Many small business have a hard time finding a reliable SEO professional. There are so many third party contractor and freelancers that decide to go into the SEO industry overnight. They throw up a website and try to convince a small business owner that they can rank there companies website on google, but very few deliver.
Without getting to technical about search engine optimazation, SEO, SEM, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, back-linking, etc. Here is one simple way to profile and gauge if an SEO company knows what they are doing. Check the rank of the SEO’ website. Not what they claim to be there clients site, but there own company website.
Here is a simple way to check out if an SEO or internet marketing companies website ranks for anything. Go to www.spyfu.com and type in the address of the SEO company and see what keywords they come up under, if any.
Don’t be surprised it you don’t see any keywords. It’s not uncommon for a company to pitch SEO services and show off some keywords they said they ranked for a client, but if they practice what they preach there own website should be ranked as well.
Watch video to here more about it.

(Sorry the video got cut off at the end, but I was pretty much done.)