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Why Does Using a Locally Based Real Dallas SEO Company Matter?
How We Define What a Real Dallas SEO Company Is
Top Real SEO Companies in Dallas, TX
How to Spot and Avoid Fake SEO Companies
Methodology
How to Get Added to the List

When you’re trying to grow you business with SEO or other digital marketing tactics, you don’t want to get taken advantage of. One of the best ways is to ensure that you’re working with a locally based company that hires locally and has helped other businesses in the area. Unfortunately, spam in Google Search, on Google Maps, and in other places a searcher might look can make this task difficult as these frequently allow completely fake SEO companies, agencies, and consultants to be listed. Spending your hard earned money on what might be a scam via a fake company is the last thing you want to do. Protect your business by working with companies locally you can be confident are real and in or near your community.

In our research using modern search tools here is what we discovered most local businesses run into when trying to find a quality local SEO provider of some kind.

• 24 Fake business listings on Google Maps
• 1 India based company on page 1 of Google Search
• 1 Los Angeles, CA based company on page 1 of Google Search
• 1 Completely blank website on page 1 of Google Search
• 1 SEO agency that uses AI generated photos of fake staff on page 1 of Google Search
• 32 Fake business listings on Bing Places
• 1 Pennsylvania based company on page 1 of Bing Search
• 2 Fake business listings on Apple Maps (and practically no real listings)

In fact, in our research most of all search results a user would see across Google, Bing, and Apple were completely fake companies or businesses located far away from Dallas. Only 2 companies that MIGHT be locally based and legitimate appeared in our results and NONE of the top locally based SEO companies as defined by our calculations (see below) appeared anywhere near the top. Most of the fake companies have pages riddled with spam and even make false claims or have false stories about their foundings or clients in Dallas. One such fake company even listed clients and used AI images to fake client contacts at major corporations which are not listed in Dallas and when reached each one confirmed that those people did not work there and they had no connection to the SEO provider.

We decided to use a looser definition than most might when determining what defines a real SEO company here in Dallas. Here is our criteria for being listed in this document:

1. Is a real SEO business – That is a business that first and foremost provides SEO services but might provide other digital marketing or business services in a secondary or ancillary fashion. In some cases SEO might be a secondary offering but is still fundamentally core to the company’s offerings (i.e. most clients would signup for it).

2. Is owned or managed by someone who physically lives in the Dallas – Fort Worth area – That is the person lives somewhere between Forney to the East and Weatherford to the West, and McKinney/Denton to the North and Waxahachie to the South.

3. The business has a physical address that is either a business office or the primary residence of the owner located in the Greater Dallas Region – That is East of the Trinity river and within the other constraints listed above. The business cannot use in any fashion a virtual office, non-primary residence, primary residence of a staff member, or mailbox service provider. We might make an exception for individual practioners who live near Dallas and commute to the city for SEO related work when this is known to us.

4. The company is not a Shell, Front, or Sham business – That is the company is the only company that operates as an SEO agency or consultant or service provider and is not a brand used to gather leads and sell them to other companies or to pass off to an internal sales team. Sometimes referred to as “rank and rent” this is a model where a mostly fake company is created and placed on mapping systems such as Google Maps with the sole purpose of selling leads generated from that business to another locally owned real business. Generally the owner of these sham profiles lives in another country and in some cases they partner with a local individual to give more authenticity to the fake company.

5. The company has at least one representative available for in-person, face to face, meetings – These meetings can be at a restaurant, the company’s office, or a meeting space provider. This is to help ensure that anyone using this list to find a local Dallas SEO to discuss their needs with can meet them to face to face when and if needed somewhere in the Greater Dallas region.

6. The company has at least one locally based staff member with a minimum of 5-years of SEO experience – Which can be easily shown in some format (i.e. blog posts, videos, conference presentations, etc…).

We do consider an indiviual consultant selling SEO services on their own (i.e. outside of a platform) that meets the above criteria to be a “company” as well in order to provide the most complete list of actual SEO practioners located here in the Dallas, TX region.

1. Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting
2. WrightIMC
3. Rise Local
4. ioVista
5. Argent Media
6. Atomic DC
7. AutoRevo
8. Sith Marketing
9. Globerunner
10. Rocks Digital

There are a lot of ways to uncover a fake. Here are some that will help you in your journey to finding the perfect SEO fit to grow your business.

1. Ask the company if someone can sit down and have coffee or lunch with you. This is a great tool since overseas spammers obviously cannot meet you in person.

2. Ask the company who on their team does the SEO work, ask them to be honest and reassure them you’re just curious. You want to find out if those are staff / contractor / employees in the Dallas area or if they are providers elsewhere. There is a type of SEO and digital marketing work known as “drop servicing” where the owner of the agency sells you on a fancy story and then immediately hires someone for an extremely low price in another country via platforms like Fiverr or Upwork to handle the actual SEO work and reporting.

3. If they use both the word “Dallas” and the word “SEO” in the title of their business on Google Maps it is highly likely they are not real. It has long been known, and proven by our agency, that keyword stuffing business titles on Google maps can artifically inflate the rankings of a business on the maps when those keywords are searched. The #1 search by volume in Dallas is “Dallas SEO” and the #2 search is “Dallas SEO Company”. These both have a long history of being used by those creating fake or sham companies in order to quickly and cheaply gain new clients.

4. If they use an out of area phone number that doesn’t make much sense for a professional organization in Dallas to have. If you pay close attention to their website or Google Maps (or other systems like Bing Places and Apple Maps) you might notice the phone number is not a DFW area number (i.e. 214, 469, 972, 817, 682, 945 area codes). Often times overseas scammers will either simply use their home country phone number or whatever phone number they can get their hands on in the USA intead of one here locally. In many cases this results in phone numbers appearing for places such as India, California, and New York purporting to be Dallas-based SEO companies.

5. If the reviews on their Google Maps profile all happened in the same short span of time and there is a large volume of them. One major trick that is especially used by overseas scammers is to pay for a large volume of fake 5-star reviews on Google Maps to help legitimize the fake profile. In many cases these use very keyword heavy wording such as “best dallas seo company here”, etc.. in these fake reviews. In SEO it can be hard to find enough success for a client that they are driven to leave a positive review for the business, especially in a short time frame. Most SEO clients wait 6 months or more before leaving a review of any kind.

6. If they use a physical address on Google Maps or other places that is: a Davinci Virtual Office or a mailbox provider like Eagle Postal Center or UPS. These are 100% fake, 100% of the time. No real locally-based SEO company would need to use such a service.

7. If they use a physical address on Google Maps or other places that is: a residential single-family home, apartment, or coworking space they could be legitimate but they might also be fake. Of course a locally-based company or new SEO just getting started might use a facility like this as their address. We even mention one or two below, especially since the pandemic it has no longer been popular for SEO companies to have large corporate offices and instead many use hybrid-office or full work from home setups to this day. Generally they should have some kind of signage somewhere at the listed address, even something as small as a sign on their front door or a popup sign at their coworking space might be enough to prove they are legitimate.

We started by searching for SEO companies near Dallas using Google Search, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Places. We gathered all the company profiles / websites that ranked on the top 2 pages and then researched them to determine if they were in fact a real, locally based, company that provides SEO in the Greater Dallas region.

The above list is ranked in order of our confidence that the companies are indeed real SEO providers in the Dallas area. We reached this conclusion partially by being involved in the local space and knowing those behind the companies. The “realness” of a company was measured by if the person or company exists in or near Dallas, how certain our team was they were still in operational, freshness of data such as reviews that show they are operational, authenticity of staff photos / LinkedIn profiles, and examination and/or personally visiting the locations listed on their website or Google Maps to ensure they were there. We gave each factor a score and then calcuated the “realness” of all SEO companies that appear on Google Maps and listed those who scored high enough that their “realness” could not be questioned.

Any companies that claimed to provide SEO services but their main or core work was Website Design, Mobile App Development, Software Development or another type of marketing had to cross a certain threshold of “realness” OR their website / marketing materials had to prove that SEO was a highly integral componet core to their offering in order to make the list. Companies where SEO was clearly secondary or tertiary were not included in the realness calcuations at all.

None of the above mentioned companies (except ours of course) were aware that this research was happening or that this page would be published before hand.

Any company known to use “drop servicing” for their SEO services or other such outsource techniques to provide SEO services where the founder / person in charge of such company exists as a glorified sales person was also not included on this list.

The rest of the companies that appear in Google Search, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and other places but we were unable to determine “realness” from available data were mystery shopped by our team over a 4-month period. If they did not respond favorably to our mystery shopping in order to gather the required data they were simply not included in our calcuations.

SEO practioners and companies known to have a strong Dallas connection but which are no longer located here were also not included in our calcuations and are not eligible for listing here.

If you are a real Dallas SEO provider please use our contact form and send us all of the information we need to determine if you are a legitimate local provider. If you have a physical space you can even invite us over for a chat, if you’re an online only provider we can arrange a lunch or other ways to meetup and ensure you are locally based.

This list is designed to be friendly, so please don’t be shy. We are even sending clients that we are not a good fit for this list as a resource to help them find that perfect fit.