How to Choose the Right SEO Company: 32 Questions to Ask by Adam Heitzman #375

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Veras, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results strategist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 375. I feel like we were just at, I feel like we were just celebrating 356. Like we had a whole year of podcast. And then, I mean 365, and now we're at 375. Wow, happens fast. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is improve the presentation and engagement of your content by using visuals and media. Yeah, don't just create this post and do all that research and put out this great content with no supporting rich media. Give yourself a hero image, a photo gallery, a corresponding video, and maybe an infographic. Some sort of media, visual media, that can support the content you write. Make sure you subscribe and follow. Hey, Chuck and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood proposition snatchers. And our mantra is, do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. It is not a good look. And we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas. We've got a very interesting article for you today. Today, Charles is putting us, eWebResults, on the chopping block, potentially. Potential chopping block. So, I want to give a good punch in the face to Adam Heitzman and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. He posted this article, How to Vet an SEO Agency and Prevent Failure. He got like 30 plus questions in here about what you should be asking an agency before you hire them. And so, we're just going to vet ourselves live and give you guys some honesty. Spoiler alert. We do just fine. Howdy. If this is the first time you've been watching or listening to the podcast, if you've listened to this podcast before, you will understand what I'm about to explain and why we're actually going to tell you how to leave us a review. We run a contest, a quote-unquote

contest, every week. And how it works is if we get 10 shikos. A shiko is an eWebResults branded term for social engagement. It stands for shares, likes, and follows. Shiko. If we get 10 of those and we get a review, then we don't go through the process of telling you exactly how you can leave a review. How and where you can review it. Yep. This time, we didn't get the 10. We got the review. We didn't get the 10. So, we're going to explain to you how you can leave us a review. We typically read our reviews on air. So, if you want your voice heard, go ahead and leave us a review. The first place that you can leave us a review really has three steps. Go on to iTunes. Create an account. Write a review. Hopefully, you will make that review faster. Next, you can go on to Stitcher. We've made it very easy to get to Stitcher. We just go to eWebResults.com slash. SEO podcast. Oh, no. Stitcher. Stitcher. Yeah. eWebResults.com slash. Stitcher. Stitcher. We'll get you. It automatically forwards you to our Stitcher page. And then you can click and it says leave a review. Yeah. Up the right corner. Click the button. Write a review. Next is Google My Business. We've made this really easy because if you follow Google's guidelines, it's like 1, 9, 5, 7, 2, 5, 9, 9, 9 plus. I don't know. Yeah. Dot. Super. You know. Cow jumped over the moon. Yeah. It's long. Here's what you can actually use. eWebResults.com slash. Google. Plus. Or slash. Google. Plus. Or slash. G. Plus. Or slash. G. Plus. All of those will take you actually to a search engine result page with a pop-up where you can write that review. Again, hopefully you'll make that review. Five stars. Next, you can leave a review on Facebook. Facebook.com slash. eWebResults. And just click the stars and leave a review and it's super easy. While you're there, go write a question if you got one. Yeah. Add a question.

That would be really helpful. Those are the ways that you can leave us a review. Next, we're going to talk about how you can just engage with us. Right? These are the social media platforms that we're on. So, here's how you get to our profiles. First, it's Facebook.com slash. eWebResults. Twitter.com slash. eWebResults. Instagram.com slash. eWebResults. YouTube.com slash. eWebResults. And LinkedIn.com slash. Company slash. eWebResults. All of those will take you to our profiles on those platforms. Please, Shiko. Shiko us and engage. Right? On LinkedIn, you'll find great articles that we're posting. Facebook, you'll see what's going on with the company and some other articles. Twitter, you'll get links to some stuff we're doing. Maybe you want to catch up on a sound check or a tip or some algo cat. Like, follow us and get access to all that stuff. By the way, the sound checks are freestyle raps that Chuck, the SEO rapper, does right before our podcast. We cut that clip out. You can find those lots of places, actually. A whole lot of places. Well, at least on three out of those five we named. Yeah. For sure. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio resume. 713-510-7846. We actually have a big interview group coming in today. So, we're really excited about that. If you are interested in a free, comprehensive website profit analysis, you can get one. Just go to ewebresults.com. There's a green button that you cannot miss. Go ahead and click it. Fill that out. It's a phenomenal website analysis, website profit analysis. And involves some time. Typically, I'm very focused to your audience and what you're looking to accomplish. Take advantage. Take advantage. It is time for the favorite segment of the program, the Algorithm Cataclysm. Okay. Oh, yeah. That was good. Yeah, that's a good one. Kind of low on the Ricta scale. Today's algorithm cataclysm comes courtesy of Google Warning. Google Warning. Yeah, they issued out a warning. Google released a statement. It's

like a weather alert. Yeah, kind of like tornado warning, meaning that there's a possible chance for tornadoes or flood warning because it's raining and there could be flood coming soon. So, Google released this warning and it's targeting really link building in a spammy kind of black hat way, right? They say Google issues a warning about guest posting to build links. And so, I'm about to read you what that warning is directly from Google. They said, basically, Google does not discourage these type of articles. And they're referring to articles where you are posted on another site and you have links over to your site. Right. And maybe that site where those articles are posted on is not really relevant to your industry or relevant to any one industry. It could just be some collection of articles from some random site with the similar authors posting these different links. That's a problem. They say stuffing keyword rich links to your site in these articles is a problem. Right. They say having the articles published across many different sites. Alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large different sites is a problem. They say using or hiring article writers that aren't knowledgeable about the topics they're writing on. It's a problem. They say using the same or similar content across these articles. Alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site. Also a problem. Yeah. So the key is don't be out here creating these articles loaded up with links to your site and try and post them on a whole bunch of different sites and other places. That's an old tactic. And Google is just saying that's in a matter of fact. They said lately we've seen an increase in spamming links contained in these articles referred to as contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts. These articles are generally written by or in the name of one website and published on a different one. So, yeah, don't be participating in the whole kind of domain switching and duplicate

content, guest posting, partner posting, syndicated posting. If your whole strategy is just to build links, they're saying that they're going to catch it. You will likely get penalized and don't be affected by that algorithm. Cataclysm. Yeah. Straight up. Avoid it. Avoid it. Do good link building strategies. You should still have a link building strategy. It just needs to be good. So it didn't say it encouraged you. It didn't say guest blogging was wrong. It didn't even say partner posting was wrong. But what it did say was if you guest blogged with the intent of just building links and your content isn't thorough enough and it appears to be written by someone who may not know what they're talking about, they're going to flag just that spammy and you could be penalized. And they frankly had the machine learning and the AI to actually figure that out. Yep. They know. Like when you read an article and you know it's not good. Yeah, they know it's not good. Exactly. All right. So I got a little bit of news. This is cool. Samsung displayed. So this was a while ago. The way I had read it originally was Samsung displayed a flexible OLED display. And then I Googled it and there was a YouTube video of them on stage in 2014 showing a flexible one. And I'm like, okay, well, why is that different? This one actually stretches. You could actually stretch it around stuff. A light? No, it's an OLED screen. Yeah. So it's probably some of the technology that's going into the edge. To curve monitors and all that kind of stuff. Right. Well, it's just the edge cell phone. So anyway, I thought that was cool. Now they can stretch it a little bit. I don't know what you're doing. How much can you do? Like, oh, that stretched too far. Yeah. I don't know. Oops. Need a new one. Next was Zuckerberg to Harvard grads. He says, choose a purpose, not a career. He also told them Delirio, what are you talking

about, the technical companies taking jobs? Right. Yeah. It's actually a good speech. I went back and listened to the entire grad speech. It's on YouTube. Very cool. And then Amazon Fresh has pickup locations. They started in Seattle. So that's kind of cool. You can order some food, no minimum orders, and then you just go to that spot and they bring it to your door. That's kind of grocery food. I got two pieces of news. Let's talk Google Lens. You had a Google Lens? Yeah, so it's an app on a cell phone that identifies stuff. Great, great answer. So according to Google Lens, so basically you can search the web with your smartphone camera. That's what that is. And the app, Google Lens app works with your smartphone camera. So Google Lens is a technology that will integrate Google search engine with a smartphone camera. By taking a photo with Google Lens, your camera will be able to recognize objects and search for them on the web. Dig this. I kind of like the examples. Like maybe you're connecting to a Wi-Fi network. You can take a picture of the name and password. Right, right. And then your phone will recognize that and get you connected. That's kind of cool. Or maybe you were in China. Like my wife was. Me in a restaurant. You don't understand the menu. You can take a picture of that menu and Google would translate the menu for you. Yeah. That's just pretty cool. And they got a whole bunch of other stuff they're doing. So shout out to Google Lens. I just think that's pretty cool. Yeah. I've been in plenty of places. I'm like, what is that? I wish there was a way to figure that out. Exactly. And take a picture of it. And then my last piece of news is about Verizon. Right. You know, I was wondering what they were going to do. How they bought out AOL. Then they, you know, did the purchase of Yahoo last year. It's like, what are they doing?

Well, they're confirmed plans on launching streaming TV. So they're about to get into the market against Netflix and Hulu and YouTube Red and PlayStation View and all of the other kind of TVs out there. So good luck, Verizon. It's a very competitive market. But one thing I like about it is that a lot of these new creators and new people creating shows, this is going to be another venue for distribution for that. Right, right. You know, you don't have to worry about getting to mainstream TV now because. Just get to Verizon. Just get to Verizon. Or get to Netflix even, you know, or Hulu. And then these people making good money doing it too. So that's what's up. Very cool. All right. I've got a review here. This is the review that saved me from getting a tear tattoo under my right eye. It is from Chuck C. And it is, of course, five stars. It says, hey, love this show. Chris and Charles make SEO fun. And it really is the best way to learn. I've been able to increase traffic to my websites by implementing some of the methods they talk about on the show. Thanks for all the content and keep it up. Double kick in the shins to both of you. I actually had a conversation with him. He was a little confused. Yeah, I'm like, hold on, dog. We said double kick. I'm like, I was confused. Five stars with a double click in the shins. Shins, yeah. So I had to let him just. Ouch, dog. Yeah. It hurts. It hurts so bad. So punch in the face to you, Chuck. Punch in the face to you. I sent him the link to our glossary. So he knows exactly what that means. Gotcha. Speaking of people confused, I got a couple punches in the face also. These came from Twitter. Punch in the face to Anise Annalise Nitz. She hits us up on Twitter. She says, at the web results, loving your podcast, but what's the deal with the

punch in the face? So apparently some other people are confused. So real talk, a punch in the face is really equivalent to like a shout out. Right? So when we punch you in the face, it is a term of endearment and that is a punch of love. Yeah. It feels good when you get punched in the face by us. A kick in the shin is the opposite of that. A kick in the shin is like, what's the opposite of a shout out? Like a down vote. Yeah, like a down vote. Like a down like, or whatever it is. A kick in the shin usually happens because you messed up. Right. Or something. Because you were being a douche. Exactly. And so that's what a kick in the shin is. Punch in the face to you, Annalise Nitz, and learning the lingo and enjoying the podcast. My second, Patif, punch in the face, goes to Zach Carter. He is up on Twitter, at AWebResults. I recently got back on the hashtag podcast bandwagon and you guys rock. I hope to continue to learn from it. Hashtag punch in the face. Zach Carter? Punch in the face to you. Thank you, sir. Love it. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. It is time to get into the meat. Yeah, let's get into the meat. Again, I want to give a huge punch in the face to Adam Heitzman and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. He posted this article, How to Vet an SEO Agency and Prevent Failure. And so as I was scrolling through SEO Journal and Search Engine Watch and SEO Moz and Search Engine Land and Marketing Land and trying to peruse what content we'd have for today, I saw this title and I thought about us. I was like, okay, how to vet an agency. You know, because you're in sales. We're interviewing people. We put out proposals all the time and I know that half the proposals we put out and even half of the clients

we have had to at some point vet an SEO agency and they ended up with us, right? Yep. And so I figured, I just printed it. I ran through the first three questions. I said, you know what? I'm just going to bring it to us live. And so let's get right into it. Matter of fact, he says finding the right SEO provider is important. It also can be a lot of hard work. This is why vetting an SEO agency is so important. You want to make sure your agency is easy to work with. He says they're going to deliver real value to your business. They're consistent. They have knowledge, knowledge, knowledgeable about the industry and they're within your budget. I think we're kind of easy to work with and we focus on results and we try to remain consistent. Right. See, number 375. Right. And we're very knowledgeable about our industry. He goes on to say an SEO agency horror show because he's heard some stories. He says one frustrating aspect of being an agency is hearing stories from businesses that come to us weary and frustrated from bad experiences they've had with unreliable SEO agencies. Yeah. It's something we hear all the time. I used to say when I was talking to a prospect that 80% of the people that I'm talking to have been burned in some way by an internet marketing agency. That number is like 90 or 95%, right? I'm very altruistic. I'm just hoping that those are agencies out there not trying to bilk people out of their money. They're just maybe growing too fast and not able to deliver. They're maybe just are more technicians, so good at SEO, but don't know how to manage a growing business. So that's kind of my approach. I mean, it happens. I can honestly tell you, we've had clients who left because we just couldn't see eye to eye on certain things. Right. And it wasn't a lack of knowledge or not performing. It was, you know, every client's not going to

be a fit. Right. And that was one of those situations. So we had an experience. Yeah, one of our kind of the horror story that we're most aware of is we picked up a client. They actually had really good placements and good traffic, so they weren't happy with the vendor that they were using. And so they switched over to us. And this was really early. And so we were a little bit nervous about picking up this account because they had good placement. We wanted to make some changes, but we didn't want to make many because they already had great placement. And their biggest fear when they switched over to us was that they were going to get a drop in their placement. And sure enough, we get the account, and it didn't drop. It plummeted. Like just like chart dropping off the chart. Yeah, if you were familiar with a miles report, imagine me in position one to 51 plus. Boom. Like overnight. And so we're sitting here. We're working on it. We're looking at it like there's nothing that should happen. And finally it dawned on me. Literally, I was having a beer at the end of a late, late Friday trying to solve this problem. And I was like, let's check out the robot text file. Now, sure enough, they had de-indexed the entire site as they were leaving. Here's your parting gift. De-indexed. Yeah. Yeah. Removed that de-index. You know, that's the in the robot text file where you say, hey, Google, ignore every page on our website. Exactly. Removed that, and they were back up. Yeah, removed that, add the site map, resubmit, and you know, you back up. Back up. So, yeah, lots of horror stories. And we've got plenty of them. We hear them all the time, but that one kind of sticks out the most because it was malicious on that other agency's part. So, let's get into these questions right here. I pulled out some of the top five questions that you may want to use when

vetting your SEO agency. Number one, can you guarantee that my site will have a top ranking position? Can you guarantee that my site will have a top ranking position? That's a great question. Great question. Can you guarantee it? And the industry standard answer to this is no. No, we can't. We can't control what Google does. We can't control what Bing does. We can't control what Yahoo or Dogpile or any other of these search engines do. Right. We just can't control that. And so, we can't effectively guarantee that we can put you in this position. Yeah. And we don't have access to the algorithm. If we had access to the actual algorithm, we could also guarantee it as well. So, from a very technical perspective, and I'm going to change this in just a second, but a very technical perspective, no. You cannot guarantee first position placement. Okay. Question number two. Two. How much on-page, off-page, and technical work can I expect to be done, and what specific practices do you do for each? On-page, off-page, and technical work. And technical work. What can I expect to be done? Well, on-page, you can expect all your pages to get optimized. Right now, we'll usually do those in a set of pages each month because we've got certain hours we're working with on your account. But you can expect all of your target pages to be optimized, to be improved, to be ranking. In reference to off-page, you can also expect us to be working off-page, building links, submitting guest posts when applicable, right? Doing infographics, and videos, and submitting to directories, and all of the off-page stuff that's necessary, press releases if necessary. Right. And those are things that we will be doing off-page. And then the technical stuff is kind of ongoing. Right. One of the reasons we redesigned is because we build on WordPress, and we have a custom framework that works on WordPress that handles bulk of these technical issues. It's like load speed, like plug-ins, and functionality, and responsiveness, and everything else.

And so we're constantly updating our framework. And if your site is built on our framework, then you inherently receive those updates. And so we're constantly doing on-page, off-page, and technical. It's the reason we charge the monthly premium is because all three of those things must be done continuously. Right. He says, the third question, do you have any examples of work you've done for similar businesses? Yes, we do. Talk about for a second what people in our proposal process usually receive. All right. So in terms of the analysis, right? So in our process, and certainly if you come on as a client, you will get a comprehensive website analysis, right? So this is part of that website profit analysis that we talk about on our best-rated SEO podcast on iTunes. Really, this is in-depth. We're actually talking about all the technical details. So are these technical details right? And there's two aspects to the technical details. The first aspect is, is it done, right? So do you have a title tag? Do you have alt tags? And the next is, is it done properly, right? So the first litmus test for most of the people that I'm talking with is if these things are done, you've probably had an SEO, at least a temp search engine optimization on your website. And then I look at the details of what is your description? What is your title? And is it done well? Because, you know, this is continuously debated about what is really well done. And we've got a system and a process that we do consistently and gets great results, right? So that's what you get in our process. Yeah, and for those who are looking for like case studies and examples and things like that, after you get the analysis, that's followed up with literally links to our clients with their sites and video testimonials from them about the service. So you can actually see, you can actually experience what we do and then hear it from other clients also. I like this one. He

says, what specific metrics do you track and report on? This is my lane. I would answer this, but that's his lane. This is my lane. I'm always reporting. And so it really depends on your industry. But typically, I'm reporting on ranking, right? Like where you were at when you started and where you are at every month when we review the reports. I'm reporting on traffic. How much did you get? What pages did they look at? How many results did you get at the end of the day? That's the biggest thing I'm reporting on. How many leads came in? Whether it were web form submissions or even phone calls from organic or paid search. We're tracking where those calls came from, where those leads came from, where that visitor engagement looked like, all of that stuff, mostly from Google Analytics, some SEO miles reports. We use some call tracking software. So that's what we're tracking and reporting every month, traffic and leads, and more importantly, how those leads closed. Yep. Because we're interested in growing businesses. So I'm not interested in telling you how many leads we sent. I already know that. I'm interested in knowing from you, out of the leads we sent, which one's actually turned into business so we can rinse and repeat. Absolutely. And the last question on here for the top five questions you might want to ask the SEO, overall, what results can I expect from my website? So great question. I think it varies from agency to agency, industry to industry. But what we've kind of noticed is upon initial site launch for anybody on a comprehensive internet marketing campaign, they usually see 30, 40% increase in leads. Day one. Day one of site launch. Of site launch. And that's just due to the technical framework we've added, to the upgraded look and feel, to the instant ranking pop that tends to happen. Because the technical stuff is right. Right. Absolutely. Because we've improved the content and everything else. And so on average, most clients see between, you know,

30 and 40% increase in leads and phone calls within that first 30 days of launching the site. Now, about 90 days later, you begin to see more results happen organically. Right. You start to see more traffic and your paid campaigns are optimized and things like that. But initial launch, yeah, probably 30, 40%. Really based off of your current traffic. Yes. Let me throw that out there also. If you're getting traffic, great, and your site's just not converting, we want to address that immediately. Yeah, absolutely. So we're all about getting the low-hanging fruit first and usually putting up a website that has great conversion aspects to it. Great call to actions, great USPs, great easy to use the site, you know, information readily available, easy lead captures and things like that. And this really leads into or dovetails into the first question. Can you guarantee? And we actually do have a guarantee because here's the reality. Google is changing their algorithm. All the time. All the time, right? That's why we have a segment today in our podcast called Algorithm Cataclysm. And those changes usually if you're using good strategies don't affect websites that are using good strategies. And so we're always using good strategies and we do the same things for all of our clients month over month and we see their positions increase. Doesn't it, at some point, doesn't it make sense that you should have confidence enough to put your money where your mouth is and say if they go through this process, they're going to get these results. And that's why we have a guarantee. Our guarantee actually will pay you back up to $10,000 depending on what package you're on and how things are going. So yeah, we do put our money where our mouth is. We do have a guarantee, a $10,000 guarantee. Yeah, we can't guarantee what Google will put your ranking at, but we can guarantee our process will get you great ranking. And we back that with the financial guarantee. And so technically we can't guarantee it,

but we can guarantee it because we have the experience that allows us to guarantee it. Exactly. And that's five questions you may want to ask when vetting an SEO agency. Excellent. He had a few more questions on here. He had about 30 of them on that kind of time, but I did highlight some of them. One of these questions was, how do you build links and what kind of links do you build? Great question to ask an SEO agency. We tend to build links. I mean, we were already aware, right, of today's AlgoCat was Google kind of warning people about guest blogging in spammy ways, right, in non-authentic ways. And so guest blogging is a tactic we use to build links. Absolutely. It's a little bit more time-consuming and a little bit more tedious because we don't want to post it on some random guest blog. It needs to be relevant to your site, and so that's one of the links that we build. We also spend a lot of time on citations and directory submissions and things like that. Legitimate directory submissions. Legitimate directory submissions. It's not like you pay us $30 and we'll submit you to 10,000 directories. No, no. That's not a good strategy. We won't do that at all. We're going to find the most relevant ones for your business. We're going to find the most relevant ones for your business, like a top 10, and then we'll find another set of 20 or 30 that are semi-relevant but have great ranking and do well for SEO. And then we'll consistently make sure that that is updated. We can probably comfortably say if you're going to Fiverr for link building, you may be paying $5 for the links. You may be paying $5,000 to fix them. Yeah, definitely. Because there ain't nothing worse than having to go back and disavow a whole bunch of bad links. Right. That is a very time-consuming and tedious process. Yeah. He says, here's another question. He says, what tools do you use to achieve results

and carry out SEO services? Oh, we have plenty of tools. Yeah, this one right here. A lot of manpower because we believe that it takes, you know, we don't want to take time and effort. In regards to tools, software, we build on WordPress. That's our kind of web design platform of choice. Yes, we're kind of experimenting with HubSpot right now. We use Google Analytics for reporting. We use SEO Moz for reporting. Call tracking. Yeah, we use call tracking. We use, yeah, we use Search Console for submitting. So we'll use SEMrush. SEMrush for quoting and proposals and research. And some backlink analysis, yeah. Yeah, I've used Open Site Explorer for link analysis. All these are just industry standard tools that are available. We're not hiding anything. Right. And so we use the same tools you would use. Yep. He says, how does your team handle content strategy and development? This is really cool. This is more of a collaborative effort between us and you. Right. And the client. And the client. Exactly. What we tend to do is make recommendations. Hey, we'd like to increase rank for these terms. And so we want to put out a content and maybe a blog piece and a corresponding video around this subject matter. And then we get the actual nuts and bolts of that content from the client. What does this mean? How do they do it? How can they perfect it? And then we polish it and proceed with the campaign. And so our content strategy. And we do this month over month. Right. And so our content strategy is all about growth. It's all about really incorporating the client. Right. And having their, you know, look and feel, their functionality, their voice in the content that we'll end up creating and promoting. Manny asked the question, do we like Ahrefs? And the answer is yes. Yeah. That's part of one of my reports that I use regularly. Ahrefs, they're consistent. It works really, really fast. And, yeah, it's the leader in this industry. We use Moz.

And Moz references Ahrefs. And so it's part of the whole suite. How often can I expect to receive reports, updates, and how will you communicate them to me? Let me speak to this. Because this goes along the lines of how many people have been burned by internet marketing agencies. I can't tell you how many people who have been burned who come in and say, and I ask, have you ever seen a report? No, I've never seen a report. Or they'll say, in my mind, an equivalent, which is, oh, yeah, they send me reports all the time. They never looked at them. For me, for eWeb results, that's the same thing. Sending you a report. You know, there are people who are data. There are people who are data-focused. There are people who are data-challenged. And most are, let's say, on the data-challenged side. So, like, okay, great. I'm going to open this report. Just because it's overwhelming and it's new to them. And if you haven't looked at a chart or a Google Analytic report, then that data is just foreign. And so it's not an insult. It's just that this data is foreign. And so sending you a blind report saying, hey, here's your monthly reports won't cut it. What we tend to do is schedule a call. Every single client gets a monthly call. And that call will be the first Tuesday or whatever time works for you. But it's the same time every single month. And we'll review the previous month's data. And now how we do that to answer the question just depends on you. We can do this by phone call. If you're local here in Houston, we may meet face-to-face. Google Hangouts. Likely most of, probably 80% of my clients we do a Hangout with. So we can screen share and share ideas and collaborate a little bit more effectively. But to answer the question, how can I expect to receive them through email and Google Hangouts at least once a month? Yep. With us. Another question he has

on here. What steps do you take to ensure the security of our website? Great question. Yeah. Great question. Especially with WordPress. That's a great question. So there was a time probably about two years ago where we'd have a website that would get hacked regularly. Remember, if you're on WordPress, you are on the most popular content management system on the planet. And just like Windows... Yeah, just consider 20% of websites. 20% of all websites on the internet right now. So if you're a hacker... Built on WordPress. If you're a hacker, do you go after WordPress or that one-off tool, that other tool? You know, Ruby on Rails is very popular, but it's not 20%, right? Yeah. So what do you go after? Because if you find a hole in WordPress, you get the maximum impact. So about two years ago, we said, let's pull back and let's spend some time on the right strategy to make sure that our WordPress is secure. So one of the things that we did is reduce the number of plugins. Yeah. Because plugins are... Well, they cause two headaches. One headache is they're not up... That you've got to update them. You've got to depend on the third party, right? Yeah. You've got to depend on them to remain secure and update. And then you have to turn around and update. Right. So it's a pain to update sometimes because it breaks stuff when you update them. And two, if you don't update, there can become security holes, right? And three, they just make your site heavy sometimes and affect your load time. Yeah. So we built this framework. The framework has significantly less plugins than a typical WordPress installation. So we're very excited about that. The other thing that we put in is server level protection. Yeah. So you can't get to the administrative structure. You can't get to that folder structure without a secondary login. So those, we'll call them script kitties or whatever who are out there trying to find hacks and then let their bots figure

out where the WordPress sites are that have enough vulnerability, they can't get to the section that they need to get to. Gotcha. So that's how we... Those are some of the steps we do to ensure security. And then not to mention that everybody who comes in and they're on an internet marketing package will be on a secure SSL server also once we go live. And Manny just chimed in. He said, I had well over a hundred plugins on my site at one time. I think he's leaned it out by now. I mean, when you consider building it, how easy it is, I get it. Oh, just add a plugin. Oh, that'll do that. Oh, I needed to wink. So now I've got Wink plugin. Exactly. And then... WP Wink. I like this question here. He says, how much time per month is needed from our end? So it's like a client asking a question. Great question. So my monthly results call, MRC, right? That on average is about 45 minutes to an hour. Right. And so you count that plus whatever communication time we'll have throughout the weeks and months. Some clients, we end up on a weekly call. So that's about 20 minutes if they need a little bit more communication or engagement. And so I would say just probably three hours. Yeah. We're talking about our more successful clients. The clients who are doing less than three hours are significantly less successful. And it just is what it is. We've got some clients who call frequently and we're always in constant communication and they're always sending us new ideas, always sending us new pictures, always sending us updates. And we have the resources to act in and do something with them. And those campaigns perform well. The clients who struggle to give us time and we have to keep begging time and rescheduling meetings, they increase. But unfortunately, that is still a rate. It just kind of is what it is. This is the last question. What separates you from other SEO agencies?

So one of the things that separates us, I assume you're asking me, one of the things that separates us is this podcast, actually. So maybe this is one of the questions that is, and it's probably in here, how does your SEO team stay on top of the latest trends and techniques and processes to do well from search engine optimization? Guess how our team does it. In order, Chuck, who leads the team in training, has to be on top of, how many articles did you cover today? So to get to this one, I read 12. 12 articles, right? So he's gone through 12 articles. So let me be honest. Yeah, I scanned 12. I read six. Yeah. And then I thoroughly read two. And then I analyzed one. So ask your SEO company, how are you guys staying on top? How do you know what the latest algorithm chain is? Who's responsible for getting that to your team? Because that's one of the very important aspects of eWeb results. The next thing that sets us apart is the focus on results. Results. We're eWeb results, right? And our result isn't, oh, your traffic's up, your bounce rate's down, your time on site. We track those. We know what's going on. And we make adjustments based on those. But our target isn't those. Our target is how many times your phone rang. Yeah. How many web form submissions did you get? And more importantly, did they actually convert into closed business? Yeah. That's the ultimate metric we're reporting on. That's the ultimate result we're looking for. And as long as every month when we have our call, if you continue to tell me, hey, I got these leads and we were able to close 5% of them, 10% of them, and they generated this much revenue, then we're great. Then I'll likely ask you for a referral. If you say, hey, they're not closing well, that's the information we need to know. That's the purpose of the call. So we can go back and make adjustments for

the next 30 days and then revisit it with the turnaround. I'm going to tell you just a real short story because this story is actually really long, but I have the short piece of it about how important results are to us. We had a client, e-commerce. They didn't want to put a phone number on their website. You know who I'm talking about. They did not want to put a phone number on their website. Man, I had suppressed this memory. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We'll get you that therapist hooked up with that therapist again. Again, seriously. So he didn't want to have a phone number on his website. We're like, you've got to have a phone number on your website. Yeah, you are an e-commerce site, dude. You're high end. If you don't have this phone number on your website, it's a problem, right? So we finally put a call tracking number, and we were answering the phone for the client. Hi, thank you for calling XYZ Company. How can we help you? And we made adjustments to his campaign based on the phone calls that were coming in, and we closed the first deal on the phone for him. That's how serious we are about results. And then what did he do? Decided to have a phone number. Yeah. Oh, let me add my phone number so it doesn't go to you. Yeah, can you take your call tracking number off and put my real number now? That's crazy. Anyway, that's how focused on results we are because results are the only thing that matter. Yeah. We used to be eWeb style. Style is just a result. We're now eWeb results. So punch in the face to you, Adam. Adam Heisman. Good folks over at Search Engine Journal. How to vet an SEO agency and prevent failure. Great article. Great list of questions. We will repost this and reshare it. We actually, I'm glad that we were able to answer and actually vet ourselves pretty cool because that just means we're doing some of the

good things. And Manny asks our packages, call us. We can let you know we typically want somebody on an SEO and PPC package. We've got a program, which we're about to mention, called Instant Leads. Lead, lead, lead. Guaranteed. T, T, T, T. And then the package that we're seeing a lot of really good results is actually SEO, PPC, social media, and newsletters. Remember, the inbox is still the number one visited place on the internet. Yeah, and all of those packages include a website. Your website. The changes that we need to make to your website in order to make it perform. Do we have any what news? No what news. All right. So, if you like this podcast, we're going to ask you to do one simple thing for us, and that is to share it. Share it. Please share this podcast with somebody who's in the industry, some business owner that you know. Somebody who could benefit from understanding what questions they need to ask the next SEO agency that they're going to interview. Maybe somebody who's just looking to get an increase in marketing and maybe, frankly, don't have the budget, but they just want the information. That's the purpose of this podcast. So, share it. If you're on Facebook, hit the share button. Tag them names in there. If you're tweeting it, retweet it and tag us in it. Now, if you're a marketing person or a business owner and you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, then call EOI Results for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. And we do have a program called Instant Leads. Yep. Leads, leads, leads. Guaranteed. T, T, T, T. It is focused on getting immediate traffic from pay-per-click campaigns onto a highly optimized conversion landing page so that you get instant leads. Leads, leads, leads, leads. Guaranteed. T, T, T, T. It's pretty easy to guarantee that. If you have a referral, that's somebody who's interested in a website or instant leads. SEO or

some pay-per-click management or some social media marketing. Newsletters. Email marketing. A drip campaign, email marketing, yeah. Go ahead and send them our direction. When they come on with us and pay us, we pay you. It's a pretty sweet program. Please remember, we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast because of you. If you are interested in a transcript, audio, or video of this podcast, you can find it at our website, eWebResults.com. Yep. Slash SEO Podcast. That'll get you right to the S. Yeah. All of the content there. So, thank you guys for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Appreciate it. We really appreciate it. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Varese. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. All right. Balance check. Balance check. 3-75. SEO Podcast 3-75. It's Friday afternoon. Chris and Chuck going live. Today, we talk about how to choose an SEO. Going to vet ourselves using this article. Yeah. SEO rapper. EWebResults. SEO Podcast 3-75. Subscribe. Follow. Boom.