When choosing the right SEO agency, pay attention to:

Use rights
The rights of use of the content made during the contract period by the SEO agency for the customer, should always be valid and irrevocable to the customer. This applies in particular to content published on the domain of the customer. Otherwise there is a bitter surprise at the end of the contract if the content of the page that has a top ranking is removed. After all, it\’s always the content that makes Google a page so interesting.

Domain owner
In the course of the search engine optimization it comes again and again to the creation of new domains as link sources. In such cases, it is of primary importance who the domain owner becomes. Since these domains can prove to be valuable sources of links if this practice is applied correctly, it is essential to ensure that the customer becomes owner of the domains as well. Otherwise it comes at the end of the contract to the question of domain ownership!

Either you have to buy the domains for expensive money or you do without the valuable links and in turn risk your ranking. Some companies also tie the transfer of ownership to minimum contract periods.

Transparency of the measures
Let the measures explain you and do not get confused by marketing guns and funny foreign words. So far I have found a German name for every word in the SEO field and also managed to explain to a more than 70-year-old hotel operator, Google\’s factors for the determination of relevance, so you dare.

Ask why and let it be explained in understandable words. It\’s the same with link sources. Let\’s point out where the links to your page come from or use free backlink tools.

Link building
Link building is a particularly sensitive topic. Even if Google prohibits it in its guidelines, but most SEOs and SEO agencies rely on purchased text links. In this context, it is particularly important to pay attention to whether the agency, the company or the SEO committed to work only according to the Google guidelines for SEO. Anyone who boasts on his site only to work according to the Google guidelines and in practice buys or sells text links, lies! So simple is that!

If text links are purchased for the purpose of optimizing your domain, make sure that you become a contractual partner of the site operator from whose website the link comes. If you eventually cancel the SEO contract, you also lose all these links. It threatens again the descent into the nirvana of the search results.

Usability
Each page lives from its visitors. As a result, basically all SEO measures have been subordinated to user-friendliness. Unless the site has no visitors! Who e.g. suggests: To accommodate meaningless juxtapositions of keywords as text on their home page or overloading the view by excessive insertion of keywords, has not recognized the signs of the times. Content is King, but that\’s why not every page needs to have 300 words!

This guide is not complete and is supplemented by me and influenced by other bad experiences of my clients.