It’s a good question, and something we are asked all of the time at SEO Experts, so here’s a quick test that you can perform to put your mind at rest.

Firstly, if the company you’re looking at is using pay per click advertising like Google Adwords, then clearly they aren’t very good – otherwise they’d be at the top end of Google naturally, not having to pay for advertising.

If they can’t get their own company’s website showing in the results, then how can they expect to do anything for yours?

Secondly, you can try out this very informative test that will really show you whether they know what they’re talking about or not (and you can try it out on your own website too!).

Go to their websites home page so that you can see their domain name in the browser bar, say:

http://www.someseocompany.com

Now click on one of the menu buttons, so you get for example:

http://www.someseocompany.com/pay-per-click

Now click the “home” button on the menu. If you end up at something like:

http://www.someseocompany.com/index.aspx or http://www.someseocompany.com/index.html

in other words something with a /filename on the end of their domain name, then they’re idiots who don’t know what they’re doing.

The reason we say this is because as far as Google or any other search engine is concerned, there are 2 identical home pages:

www.someseocompany.com & www.someseocompany.com/index.aspx

This means that any backlinks that you have pointing at your website could effectively be split in 2, halving the effects of any web sites pointing at yours.

But it gets worse…

Now trim out the “www.” bit of the domain so that you get this:

http://someseocompany.com

and see whether the same home page shows up on this domain name – if it does then they really don’t have any clue what they’re doing, because there are now 3 identical home pages on their website.

If you now click a menu button again so that you’re on say:

http://someseocompany.com/pay-per-click [note this is also a duplicate page & that every page on their website will have a duplicate]

and then click the “home” button again, and you’ll get this:

http://someseocompany.com/index.aspx [or whatever /filename they had before]

This is now a FOURTH duplicate copy of the homepage, which could therefore reduce the effectiveness of your websites SEO by 75%, just by an SEO companies ignorance.

Do you really want to pay them or to let them loose with your livelihood?

This is just a quick & simple test, and it is just one factor, so an SEO Company that passes here doesn’t mean that the SEO Company will achieve anything for you.

However, what you can be absolutely guaranteed is that any SEO Company that doesn’t know or correct this is unlikely to do anything for your website or your business, and they are best avoided.

And you’d be amazed at how many of them don’t even know that this is an issue.

We don’t mean to sound arrogant, but it annoys us no end that there are people out there who charge money for search engine optimisation, and who in some cases don’t just achieve nothing, they can actually damage the ranking and performance of the websites they interfere with - permanently.

Please be careful who you deal with, and if you have any queries or concerns about SEO then were always happy to help or give our opinion at SEO Experts.