Good SEO companies are hard to find...

Selecting a quality, ethical SEO company from the slew of SEO companies that have recently sprung up can be very difficult, and while we would like to work with every SEO client, we can't.  Here are some tips to help you make sure you wind up with one of the good SEO companies (if not ours):

The SEO Company requires a retainer to “keep your rankings.”

This is a typical one, but to be honest once a SEO company has worked on your site for 12 months or so, you may rank well (and move up some) after they stopped working on optimizing your site.  Assuming the company optimized YOUR site, you should rank well for months to come without constant tweaking.  In VERY competitive spaces, you may need a retainer, but for most SEO companies this is just a way to get guaranteed monthly income with little work.

Look up query volume for their top terms.

Use a tool like the overture keyword suggestion tool and make sure that the terms the SEO company is telling you they rank well for are actually being typed in a decent amount of times.  In our honest opinion, an SEO company's top terms should be highly searched.  Don't get snowed by SEO companies who tout rankings of terms hardly being typed in.

The SEO company's web site doesn't rank well for anything.

This is where you separate the men from the boys.  At our SEO company, we target a few generic SEO terms (like SEO agencies and SEO consultants), for which we usually score in the top two pages.  We are able to beat out many other SEO companies who would love to rank well for terms like those.  While we don't rank well for every derivative, we have selected a few worldwide SEO terms for which we are competing with other SEO companies, and we typically do well.  Your SEO company should have a few, even if they are local terms, like Philadelphia SEO company, for instance.  How can an SEO company preach how important search should be for you if they can't rank well for terms themselves?  Also consider what they had to do to get that high ranking.  In order to get high rankings, do they have a homepage FULL of text that looks unappealing?  What will they do to your site?  If you rank highly for a term but your site is butchered, you will not convert customers!

The SEO company doesn't proactively offer to analyze traffic AND conversions from organic search.

This one is easy.  You are using search to gain customers and add exposure, right?  Your SEO company should be able to analyze the impact that the ranks they achieved have had on your organization from both a traffic and leads/sales perspective.  If the SEO company only reports on rankings, run and run quickly.  There are much better SEO companies out there.

Heavy on the scare tactics.

These are the "you'll get banned by Google" SEO companies.  Rarely can a penalty NOT be lifted.  99% of the time you need to fix your mistakes if you were breaking the rules, and then you are OK.  If an SEO company's main push is about protecting you from getting banned and not maximizing your ROI, you should run from them too.

The sites they show as high ranking ones are over-optimized  for search.

If you already have a good looking site out there on the web, don't ruin that by butchering your site just so it ranks well.

They should use 100% ethical procedures. 

Your search company should not use words like "trick" or "hide" when speaking to you about your campaign.  Any attempt to hide something from or trick a search engine will only last for a while and MAY put you at risk of being banned.  Here at SEER we use always 100% ethical SEO procedures.