If you’re completely new to SEO but want to start an SEO business or you’d just others rather do the work so you can concentrate on marketing, finding an SEO company you can trust with your customer’s websites can be hard to say the least. If you’ve become overwhelmed with finding the right SEO company to help you, I may be able to help you today.Update as of 5/12/16: This post has been updated with my current options for outsourcing SEO. I have others that I’m testing and I’ll share those that work well as I see results. Others have been removed from this post that were not producing the results I would like.Over the past several months (9 to be exact) I’ve dedicated a lot of time and money to building extra websites and outsourcing SEO work so I could report what has worked well for me. I’ve tried working with a few SEOs on freelance websites and also went through a number of SEO reseller agencies to see what worked best. And now I’m here to share my findings with you.I tried close to 10 different SEO companies (several of which were fired not too long after being hired for reasons such as doing spammy work, not doing what they said they were going to do, poor communication and so on) and I stuck with a small handful for a longer length of time to see how they compared.I’d rather not focus on bad companies because really there are a lot of them so I’m just going to stick to the ones that showed me results.Of the SEO companies I tried, there are only two that I will continue to use. Below I share more about these companies. Let’s have a look, shall we?PosiRank
Remember the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”? At first glance, you won’t be able to tell just how much you’ll love Posirank‘s service because well…a lot of the SEO reseller companies look similar making it hard to tell the good from the bad.After reading through their site everything sounded good but it’s hard to convince me these days. I really found out just how much I like them after I started to interact with them. Their customer service and the quality of the work they provide is top notch.To start off, I tested out one website with them. I let them guide me through the process, I asked questions, read information on their site and so on just as I expect any new customer would do. All of it pointed me in the right direction and most importantly…I saw results! After all, that’s what it’s all about anyways, right?There is a bit of a difference though with Posirank than with a lot of other SEO resellers or SEO white label companies I’ve seen. Many offer some version or another of an SEO audit tool or other fancy dashboard. I never really found any of them overly helpful and as Posirank doesn’t have this, I was intrigued.There really is nothing flashy like this about Posirank. Their focus is clearly on getting results. Now while you don’t have a fancy schmancy dashboard, you do have a dashboard full of ordering options. From the dashboard you can order entire SEO campaigns or just parts of an SEO campaign such as article writing and submission backlink submission.
The Posirank dashboard allows you to manage everything you need from a single interface – without the hassle of managing freelancers, training staff or juggling multiple suppliers. Posirank has a team of SEO experts that actually works on any type of promotion or service you need. The content is written by American writers & the promotions team was a big aspect on why PosiRank is one of the best I’ve used. Their task creation system is optimized for maximum efficiency as they only need minimal information from you – and their team of experts takes it from there.If you ever want them to send out a press release for your site every single month, you can do it in just one click of a button with their 1-click automation and recurring promotion feature.
Now if you’re looking for a white SEO report, you will be able to get that here. There are certainly no fancy graphs and charts but all the information is there. You can upload your own logo and add in a customized message as well. The system then customizes the report automatically and can even send the reports to your client on your behalf (if you’d like).One of the biggest concerns I here about finding an SEO reseller is the cost. For the most part it’s true, you get what you pay for. Posirank does offer competitive prices and the more work you send to them (the more clients you have), you can apply for lower wholesale rates. If you’re a person who wants to focus on marketing and getting more clients while outsourcing the work, this should be a very attractive option for you.I’ve done several campaigns with them so far from ordering individual services to full SEO campaigns to test their communication, customer service and of course, the quality of their work on several new and existing websites. I do plan on continuing work with them.SEO Reseller
SEO Reseller is a company that offers SEO, reputation management, social media management and (more recently) web design packages. This is a company where you can outsource complete projects to. They do offer limited options for outsourcing smaller portions of a project, however, the financial benefit of using those options isn’t there in my opinion. So if you’d like to outsource full projects than this is an option to consider.I’ve tested their local SEO package and web design package. As with any provider, I like to start with some of the smaller (easier to do) packages to see the results they can achieve. For a small, local business I found the services to work well and free up a lot of time. I have not currently used some of the other service packages they offer but I am open to doing that as needed.
SEO Reseller has a dashboard that is easy to use, order from and contact your account manager. You can view service prices, create proposals, design mockups and monitor your campaigns.
Hiring an SEO Freelancer
I wanted to try going another route so I hired several (honestly I lost count of how many) freelancers. I wanted to see if I would be able to achieve the same results as I could using software or hiring other agencies.I’ll be honest, hiring a good SEO freelancer is just about as hard as it is to find a good SEO reseller company. It often feels like a complete shot in the dark. But there are a few things I did to try and weed out any bad workers.Now the most trouble I had finding a good freelancer was when I looked for someone to do the entire process. I had the most luck finding someone when I looked for someone who specialized in a particular SEO task (on-page optimization, link building, etc.). I’m not saying you can’t find someone to do the entire process but this is just what worked for me. Having a few freelancers who each handle a specific task has it’s pros and cons of course. At times, it can be less expensive for you to hire multiple people with a dedicated task but then you also have to manage multiple people. On the other hand if one person stops responding to you or dumps the project, all hope isn’t lost. You can easily replace them and not have to worry about your entire campaign.So let’s take UpWork for example. After you post a job ad and start getting applicants here is what you’ll see:
Now, I’ll tell you that I tried this with lower budgets (as you’ll see here) and higher budgets. In the end I screened them all the same and I found good and bad in all budget ranges.You’ll see each applicant has a few things:
- Hourly rate
- Feedback rating
- Number of hours worked on UpWork
- Job success rate
- Location
- Agency Contractor / Freelancer
You can set-up jobs to only attract workers in specific budget ranges and you can do the same for location if that is important to you. I have hired freelancers all over the world so it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is communication. You can work with someone on the complete other side of the world who works the same hours as you do. Other times, they will work while you sleep and your work will be done by the time you wake up. It’s all a matter of preference.Feedback rating, number of hours worked and job success rate is what I really pay attention to. Let’s look at this applicant for:
This is a person I would contact because they have a good rating (I look for at least a 4.5 star rating), they are top rated in their category with a 100% job success rate. Most importantly they’ve put in over 1,000 hours of work so their rating actually means something.The only reason I would not reach out to this person is if I do not want to work with an agency. The profile notes he is an agency contractor which means he may or may not be doing the actual work himself. Pro – he has a team to do the work if he is sick or is unavailable but on the other hand you may not be speaking directly to the person doing the work.These are two applicants I would not contact:
I’m not going to mess with anyone with a bad rating. In this applicant’s defense, they are pretty new to UpWork so it could have been a crazy client or something odd but I’m not willing to chance it on my work so I move on.The next person has a good rating but they are so new to UpWork that they do not have any feedback yet. Now I know there are lots of great applicants who have years of experience but are just new to UpWork but I would like to see some ratings.UpWork allows you to hide applicants so you end up with a final list of applicant’s you’d like to hire or move forward with in the interview process. I like to start by contacting each of them using UpWork’s messaging system and see how long it takes for them to get back to me. When I receive a message back I immediately respond with a follow-up question to see how long it takes them to follow-up again. This way I can see the speediness of their response and the quality of their response as well.I guarantee you this step will remove most of the applicants on your final list and you can move forward with the very small handful you’ll be left with. Communication is huge! From here you can either hire one (or even more) to start testing out their skills or you can go one step further and interview them over Skype.So there you have it. These are the three options I have had the most success with over the past 9 months when I wasn’t doing the SEO work myself.Where Do I Start?From here you’ll need to decide which option sounds best to you, which you think will fit your business model the best and what your budget will allow for.Regardless of which option you go with let me share one piece of advice. Never start using a new freelancer or provider on a new client project. It’s just a bad idea. Sure things can go well, but what if they don’t? That will leave you scrambling and having to answer to your client. There is nothing worse than losing a client you worked so hard to get because of someone else’s work.Now I believe you’ll be safe using Posirank to get started but I still think it’s a good idea to test the system out so you feel more comfortable with it and the process won’t get stressed out when you start using it for client work.If you’ll be using a freelancer, create a test site for them to work on whether it be for a fake business, a side project of yours or an affiliate site. See the quality of their work, the results they get and how well they communicate with you. I often go through several freelancers before finding “the one” and putting them to work on any of my client projects.But if you’re still concerned with outsourcing your SEO work just yet, I’ve also shared some of the top SEO software you can use to do it yourself which can also save yourself a lot of time, money and frustration. Click here to see the top 5 SEO software tools.How do you plan on outsourcing your SEO?
