more. Physical location matters much less than the approach – and my approach is to work with clients as a team, rather than for clients as a mysterious SEO wizard.

It isn’t wizardry – with hard work, good communication, and clear goals, we can work together to make your SEO project a success!