Choosing the Right SEO Consultant
By Puglucy
No matter what type of business you’re running, if you have a website, then search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to the success of your business. Most small businesses have never heard of search engine optimization, or if they have, this process is foreign to them. Search engine optimization is what helps drive customers to your website. When you look at all the successful online businesses, one thing they all have in common is that they use SEO. It’s the SEO consultant’s job to make sure your company comes up near the top of any search engine result related to your company's products and/or services. If you’re not using organic SEO, then your business is most likely getting lost when customers are searching the web.
Once you’ve determined that search engine placement is essential to your survival, you’ll want to look into hiring a SEO Company. You will want to make sure your SEO consultant really knows what they claim to know. You’ll want to stay away from just selecting a company because they’re inexpensive. In most cases - at least in the SEO world - inexpensive means incompetent. One of the best ways to find out if that "SEO expert" really is an expert is to ask to see examples of top rankings they've achieved for other clients. If they can't show you at least one top-10 result for a fairly competitive keyword phrase (more than 1 million results in Google), then you might as well move on.
Once you've contracted an SEO consultant, they should attempt to understand your business and recommend keywords and phrases that are most commonly used when searching for the products and services you offer. They will also work with coding and navigation structure to make sure your website is search engine friendly. Finally, they should know how to build buzz for your website in terms of links from other sites, as well as "social media" websites.
Determining the correct keywords is vital to your SEO success and ranking. The higher you rank on each search engine, the more traffic you will have. An SEO consultant will be looking to see your ranking climb every month. But even more important than rankings is the quality of the traffic that those rankings produce. They should always be watching the flow of traffic to your site. They will be tracking this traffic flow by reviewing what is called website analytics. Your ranking and traffic flow should rise simultaneously. Web analytics software provides invaluable data regarding where your website traffic is coming from, where visitors go once they arrive, and how soon they make a purchase or leave your website.
Comments
Concisely written piece you have here. You seem to know your stuff fairly well. But I've read that some companies seem to be trying to allocate time and resources to have their own people learn their own SEO, so this can be done in-house? What are your thoughts on that? And when do you think a company should job out its SEO? I'm just curious.
Some interesting points made - I have thought of becoming an SEO consultant myself. You are right it is definetly the 'quality' of the traffic and not the pure numbers of traffic.
Thanks
I consider myself a SEO consultant as SEO is and will be really important now and for sure in the future. If you think it is hard getting on the first page of Google now, wait 5 years.
I agree - wait 5 years and today will seem like a breeze. This is the next big boom in marketing.
In my mind SEO seems more of an 'art' form than a career path :-)
yojpotter 3 years ago
optimizing your site for search engines is very important. Now only that it can help generate tarffic to your site but also it can help you a lot in earning more money online.