<h2>The SEO Checklist.</h2>
<p>To help our clients, we created a quick checklist to help you know if the SEO agency you are hiring will actually help you.<br /></p>
<h3>1. See past work </h3>
<p>See previous work from the date they started. Even better if you know their budget for the campaigns. They don't have to have a vast breadth of work if they can appropriately answer strategy - but if there is any "we can't share our work," they don't have any. We don't put much credibility in past work because it can easily be faked by giving false timeframes, false results, campaigns they didn't work on, or even the <a href="https://medium.com/thebalancedinvestor/the-parable-of-the-baltimore-stockbroker-97f616acaecb" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Baltimore trader problem.</a> You can easily create 100 free WordPress sites and only report on the one success when you have 99 failures. While you shouldn't give too much credit to past work, no past work is a bad sign.</p>
<h3>2. Check Their Own SEO Value</h3>
<p>Check the SEO value of their website. It doesn't have to be a lot - but if it is zero, that is suspicious. The "we don't utilize SEO for our business" usually means they can't compete in their niche. SEO and web design are competitive industries. The reason most agencies don't do SEO on their website is that they are only able to rank for noncompetitive markets.<br /></p>