<h3>15. Understand Your Competition</h3>
<p>Understand your niche and your competition. SEOs can work in any niche - other than maybe vice industries - that is a specific specialty - but if they say you need an extremely high budget for something without competition, then they are just stealing. If they recommend a very low budget for something like roofing or law, then it won't help you. You can do low budgets to get new domains moving and out of the sandbox for a cost-benefit, but competitive niches will eventually need reasonable budgets to get good results. The larger the city the more competition.<br /></p>
<h3>16. Check Keyword Volume</h3>
<p>You can get some search traffic from zero-volume keywords - but if their entire strategy is zero volume or if they are only aiming for longtail keywords, then they aren't good. You do need some legitimate volume keywords. It is extremely easy to rank for a longtail keyword with zero search volume and then send you a report claiming they got you to page one.<br /></p>