When it comes to SEO, there are lots of companies out there promising you the earth.  We even get phone calls and unsolicited emails every day.  So to avoid the cowboys we recommend that you avoid anyone who makes you these kind of promises:
 

1. We’ll get you to number 1 for all your keywords.
2. We’ll submit your site manually to thousands of directories for hundreds of pounds.
3. We have a special relationship with Google et al which allows us to get our clients favourable treatment.
4. We will add your site to our network of several thousand sites that just happen to all be relevant to your market segments. = large numbers of irrelevant low quality links probably all appearing at once which will not only waste your money but probably be detrimental to your search engine rankings.  And even if this approach does work then what happens when you end the contract and they remove all the links.
5. We create all your links manually but then spend your money on paid links or on paid review s from blogs which Google and the other big search engines disapprove of.
6. We get our clients favourable treatment because we spend so much money on PPC advertising with the search engines.
7. SEOs who do keyword research and then tell you they can rank you on page 1 for a handful of useless keywords that are easy to rank for because no one is searching for them!
8. SEOS who threaten you along the lines of, “If you do not optimise with us, we’ll work with your competitors and destroy you!!”.  Yes it has happened. One irate sales rep did actually threaten me with this one sunny afternoon when I questioned the credibility and value of her services!
9. We look at top 30, top 20 and top 10 keywords.  Is there any point in focusing on the top 30 keywords when approximately than 1% of users click through the SERPs this far? In my opinion this is only useful for two things; i) in notifying you that you are now ranking for keywords that you did not previously rank for (and identifying that with a bit of additional effort you could get good results); and ii) alerting you to keywords that are going in the wrong direction so you can take remedial measures.
10. We are experts.  Is anyone really? Sure some SEOs are better than others, and some have a great client list and a good track record of success; but at the end of the day the SEO process requires a lot of testing, trial and error, intuition, guesswork, analysis, luck, contacts, effort and more.  It is as much an art as it is a science; and I guess that’s what makes it so interesting.

For your search engine optimization techniques to be effective you need to ensure that your SEO supplier helps you see the whole picture.

You can get a much better view of where you currently stand compared to your competitors and what you need to do to get the better of them by doing some essential preliminary SEO research.

It is this essential upfront SEO research that will help you set realistic objectives and expectations for your next search engine campaign before you begin.  It will save you time and money, and produce a more satisfying and successful relationship with your SEO agency because you will both be clear about what you expect before you start working together in earnest.

Even if this initial research costs you a few hundred pounds it is money well spent at this stage.