Finding SEO Companies

When KeywordRanking was still in business, we used to get calls about once a month from disaffected clients asking how to get out of contracts and to see if they were getting value for the $2,000 being spent. Most of those situations were the result of overzealous sales people, cold calling businesses and making promises that were a bit ambitious. In most cases though, the business owner had not allowed enough time for their SEO and link building to gain momentum. Even quality SEO firms can suffer if expectations are not set correctly. Now that the subsequent iteration of KeywordRanking (MarkeSmart Interactive) is no longer doing business as usual, we are getting contacted again by companies looking for reliable, trustworthy and results oriented SEO vendors that can help improve their sales online. This is on top of the 2-5 daily inquiries we get from other sources. There are a variety of resources online that list SEO firms and I've listed several below. However, if you're a company looking for a new SEO agency, I would recommend going the referral route first. Referrals are a win win situation for the company as well as the agency. I am biased about this somewhat because referrals are the biggest source of long term and successful client engagements for TopRank. However, if you don't have a network that includes people that are satisfied with their SEO agencies and prefer to go the search, evaluate, selection route via a larger universe of vendors, here are a few resources:

• SEOmoz - Recommended SEO, web development and support firms.
• SEO Consultants - Strict inclusion guidelines for this directory of search engine optimization specialists and companies makes sure vendors do not engage in search spamming. They claim to reject 70% of the consultants that apply. After 7 years, there are only 140 SEO consultants and firms currently included so the process of inclusion is indeed selective.
• Marketing Profs Vendor Selector - A list of the top SEM and SEO firms with additional information on each. There are 48 world wide SEO firms listed.
• seopros.org - This is an older list and somewhat like seoconsultants.com.
Check out this article from Search Engine Watch on Comments Bookmark murdok: Lee Odden is President and Founder of Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.