What to Look for When Hiring an SEO Consultant

Are you eagerly waiting for your website to show up on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing search result?

If not, the sad news is that your existence may not have known to your customers.

Hence, elevated visits to website can be achieved by proper search engine visibility. This would lead to enhanced profit, sales, and preeminent brand awareness.

SEO Consultant meaning:

Search engine optimization, in short, is mentioned as SEO. Search engine optimization can be mentioned as the tactics, techniques, and strategies which lead to an elevated number of visitors to a website.

This is achieved by getting a higher ranking placement in search engine results of any search engine.

A search engine optimization specialist reviews, analyses and brings about changes to the website so that they are optimized for search engines. By this way, they maximize the traffic towards a particular site and enhance their page rank.

Questions to ask when hiring an SEO consultant:

1. List of past and present clients:

Author of “marketing in the Google” (Wiley, 2012), Vanessa Fox mentions that any reliable SEO consultant should be ready to share his present and former clients as well as their contact details.

By collecting such references you can estimate the effectiveness of the candidate and also know the specialist’s individual work on SEO campaigns.

Specific analytics may not be provided by the clients but author Fox mentions that the clients must mention if they obtained a positive effect with search ranking mainly in gaining an audience and in conversations due to consultants work.

2. How my search engine ranking will be improved?

Rand Fishkin author of “art of SEO” and founder of Moz an internet marketing software company mentions that the SEO consultants should come up with strategies they use to enhance the website search engine ranking.

They should also make a clear explanation about the time they would take to actually achieve the SEO campaign goals which you agree.

The proposal should be followed by technical review so that issues which may weaken search engine results such as errors or broken links can be cleared.

Consultants should also provide “on page optimization” service which makes the site search engine friendly by a process.

This process takes into account internal linking structure and enhancing the website’s URL simultaneously developing tags, headings and web page titles.

3. How would you update me about the changes in our website?

Regular reports would be sent by a good SEO company. They may update you once in a month or some would update in a weekly manner.

You must make sure to provide the SEO consultant access to your website. For this reason, it is important to get associated with a trusted SEO company.

By possessing changes in the website by an in-house developer, any risks can be lessened if desired. It is important to have a link and open conversation between the developer and the SEO consultant and also changes would be made a bit slower.

There are few SEO consultants who do not opt for changes in website completely and this is another red flag. Though off-site work is a large part of SEO, the on-site part is also equally important mainly during the start.

4. Do you follow search engines “webmaster” guidelines?

Web master’s best practices” which was a public post of Google should be strictly followed by the consultant. This post would mention about 12 usual SEO tricks which include adding bogus links, hidden text, and generation of spammy content automatically.

If all the mentioned guidelines aren’t followed, then the website may be downgraded to a lower search ranking or it may result in banning the site from search result by Google totally. For Yahoo and Bing, Consultants are to follow webmaster best practices from their source.

5. Would you guarantee that my website would be on number one ranking in Bing, Yahoo, and Google?

When such a question is probed and the SEO consultant guarantees you, it would be better to look for another SEO specialist. Guaranteeing a number one rank on any search engine is impossible where such bogus guarantees are made by certain unethical SEO consultants.

In case the candidate mentions that he has an inside link with any search engine or Google which would gain you search result ranking, then do surely raise a red flag.

It is the sole responsibility of Yahoo, Bing, and Google to control the higher or lower ranking of websites in search results.

6. What tools do you use?

When the term tools are discussed there are a broad range of applications to be understood regarding SEO. With tools, an enhanced amount of information can be processed in a short time.

Hence by making use of tools, money and time for everybody is saved. There are many types of tools utilized by an SEO consultant they are

Reporting tools:

There are ways to create manual reports but creating a custom report which sinks keyword rankings, analytics, and other SEO metrics isn’t easy. Such reports can be automated leading to saving of time and also satisfies your expectation as a client.

Technical SEO tools:

In order to crawl into a large site instantly for technical issues, tools like a screaming frog can be utilized. Such scenarios would take a long time when done manually, and issues need to be solved often.

Link building tools:

Hundreds and thousands of links can be developed with link building tools and also a few proxies with just a single click. This tool is very beneficial.

Research tools:

In order to collect the contact details of a large number of individuals in minutes, Buzz stream tool can be utilized. Another use of the tool is that it helps to collect prospects and keyword research can be conducted.

These are the best tools to be used and they comply for SEO with Google guidelines.

Are you expert in enhancing local search results?
For brick and mortar businesses getting listed in the top local search engine results is mainly mandatory to grab the attention of nearby customers. So looking for an expert SEO consultant in local SEO techniques is important.

Your website should be highlighted when someone looking for a specific keyword associated with your business if your website is enhanced for “local SEO”.

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