What Makes an Ethical SEO Firm?

Not every so-called “professional” holds themselves to those standards.

If you can’t trust your SEO partner, you can never be sure your budget is going to tactics that benefit your company. That’s why you should vet every SEO firm you consider working with and make sure its practices are both effective and respectable.

P.S. Want to equip yourself with the info you need to choose the right SEO professional? Claim your free SEO request-for-proposal (RFP) template for use when reaching out to SEO experts!

Understanding ethical SEO

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, includes all the efforts that help your site earn visibility and rankings for specific terms in search engines like Google. Many people think that it’s all about keyword optimization of pages.

Certainly, that’s a part of SEO, but it’s hardly the whole story.

What does effective SEO involve?

Effective SEO involves researching keywords, creating content that helps potential customers, optimizing a site for the best possible user experience, building your company’s overall reputation online, and earning citations in AI answers.

Is SEO ongoing or one-time?

It’s also important to understand that SEO is an ongoing process.

The web is always changing, and so is search, with Google answering many queries through AI Overviews and buyers asking AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations.

In order to succeed, you need to stay on top of these trends and adapt accordingly.

In addition, you also have to be in the know about what is acceptable, and—perhaps most importantly—what is unacceptable. Enter the concept of ethics and ethical SEO…

Ethics & SEO

Without ethical practices, any benefits you see from SEO are temporary. Sure—those who “work” or “game” the system may see high rankings for a few days or weeks.

But as soon as search engines catch on, you’re guaranteed to lose those rankings—and possibly the opportunity to ever regain them.

Ethical SEO ensures that you’re keeping your company out of harm’s way, and can continue to reap the benefits of an optimized site for years to come in web and AI search.

What are the signs of an unethical SEO firm?

Because SEO is an element of business that is often outsourced to marketing firms, it’s essential to be able to spot the identifiers of an unethical one, including unverifiable promises about AI search visibility.

If you see any of the following signs, it’s time to have a conversation with your SEO partner:

Your content sounds like it was written by a robot and is stuffed with keywords.

This is a huge no-no in the SEO world. Search engines expect quality content, and so do readers, meaning that if you want to succeed with either of them, you should invest in professional copywriters.

When the SEO industry was relatively new, the practice of keyword stuffing was common. Now, Google’s spam policies treat it as spam, and it can cost you rankings in major search engines such as Google and Bing. Besides, don’t you want to have content that’s actually interesting to your prospects?

The newer version of robotic content is AI-written articles published at scale with no expert review.

Google’s guidance on generative AI content warns that generating many pages without adding value for users may violate its scaled content abuse policy.

The same guidance says it’s critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy before publishing.

The SEO firm is “earning” you links from low-quality websites.

You want to have backlinks to your web pages to increase your page rankings, but you don’t want those links to be from just anywhere. Unethical SEO firms will pay bad websites to link to your site.

This creates a nasty connection between your site and those websites. Link schemes like this violate Google’s spam policies and can cost you rankings.

The good news is that an ethical SEO firm can help you get rid of those bad links and begin to replace them with links from reputable websites.

You’re encouraged to just use the same content on your website in a variety of places.

Duplicate content makes it harder for search engines to choose which version of a page to rank, and at scale it can waste crawl effort. When search engines can’t tell which page deserves to rank, your visibility suffers.

You need to make sure that your content is all original, which can be a challenge if you don’t have an internal copywriting team.

However, once you get your site to this level, you can simply continue to create new content that isn’t plagiarized from your own site or, worse yet, from another business’s website.

The SEO firm sees no problem with cloaking.

Does the term “cloaking” sound suspicious to you? It should.

Google’s spam policies define cloaking as presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users. A related tactic, hidden text, puts content on your site in the same color as your background, so visitors never notice it but bots do.

Let’s face it—if you have to cloak something, it probably isn’t something that you want on your site in the first place.

You are urged to add links, links and more links.

Link stuffing is as bad as keyword stuffing. Basically, this poor practice is when you add keywords, and then you immediately link them to some other web page.

Don’t have too many links on one page, as it sends a red flag to search engines that there might be some unacceptable things happening in your SEO.

The headlines or page titles and content have nothing in common.

You’ve probably fallen for this bad SEO tactic yourself as a search engine user. You click on a link thinking that you’re going to read an article that interests you, and suddenly you’re taken to a landing page that has nothing to do with the headline that attracted you.

Not only is this annoying, but it can land your organization in hot water.

Always make sure that you give your prospects and customers what they think they’re getting. Otherwise, you’re just doing a bait-and-switch, which doesn’t work to build your reputation.

3 questions to ask an SEO company to test its ethics

Ask the following questions when searching for an ethical SEO company:

1. Ask what it will and won’t promise. Treat guaranteed AI Overview or chatbot placement as a red flag, since no firm controls it. Ask instead for the plan behind the work, such as technical fixes, helpful content, and mentions on reputable sites.
2. Ask how content gets made. Get the firm’s content process in writing, including where it uses AI and who reviews each piece before it’s published. AI-assisted content can perform well when an expert shapes and reviews it.
3. Ask where links and mentions come from. Rule out paid links, hidden links, and expired domain abuse in your contract. Google’s spam policies define expired domain abuse as buying an expired domain and repurposing it primarily to manipulate search rankings.

Are you looking for an ethical SEO firm?

If you’re considering hiring an agency to manage your SEO and other Internet marketing strategies, WebFX can help. We have over 30 years of experience achieving results for our clients with white-hat methods, and we report on what our work drives in search, AI answers, leads, and revenue.

Contact us today to speak with a strategist about how our team of SEO professionals can help you earn visibility in search and AI answers with ethical and proven methods.