Need help with 3rd party SEO providers

[pwilkerson]

First, let me say how grateful I am for this community! You guys help me SO much!

Ok, so Chrysler has come up with 6 different "Certified" SEO providers. Essentially, this means that these 6 are the providers we are allowed to use with our CO-OP money from Chrysler.. With all the changes made to SEO in the last few months, I am not sure who would be the best option.. Below is a link to the program and the 6 providers. It also includes what they provide.

Would you mind taking a look and giving me some feedback? Thank you in advance!

Chrysler Digital - Digital Certified SEO

 

[Chip Grueter]

I hate to answer a question with a question, but what are your SEO goals for 2013?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I hate to answer a question with a question, but what are your SEO goals for 2013?

That's actually a great question Chip. A question I too ask. What are you hoping to achieve with your SEO efforts this year?

 

[joe.pistell]

An old saying: "If you don't know diamonds, know your jeweler".

If you're busy selling cars and if you have little experience with SEO and little to no time to build a battle plan, then WHO you pick is very important.

Ask your SEO vendors:

• Planning
  • how is my site you doing now?
  • Goal Setting: What is your goal for me in 2013 and how can we measure it?
• Execution
  • what is your battle plan? (what are the tasks that your team will do for me?)
  • Show me examples of your work
• Reporting
  • Reporting Dashboard or reports via email?
  • How many scheduled one on one Phone Calls from a SEO rep can you expect?
    • Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? etc...

 

[joe.pistell]

Some other factors to consider.

SEO has 2 classes, I gave them nicknames to help you visualize them:

• White Pages SEO
  • Your dealership name (example: Johnson Motors)
• Yellow Pages SEO
  • People looking for cars but NOT using your name (example: "best price 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee near Kansas City")

White pages SEO is the easiest to win, have the highest amount of traffic and your site should already be doing very well here.

Yellow pages SEO is where all the opportunity is. The volume of traffic from these keywords will be less than your business name, but, these are fresh new faces that are in market and very expensive to acquire.

 

[joe.pistell]

Also, ask your SEO vendor

Chrysler has thousands of dealers, where will I be when you get over-run with new accounts?

1. How long should it take to reach our goals?
2. How do I hold you accountable to my needs?
3. Am I free to leave if you cannot deliver on our goals?
4. Should I leave your SEO services, is the SEO work that you've created (and I've paid for), mine to keep, or, will you pull it down?
5. Tell me about your SEO agency
   1. (how many accounts,
   2. how many SEO employees)
   3. How long have you been offering professional SEO services?
   4. how you plan to manage the expansion?

HTH

 

[cmjerry4531]

Awesome points Joe, especially with planning and execution. You will never know the value of what you pay unless you can measure the results.

Anyway, when you are checking out a SEO agency make sure you get all the info on what they do both on-site and off-site. All the on-site work in the world won't mean much if your off-site stinks. Ask them how they get links, how many they are going to get per month and how they use exact match links. If you get too dense with exact match links, then you might get hit with a Penguin update.

 

[TuneyFish]

Here's a real quick off-site SEO test...

Ask an SEO provider for a couple URL's where they have obtained links for clients and paste that URL into Open Site Explorer and note the site and page authority scores. Use an SEO plugin like SEOquake to ensure links aren't nofollow.

Then plug in your own URL just to see your own scores. The goal is to get links from sites that have authority and aren't easy to obtain links from, ie. no paid links, reciprocal links, etc.

As for on-site SEO, make sure you check how your site is performing, page load times, use the Firebug / YSlow plugin, or Google Pagespeed. Fix those issues before you hire an SEO because if your site is too slow it won't rank no matter how well you've optimized the titles, description tags, internal links, etc.