One question you may not have thought to ask is “Who is doing my SEO work”? A dirty little secret that many SEO companies hide is that they actually farm out their work offshore or to other companies.

Troll through the postings of any of the big freelance websites such as Get A Freelancer, Elance, Guru and the many others and you will find many postings that read like this:

We are a web design company in Canada. We are looking for one or more SEO partner companies to whom we can send work, and build a long-term relationship.

or

We are a consulting firm looking to sub contract our SEO work.

or

We are a web developer and  will be providing a number of customers with SEO services and would like to strike up a relationship with an Indian or Pakistani based SEO company.

So the questions begs…who is doing your SEO work?  Are you paying high prices with a company only to have them send the work off shore at a fraction of the cost. 

Off shore optimization also presents quality issues that the company would need to make sure they stay on top off.   Meta Tags and content may be written by someone who’s first language is not English resulting in poorly written tags and content, lower quality links like forum and blog postings are typically used which provide quick short term results but hurt a site in the long run.

If a company is outsourcing their SEO work than there are some things you need to judge:

• Are they outsourcing only menial tasks and are they telling the company what to do?
  Why this matters: If this is the case they are in control and are outsourcing tasks that are time consuming like link building, but as long as they are incontrol of what link building is being done that this isn’t too bad.
• Are they outsourcing all tasks and do they seem knowledgeable in SEO?
  Why this matters: If they are outsourcing all tasks this is a sign that they don’t know much about SEO, start asking questions about what methodologies they use, where they build links, what tools they use.  If they can’t answer the question without specifics and speak more in generalities (i.e. “we use the most popluar keyword research tools available” instead of  “we use Word Tracker”) than you can easily deduce that this company doesn’t know enough to manage and choose a proper outsourcing company and is only in it for the money it brings in.

Don’t pay premium prices for a North American, UK or Australian company if you aren’t sure where the work is coming from, ask them if any portion of the work is outsourced and judge accordingly if you feel the value is worth their cost or not.