Choosing an SEO Consultant

Choosing an SEO Consultant

Choosing an SEO Consultant

There are a number of important principles to bear in mind when you are thinking about hiring an SEO consultant. There are many such consultants advertising on the web but, as with most other services, they vary wildly in quality and cost. A good SEO consultant can bring about huge advantages for your business, whereas a bad one can cause more problems than benefits.

Firstly, you need to check that the SEO consultant follows best practice. One of the chief ways that search engines such as Google decide how important a site is, and therefore where it comes in the search results, is by how many links there are to it from other sites. There are plenty of companies out there that offer a huge number of inbound links for a comparatively small amount of money. However, the quality of these links is usually very low the equivalent of spam'. Since search engines also reward websites that display best practice, bad practice can actually get you penalised in the search results, with a knock-on effect to your business.

A related theme for your SEO consultant to discuss with you is the quality of the visitors they are driving to your site. It doesn't matter if you are getting thousands or tens of thousands of new visitors (perhaps from dubious sources) if these do not convert to sales. In other words, you need the right kind of visitors. This can generally only be achieved through extensive keyword research and competitor analysis, allowing them to identify search keywords to target that will produce the highest possible return on your investment. Just as importantly, they will discover which keywords not to pursue.

On another similar point, a good SEO consultant will make sure their strategy is user-friendly, optimising your website for users first and search engines second (because search engines want user-friendly web sites in their index, and user-friendly web sites generate more sales). Your SEO consultant will need to balance design and usability to ensure that the visitors who arrive at your site are able to use it easily otherwise there is no point getting them there in the first place.

An SEO consultant will need to carry out many different tasks to do a complete job, and so it's worth clarifying which ones are covered. For example, since the majority of Google's search algorithm is weighted towards the number and quality of links pointing to your website, this should be reflected in the effort the consultant puts into building strong links. However, some SEO consultancies will simply recommend that you need to build more links, meaning that your web developer ends up spending time (perhaps 2 or 3 days a month) on this important task a significant cost of time and money, in addition to the consultant's fees. Producing high-quality, original text is also an important part of optimisation because search engines reward relevant, original content, so it's worth checking if the cost of copy-writing is included.

All of these factors will be reflected in the quote your SEO consultant gives you. It's a universal maxim that you get what you pay for. There are plenty of websites and consultants who claim to be able to improve your website rankings for a fee of perhaps 50 to 100 a month. This is hardly going to translate to the one or two days a month in terms of man-hours that even the smallest of SEO campaigns requires to make a difference, let alone in more competitive sectors where five to ten is more realistic.

Finally, bear in mind that you will be working with your SEO consultant for a while months and possibly years, since search engine optimisation is a long-term process and it takes regular work to stay up in the rankings. It's therefore important that this is someone you get on well with, or at least with whom you have a good working relationship.

POST COMMENT

About seo and it's work Reading SEO Hosting Reviews for Multiple C Class IP Information Indispensable SEO Tools How To Become An SEO Consultant ImSEO - Converting SEO Traffic Into Conversions Socrates Themes - SEO For Page Ranking Simple SEO Techniques Anyone Can Do 5 Quick SEO Fixes You Can Use Right Now Become your own SEO expert Video SEO – It is actually a powerful tool Receiving Search Engine Traffic Can Be Easy When You Develop Inbound Links The Latest and Greatest SEO Trends for 2011 Should you optimize for long tail keywords?