SEO has become a very big business, and here is why. If your website doesn’t show up on the first page of search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo, your potential customers might not even know you exist.
Better search engine visibility can be critical to boosting visits to your website, which can lead to increased brand awareness and higher sales and profits.
This makes it important for you to hire an experienced, reliable search engine optimization (SEO) consultant, or you might consider a career in SEO consulting. To help you get the best from SEO consulting, this article will provide all the information you need concerning SEO consulting services.
- What Is An SEO Consultant
- What Should I ask my SEO Consultant?
- 6 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring an SEO Consultant
- What Skills do you Need for SEO?
- How do I Hire SEO Services?
What Is An SEO Consultant
SEO consultants are experts on search engine optimization and are paid by businesses and site owners to give them advice on how to get higher rankings, more targeted traffic, and ultimately more profits for their websites.
A professional SEO consultant or consulting firm should have a lot of experience and expertise in the following areas.
On-Page SEO
This is the stuff you do on your site. Most people tend to think of SEO as an off-site strategy, which typically means link building and social signals, but there are a lot of things that need to be done on your site before any of the other techniques will work.
Read Also: The Best SEO Tips And Advice For 2021
Basically, your website needs to be “search engine friendly” in order to rank well, no matter what you do, and your SEO consultant should be able to advise you on what you need to do on your site to get it ready to rank. Also, by getting a Website audit, SEO web site audit report, you can further understand the issues with your website and how to fix these in order to draw more traffic to your site.
Here are some of the on-page factors that your consulting company should be able to assist you with:
Title tags – Getting a title tag right is a lot harder than you might think. And a properly optimized title tag can work wonders for SEO.
Description tags – Pretty much the same can be said about this tag as with the title. It’s very important for on-site search engine optimization but not easy to “get right” unless you are a professional.
Meta tags – In addition to the title and description there are a lot of other meta tags that may or may not be important, depending on your particular website and situation. The SEO guru that you hire should be able to advise you on these.
Quality content – The most important part of any website and vital for achieving high search engine rankings. But are you pages actually well written with truly quality content from the perspective of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines? You probably think so but you might be surprised! Keyword density – Something else you don’t want to mess up. Too little and you might never rank for the terms you want to rank for, too much and you might be penalized for over-optimization. It’s a fine line to walk!
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – The basic summary of LSI is that the content of a website are crawled by Google and other SE’s in which the most common words or phrases, along with their synonyms and related words, are identified as the keywords for each page.
For example; if the title of your page was “Animal Facts” the search engines would expect to find other words related to that in the content of the page – such as dogs, cats, birds, etc…
This helps you rank higher because the SE’s realize that your page/site is truly about the subject. Plus, you may also rank for LSI terms in addition to your main keywords.
Site structure – Are your pages using structured data to support listings? Can search engines crawl your site easily? Are duplicate content issues being handled correctly on site? Is the design SEO friendly? These are all things your consultant should be able to tell you and help you fix if needed.
Headers – Are your heading and sub-headings using the correct HTML tags and proper keywords?
Site speed – This is increasing in SEO importance as everything on the internet gets faster and faster. People are impatient so your site needs to load very quickly for best results.
Mobile friendly – Sites tend to show up very differently on devices such as smartphones and tables than they do on regular computers. The world is becoming increasingly mobile and more people are getting online via mobile devices than they are computers these days. So it is very important that your site is mobile friendly and optimized correctly for it.
Structured data / Schema markup – Structured data allows search engines such as Google to truly understand your site, which can help tremendously with SEO.
They need to be very good at optimizing your website or teaching you how to do it yourself. You are hiring them because they are experts at this stuff, so be sure they really are before handing over your money.
Off-Site SEO
There are hundreds of entire courses, ebooks, membership sites, videos, blogs, groups, and all sorts of other stuff devoted strictly to this subject — it can’t be taught in one post. That’s why you are looking for an SEO agency, so their experts can either teach this stuff to your team or do it for you.
Link Building – This is one of the most important parts of SEO, but there are some good ways to do it and a lot of horrible ways to do it. You need to know the difference and do it right. Few things, if any, can boost your rankings more than getting the right backlinks.
And nothing can destroy your rankings and the future of your website or business faster than being penalized from using bad link building tactics. It’s absolutely crucial that this is done correctly!
Social Media – This is growing significantly in importance as a ranking factor. In fact, it is now one of the most important parts of SEO. Is your content getting posted on social networks? Does it get shared by trusted and respected people in your industry?
The more likes, shares, tweets, pins, upvotes, favorites, and any other social media love your site gets the better it will be for solidifying your rankings in Google, Bing and other search engines. Not to mention the fact that those things will bring in a lot of direct traffic and give your business branding a huge boost.
Videos – In many ways videos are the future of the internet and video marketing is the future of SEO. YouTube itself is the #2 most visited website in the world as well as the #2 search engine in the world behind only Google, who coincidentally owns them.
Videos that are optimized correctly tend to rank very well, and typically do so much faster than a regular website would. They are also great for links, exceptional for exposure and branding, and are awesome content all in themselves. Plus, they get shared and re-posted far more than text content does.
Content Marketing – People have become blind to most forms of advertisements. They don’t notice banners, they skip TV commercials, they ignore billboards, they have satellite radio or simply tune out radio advertising, they are figuring out the difference between PPC ads and organic listings, they don’t open promotional emails, and so on. Traditional marketing is dying fast — both online and offline!
So content is now the present and will be a large part of the future of marketing, especially online. Simply put; effective internet marketing is not possible without great content in this day and age. And that certainly includes SEO – even more so than most.
Your SEO consultant will need to know how to create useful free content and share it around the web in a way that attracts targeted traffic to your site, turns those visitors into prospects, and then converts them into buyers. Then, keep the content attractive enough to turn those people into repeat customers. It’s not easy but someone has to do it.
Anyway, internet marketing encompasses a lot of strategies, which includes the things above, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more to it. And search engine optimization is under that huge umbrella of online marketing in which a lot of the tactics used overlap each other and help in more than one way.
What Should I ask my SEO Consultant?
1. May I have a list of current and past clients?
A reputable SEO consultant should be open to sharing a brief list of current and former clients and his or her contact information, says Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing in the Age of Google (Wiley, 2012) and founder of Nine By Blue, a Seattle-based SEO software provider.
These references can help you gauge how effective the candidate is, as well as verify that the person did indeed work on specific SEO campaigns. Clients may not provide specific analytics, Fox says, but they should be able to at least tell you if they saw a positive impact on their search ranking, especially in conversions and in gaining an audience, as a direct result of the consultant’s efforts.
2. How will you improve my search engine rankings?
Steer clear of SEO consultants who won’t freely discuss their methods in detail, cautions Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, a Seattle-based internet marketing software company and co-author of The Art of SEO (O’Reilly, 2012).
They should explain the strategies they would use to drive up your website’s search engine ranking, as well as estimate how long it could realistically take to achieve the SEO campaign goals you agree on.
Make sure the candidate’s proposal includes an initial technical review of your website to weed out any problems that could lower your search engine ranking, including broken links and error pages.
Consultants also should provide “on page” optimization, a process to make your website as search engine friendly as possible. It involves improving your website’s URL and internal linking structure, along with developing web page titles, headings and tags.
Also, ask consultants if they provide “off page” SEO strategies to raise awareness of your content on other websites, often via blogs, social media platforms and press releases.
3. Do you adhere to search engines’ webmaster guidelines?
You want a consultant who strictly abides by Google’s publicly posted webmaster best practices, which specifically prohibit 12 common SEO tricks, including automatically generating spammy content and adding bogus hidden text and links.
If a candidate doesn’t follow those guidelines, your website could be relegated to dismally low search results ranking. Or, worse yet, Google could ban it from search results altogether.
Bing and Yahoo also post webmaster best practices that consultants should confirm they follow.
4. Can you guarantee my website will achieve a number-one ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo?
If the candidate answers yes, Fox warns, “Turn and run in the other direction as fast as you can.” Although it’s impossible to guarantee a number-one ranking on any search engine, she says, some unethical SEO consultants do make such bogus guarantees.
Consider it a red flag if the candidate claims to have an insider relationship with Google or any other search engine that will get you priority search results rankings. Only Google, Bing and Yahoo can control how high or low websites appear in their search results.
5. Are you experienced at improving local search results?
Appearing in the top local search engine results is especially important to small brick-and-mortar businesses trying to attract nearby customers, Rand says. You’ll want a consultant who has expertise in local SEO techniques.
If your website is optimized for what’s known as “local SEO,” it should appear when someone nearby is searching for keywords that are relevant to your business.
To achieve that, a consultant should add your business’s city and state to your website’s title tags and meta descriptions, and get your site listed on Bing, Google and Yahoo’s local listings, which are online directories of businesses that cater to a specific geographical area.
6. Will you share with me all changes you make to my site?
Search engine optimization will most likely require a number of changes to your existing web page coding. It’s important to know exactly what adjustments the consultant plans to make and on how many web pages. If you would like the candidate to get your permission before accessing and altering your website code, be sure to say so.
For example, will consultants add new title tags to your existing HTML code or modify the existing ones? Will they provide additional copywriting content highlighting your products and services to beef up the number of visible, on-page keywords relevant to your potential customers? And do they plan to redesign all or some of your website navigation or add new pages to your site?
7. How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns?
To gauge the success of SEO efforts, you must track exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website and where it is coming from.
Consultants should be experienced in using Google Analytics to track improvement in your site’s search engine rankings, the number of links from other websites driving traffic to yours, the kinds of keywords searchers use to find your site, and much more.
Be sure to ask how often they plan to share these important analytics with you and how they would use the data to continually improve your search engine rankings and website traffic.
8. How will we communicate and how often?
SEO consultants’ communication styles and customer service standards vary. You need to find someone whose approach best fits your needs. Ask if the candidate prefers to talk in person or via phone, Skype, texting or email. And find out how often will he or she reach out to you with status updates.
9. What are your fees and payment terms?
You need to know how much you’ll be charged, of course, and also whether the consultant gets paid hourly, by retainer or by project.
Project-based payments are the most common in the SEO consulting industry, and they can vary widely, depending on a project’s size and complexity. Most contract projects ranged between $1,000 and $7,500, according to Moz’s 2011 pricing survey of more than 600 SEO firms.
The study also found that the most common retainers ranged between $251 to $500 a month on the lower end and $2,501 to $5,000 a month on the higher end, while the most common hourly rates ranged from $76 to $200. Fox said consultants who specifically serve small businesses often charge less per month and hour.
Other important payment-related questions: How often are invoice payments due — every 30, 60 or 90 days? Is there an interest charge for late payments?
10. What happens when we part ways?
When your contract expires or if you terminate it early, you should still maintain ownership of all of the optimized web content you paid the consultant to provide, Fox says.
Accordingly, you’ll want to make sure the contract states that when you part ways, consultants will not change or remove any of the content they added, modified or optimized on your behalf. You also should ask consultants whether they charge any fees for early contract termination and if so, to specify them in the contract.
6 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring an SEO Consultant
Most SEO consultants are going to tell you what they think you want to hear: that, without a doubt, they can help your business rank on the top of Google, increasing your website traffic and conversions.
In an effort to help you understand what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant, we have put together a list of six things you should be aware of.
Be Prepared to Spend Money
If you are going to simply look for the cheapest option, you might as well just stop now — it’s a recipe for complete disaster. Not all SEO consultants are created equal, and there is always going to be someone willing to undercut the lowest bid to simply get the deal on his or her books.
Google’s paid search results are filled with SEO service options ranging from $99 to a few hundred dollars a month. SEO that is a few hundred dollars a month isn’t going to be effective. In fact, it’s more likely to be harmful and dangerous than helpful.
SEO packages that are a one-size-fits-all service are going to be low quality, mass-link options that point spammy links at your website. This can trigger a penalty that will take not only a lot of time, but also money, to clean up.
SEO Involves More Than Just Links
While important, links aren’t everything. Be concerned if an SEO consultant is only focused on building links and doesn’t mention things like page speed and load time, on-page optimization, content and user experience.
All the traffic in the world isn’t going to help if your website loads slowly or doesn’t provide a good mobile user experience. A qualified SEO consultant should be focused on the big picture, not just a small segment, which are inbound links.
Yes, links are still the No. 1 search engine ranking factor, but links alone aren’t going to automatically translate into conversions and revenue.
There Is No Such Thing as a Quick Fix
SEO consultants are called upon for two reasons: to help improve organic traffic or to fix a problem, such as a technical issue with the website or a penalty — algorithmic or manual. Regardless of what the consultant is hired to do, remember that there is no such thing as a quick fix.
If you search for an SEO firm or consultant, you will see advertisements that claims to deliver results within days, sometimes as little as 15 to 30. This drives me absolutely insane, as these claims are so far fetched and done to bait unsuspecting and unknowledgeable business owners.
Achieving solid ranking results that aren’t short term takes time, as does addressing penalties. Look for an SEO consultant who shoots straight and is upfront with you. If a highly competitive industry is going to take six to eight months to see a noticeable return, then that’s what the client needs to hear.
An SEO Consultant Can’t Compensate for a Poor Product or Service
No SEO consultant, regardless of how good they are, can magically make a bad product or service sell. You could be pulling in huge traffic numbers, which is turning into leads and phone calls. But a horrible product or service, or underperforming phone agents and sales team members can quickly ruin everything.
As a business owner, you need to understand what the SEO consultant is responsible for, which is driving traffic and building online brand awareness. Not all SEO consultants are going to provide you with additional business consulting outside of search engine optimization.
Never Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
If an SEO consultant isn’t advising you to create multiple streams of traffic, you’re going to be in trouble. No consultant, no matter how successful and knowledgeable he or she is, can predict what Google will do next. Imagine if you put all of your budget and effort into organic rankings and overnight that traffic disappeared — then what?
You should be pulling in traffic from additional channels, such as paid search, email marketing, social media and affiliate relationships. This allows you to turn off one source and turn up the volume on additional channels to compensate for a sudden drop in traffic. Focusing all resources on organic traffic is potential brand suicide.
Don’t Worry About Keyword Rankings — Focus on ROI
Run far away from an SEO consultant who isn’t focused on ROI. Do you want to rank No. 1 for keywords that aren’t going to produce a high enough return to warrant the SEO, or would you rather work with a consultant who is ROI focused and doesn’t try to paint the false picture because there are a few top rankings?
SEO and online marketing is highly measurable. I can tell you exactly where every conversion came from, what channel it came from and whether it was organic, paid, search or social. At the end of the day, ROI is the most important number.
Far too many SEO consultants are focused solely on rankings and not the revenue and return the SEO effort is producing. The ROI your online marketing campaigns generate allows you to meet payroll and continue to build your business, not rankings alone.
What Skills do you Need for SEO?
Whether you’re going to hire someone to run your SEO campaign or you’re going to take a stab at it on your own, there are certain skills that help the optimization process happen smoothly.
The skillset for SEO experts is typically quite broad, but there’s normally a baseline of traits that contribute to their digital prowess. In considering how you or your SEO service provider handles your optimization, keep an eye out for these 5 skills.
1. Research Minded
Research is incredibly important to an SEO campaign. An SEO expert should be someone who mastered the art of researching while still in school and perhaps even enjoyed it on some level. Comfort and confidence are needed for strong research, and make no mistake about it, keyword research is going to take a fair amount of time.
Be thorough and look into every angle when planning out your keywords. SEO experts know the importance of terms that are both high value, meaning that there is a large demand for them, and relevant. Relevancy is huge.
If your SEO director is telling you that you should apply keywords that have nothing to do with your product of service, that’s black hat SEO and it will actually hurt your ranking in the long run.
An SEO expert should be well versed in tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. It’s also important to do a lot of research the competition, but be careful not to copy them. What works for one business might not work for another, even if they’re in the same industry.
Finally, and most importantly, SEO experts need to constantly research Google, and stay on top of its ever-changing search algorithm. SEO is not something that you just learn once and then never touch again.
You have to always be reading articles and paying close attention to what Google is doing. If you fall behind, you’ll lose out on a lot of progress.
2. Analysis
Analytics are the backbone of SEO. It’s how SEO experts measure success, so it should be a regular part of their day. Every action that is taken during an SEO campaign can and should be measured.
Experts in SEO should understand how to pull analytics as well as how to read and interpret the data that they’re receiving.
But they have to know a lot more than how to simply read the results. Any SEO expert worth the title will know how to take action and apply those analytics to the site that they’re working on in order to achieve continued success.
SEO is a report based process, so any SEO professional who does not have strong analytical skills will be unable to monitor their successes and failures.
3. Critical Thinking
It’s important to remember that no two SEO plans are completely alike. Every website is different, and there are many factors that impact a site’s search engine ranking.
Because of that, it’s imperative that an SEO expert should be able to find potential issues on the websites that they work on. This can be done by engaging in competitor research and figuring out what’s working or not working for some of your chief rivals.
SEO success boils down to having the ability to “out-optimize” your chief competitors. An SEO expert should be a critical thinker; someone who can examine your campaign vs. those of your rivals to determine what went right, what went wrong, why it happened, and how you should go about fixing any problems.
There is no standard SEO formula. That’s why it’s important to bring a critical mind to the table in order to understand unique problems from multiple angles and find creative solutions to correct them.
4. Prioritization
Prioritization is vital to running a successful SEO campaign. That’s why all SEO experts should have a strong understanding of the steps that need to be taken. Each of these steps should be prioritized as it pertains to their importance and difficulty.
For example, back link building is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of the SEO process. It is also one of the most important factors in determining ranking.
A backlink is a link to your site from a respected website that is relevant to your industry. Think of it as a recommendation. When a site is linking to your page, it is acknowledging that you are an expert in your field.
Because of the difficulty and importance placed on link building efforts, it’s important to give this process lots of time and attention to ensure that it pays off for you in the end. Simple matters like content tweaks, while still important, take far less time and shouldn’t be prioritized.
5. Flexibility
If a specific strategy that an SEO expert believed would be a sure thing turns out to be a flop, it’s important that they know when it’s time to course correct.
One size does not always fit all with SEO. That means what worked well for other companies won’t necessarily be a slam dunk for another company. Your SEO expert should have the flexibility to switch strategies at a given moment.
What’s more, it’s important that these strategy shifts not kill any momentum or slow the process down in any way.
If you want to hire an SEO expert to improve your search engine standings, it’s important to know what it is that you’re looking for. You want an individual or company that properly embodies all of these 5 vital tasks.
You need critical minds who understand how to prioritize their actions. You need someone who is heavily research minded that won’t mind the long hours that it takes to compile lists of high-value relevant keywords.
It has to be someone who knows how to analyze a website, make decisions on the fly, and is flexible enough to abandon failing strategies at a moment’s notice and adopt an entirely new perspective.
You’re looking for a strong writer with a background in web coding, who understands what needs to happen on the back end for SEO to truly succeed. What’s more, your SEO professional should be able to easily explain the process to you and manage your expectations while remaining humble and keeping their ear to the Google ground.
Sometimes it can be difficult to find one person that embodies these specific traits. That’s why it’s often a great idea to employ the services of a full-service SEO marketing firm over bringing in an in house employee to manage your campaign full time.
An SEO firm puts an entire team of professionals at your disposal, working together toward one common goal, to push your website up to the first page of Google and to keep it there.
How do I Hire SEO Services?
Here’s what Google outlines as the “General SEO hiring process”:
Conduct a two-way interview
We can’t agree more that you want to find a consultant who’s sincerely interested in you, your business, your customers and your goals. After all, you want someone who feels like an extension of your team.
Check references
Talk to past clients about their experience. Ask them how effectively the SEO worked with their various staff and vendors, and what kind of guidance he or she provided.
You want to hire someone who will help educate you, not just implement short-term solutions.
A good SEO should be someone you can work with, learn from, experiment with, and who genuinely cares about you and your business. –Maile Ohye
Request an audit
For smaller businesses, Ohye suggests asking for “a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO.”
For larger businesses, she suggests doing this with multiple SEO consulting candidates. Then, compare their audits. Here’s the audit structure Google recommends:
You’ll need to give the SEO restricted-view access to your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts (not full or write access) so they’ll have the data needed to perform the audit. You should also let the consultant talk with your developers to understand any technical constraints.
Right up front, Ohye notes that you’ll probably have to pay for the audit. We agree.
Read Also: SEO Services As A Way To Earn Extra Income
This level of custom technical and search auditing requires a considerable amount of time spent by a trained, experienced SEO analyst. If a prospective consultant is offering you a “free audit,” more than likely he or she plans to just run your site through a tool to produce an automated report.
A good SEO will try to prioritize what ideas can bring your business the most improvement for the least investment, and what improvements may take more time, but help growth in the long term. –Maile Ohye
Decide if you want to hire
When you’re ready to engage an SEO consultant, make sure your whole organization is on board. Without internal cooperation, you may not see any search improvements at all, no matter whom you hire.
One of the biggest holdups to improving a website isn’t [the SEO’s] recommendation, but it’s the business making time to implement their ideas. –Maile Ohye
Finally
SEO can and does work. Don’t be discouraged by a previous bad experience or a lack of quick progress. Invest in SEO and watch your visibility rise to the top of the world’s most trafficked search engines.
