Jon Samsel

Recently I was on LinkedIn and came across the following SEO question:

“Looking for one of the best SEO companies in the world. Can anyone recommend one that has amazing track record / recommendations?”

I read through the Q&A thread. Over 20 people responded by providing SEO tips, as well as the names of SEO firms to follow up with. Some were big name SEO companies, some were creative agencies, and some were unknown to me.

I decided to do a little detective work. You see, from my experience, not all search optimization firms practice what they preach. So I thought of a quick way to gauge which SEO consulting firms were legit and which ones are full of bologna–run a Websitegrader report on each firm’s URL and then compare the results.

Why use Websitegrader? There are lots of free tools online that measure this and that. I like Websitegrader.com because it looks under the hood of a company’s URL to uncover what developers are doing well and where they could use improvement–mostly from an SEO point-of-view. They also provide a score so you can compare one website against another.

Websitegrader is not foolproof, mind you, but the results are very insightful. And as long as Websitegrader applies the same algorithm to the each website they grade, a user should be able to benchmark the good from the bad, from the ugly.

I looked at 30 SEO firms mentioned in the LinkedIn Q&A thread. The results were somewhat surprising. Here is how these companies ranked by Websitegrader on a scale of 0-100, 100 being best:

99.9 - www.bigmouthmedia.com
99.7 - www.6smarketing.com
99.7 - www.primevisibility.com
99.6 - www.bruceclay.com
99.6 - www.webadvantage.net
99.5 - www.vizioninteractive.com
99.4 - www.submitawebsite.com
99.3 - www.seo.com
98.9 - www.oneupweb.com
98.2 - www.webmetro.com
97.9 - www.netconcepts.com
97.6 - www.iCrossing.com
97.3 - www.thinkseer.com
96.5 - www.purevisibility.com
96.3 - www.seojunkies.com
95.9 - www.increasevisibility.com
95.5 - www.reprisemedia.com
95.5 - www.rustybrick.com
95.0 - www.seop.com
94.0 - www.nowspeed.com
93.0 - www.ilikesem.com
92.0 - www.usawebsolutions.com
91.0 - www.tmpdm.com
90.0 - www.iprospect.com
85.0 - www.360i.com
85.0 - www.razorfish.com
71.0 - www.ip-seo.com
67.0 - the-ccg-group.com
43.0 - www.asenyo.com
27.0 - www.wsiim.com

Who would have thought BigMouthMedia would outperform so many larger competitors? Of course, these results don’t mean that any of the above-rated SEO firms are not good at doing search optimization for their clients. I am pretty sure many of them are just busy doing client work…so busy that they have neglected their own website optimization efforts. However, for prospective companies considering doing business with any of these firms, wouldn’t a prudent client take a close look at an SEO company’s track record–both client results AND the quality of the SEO firm’s website as well? I think so.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm to assist your company optimize its website for search engine rankings, you might want to run a Websitegrader report on the SEO agency first. Not only will the resulting grades be useful in evaluating two SEO firms against each another, but you can use the scores as a conversation starter when talking to the sales manager from an SEO firm trying to sell you their services. It really trips them up when you ask them why they scored so poorly next to competitor X!

Did I just say that?

Good luck.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under LinkedIn, Marketing, SEO, Websites, Writing. 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.