In today’s digital and competitive market, Search Engine Optimization(SEO) marketing is more important than ever. This Blog covers briefly on what kind of skills you will need to look for in a prospective SEO Consultant / Agency while hiring for your SEO project.
While Paid Advertising, Social Media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines is always going to work to a brand’s favor.
Who is an SEO Consultant?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming increasingly complex with various ranking algorithms that have unpredictable factors in effect. Thus your site requires full-time attention and customized care by someone to analyze, review, improve the website’s search engine performance, and update sites regularly to keep up with the latest algorithms, and to monitor the incoming links and provide expert advice, guidance, actionable tasks, and recommendations to business owners to earn more natural search engine traffic and higher-ranking positions. This is where an SEO Consultant comes to help.
An SEO Consultant may operate either as an Individual or as an SEO Agency. The following will best describe an ideal candidate for the role of an SEO consultant.
- Who helps to rank websites adhering to Search engine guidelines and algorithms, improves a website’s SEO performance, to build a brand, and ensure business profitability.
- Who are knowledgeable about SEO trends techniques and strategies
- They have a combination of Technology & marketing skills
- SEO consultants may have about 7-10 years of experience in Internet Sales & Marketing and/or in the field of website design & development
- SEO consultants are a breed who are connected with other SEO professionals and SEO Software businesses by the way of forums, webinars & social media groups for the sole purpose of learning and sharpening their ‘SEO skill sets‘
- They possess Digital Marketing Certifications from Google, Hubspot, or from any top universities that usually demand significant financial investments. They don’t hold back when it comes to investing in themselves.
Now that you have some ideal characteristics that describe your ideal candidate for the role of an SEO Consultant, read on to understand, When and Why you will need an SEO consultant and their roles & responsibilities.
When & Why do you need an SEO consultant?
There are scenarios where a website has been SEO optimized and still, it doesn’t perform as expected. It might be because the SEO implementation done is currently outdated or it did not comply with the latest Google ranking algorithms or did not follow the SEO Best practices.
So if you are a business owner or an entrepreneur having a website who may have never optimized the website before or your website was SEO optimized but you are unable to see any noticeable progress in terms of Website traffic and/or leads; then you would ideally have to reach out to an SEO Consultant.
An SEO consultant can be hired at the time when you decide to design or redesign or making any changes to your business website. they can add immense value in terms of research of your target audience with the help of a combination of data, competitor, and market research analysis. When hired at this stage, they can add immense value especially if you are in the B2B (Business-to-business space) and want to rank well with B2B SEO strategies. Here are some more reasons why you will need an SEO consultant
- Guide you to use the right SEO approach.
- Create SEO Marketing Goals.
- Create an SEO ‘road-map’ based on the Goals.
- Train team members on SEO best practices.
- Plan an on-going content generation strategy.
What are the main responsibilities of an SEO Consultant?
The primary responsibility of SEO professionals is to ensure top rankings for the client website and they liaison with Web developers for implementing website changes according to SEO best practices. The following tasks are performed to achieve them:
- SEO & Technical Website Audit – An SEO consultant will check, test, and identify website visibility issues. An SEO Consultant will test & identify issues & opportunities and document the benchmarks. They also check Google indexing status, website content inventory, HTML code efficiency, traffic statistics, domain authority factors, and keyword targeting.
- Online Competitor Analysis – It is a vital strategy to identify your competitors and identify growth opportunities. An SEO Consultant will reverse-engineer your competitor sites to identify their strengths and weaknesses and audience share and use potential strategies for your brand growth.
- Client Business Analysis – Any marketing activity should begin with a detailed Business Analysis process. An SEO Consultant, analyze and guide your businesses in improving processes, products & services through data analysis.
- Keyword Research – SEO Consultants conduct keyword research and set keyword targeting & optimizing strategy by identifying primary keywords and long-tail key phrases. An SEO company also Identify potential keywords having lower competition that gives higher profits and also conduct research for alternative keyword opportunities for business to rank for.
- Content Research – An SEO Expert analyzes existing content, your business goals, potential opportunities, research content online and develops a unique strategy aligning with your business vision and goals that will benefit your company’s long-term growth and help with brand visibility.
- SEO Optimization – An SEO consultant executes on-page SEO elements and organizes web content as per the guidelines of search engines complying with the latest search engine algorithms.
- Improving & Optimizing Existing website Content: SEO Experts conduct content editing and proofreading to improve readability and leverage the existing content for optimization. They focus on readability, user experience, interesting & engaging content, use bullet points, use statistics and facts and figures, correct grammatical errors, and ensure that content on each page has relevance, purpose and value.
- Identify & Resolve Technical issues – This services involves identification and resolution of technical SEO issues like canonicalization, crawl errors, 404 errors, broken links, pagination, robot.txt file, content duplication, and more and they cover them all.
- Improving UX to Boost Conversions – In Spite of all SEO implementations & best practices done, a smooth user experience plays a major role in website engagement. SEO Experts optimize your website to improve user experience (UX). This will help in minimizing page abandonment, increasing website engagement, increasing page views, CTR, and evaluating rich content benefits.
- Link building activities – As an important SEO Strategy, they also help build a diversified inbound link profile through white-hat link building strategies including content marketing, guest posting, Influencer Outreach, video submissions, designing and publishing Infographics and more.
- Local SEO – For every business, optimizing local presence is also a very important SEO Strategy. They set up Google Local Business (Google Maps), Bing Maps listing, & Apple Maps listing and optimize them for local SEO. Local SEO experts also set up local SEO marketing campaigns to promote business locally. They use the right tools and focus on the acquisition of local business reviews and reputation management.If you have an existing Google My Business Listing, learn how to Optimize it.
- Ranking Monitoring & Analysis – An SEO Consultant set up and Configure Google Analytics, Search console and other Rank monitoring tools to analyze and monitor the website’s performance in terms of website traffic and ranking. Monitoring your own website’s ranking is key to ensuring sustained success with search engines.
- Client Reporting – SEO Consultants also ensure accountability, transparency and communication by sharing the marketing results through stats & figures, so you have a clear understanding of the marketing implementations done and also outlay the plan for upcoming months taking into consideration the performance of the marketing strategies done.
- Create Marketing funnel strategies – A marketing funnel is important for any business as it describes your customer’s journey with you. From the initial stages when a customer learns about your business, to the purchasing stage, marketing funnels map routes to conversion and beyond. By evaluating your funnels, they potentially drive greater sales, more loyalty and stronger brand awareness.
- Strategize and implement post-SEO marketing – As an SEO Consultant, they also strategize and implement post-SEO marketing to improve the brand/business growth, user engagement & maintain the consistency of the website rankings and performance achieved.
How to Choose an SEO Consultant?
It is important for you to carry out a lot of research before you hire any of these businesses to enable you to make the right choice.
- Existing clients industry verticals – When hiring an SEO company, Dive Into Their Portfolio And Case Studies, look at the company’s existing client industry verticals, website and see if they tend to specialize in any particular industry, location or service line. They may share what you can expect with each service and case studies.
- Reviews and ranking overview – It’s also important to look into what an SEO company has done in the past and how they are performing currently through their reviews & testimonials. You can look at review websites like Google Maps, Facebook, and others to find reviews and more details on the SEO companies you’re considering.
Also, a good SEO company need not necessarily be found on the 1st page on Google results, they can be found through referrals as well. Good SEO companies are often overwhelmed with clients all the time because their clients refer them to people and lots of people in their network refer folks to them. They have a high retention of clients. Lots of people are very satisfied. They’re making plenty of money and they’re incredibly busy, so they hardly get time to spend on any work optimizing their own website to get new clients.
- Plan they propose – Always look at the plans and goals they propose. Check their immediate actions, Short-term goals, long term goals, activities list, and more. See, if they focus on boosting your revenue & your brand growth and not just sell you promises of sales leads by SEO rankings alone.
Their plan should also focus on
- SEO Methods & Implementations adhering to google & other search engine guidelines with No Spam or blackhat strategies.
- They should conduct a technical audit/content audit and based on it propose website changes for improving website performance & engagement.
- Know about their reporting and Communication methods. Ask for Sample reports and if they track important business oriented metrics.
- Check on the guarantee and the timeline they give you for top rankings.
- Check if they also focus on local search presence, and
- Check the customer engagement ideas proposed.
The ideas or the strategy given by your SEO marketing consultant should adhere to latest trends. Want to learn more about planning on launching a product or service, Checkout the FREE Product Launch Checklist.
- Research The Team And The Company’s Ethics – This may be one of the most important factors when it comes time to choose an SEO company. Ethics and integrity are paramount when selecting your digital marketing team. If the employees on the front lines don’t have a strong grasp of company spirit, or if they are disconnected from the company’s vision, it’s unlikely they will be dedicated to exemplary client service.
Note that SEO companies can be structured differently. For example at Immersive Radical digimedia, we assign one SEO specialist to each client and that person acts as the project manager and SEO specialist to avoid any miscommunication and confusion with having more than one primary contact within the company.
- Follow Them On Social Media And Read Their Blog – It is a good strategy to understand about your potential SEO consultant. Take some time to follow them on Facebook and LinkedIn. Maybe read a few blog posts and subscribe to their email newsletter. You can also learn their knowledge and priorities by reviewing the content they’re putting out.
- Ask About Their Fees And Contracts – Agencies are structured differently. So, ask about their fees and what the expected deliverables will be for said price and also look at how attentive they are going to be and listen to your goals and objectives. You can compare prices of multiple SEO companies to ensure they are offering a competitive rate. However, you usually get what you pay for, so going for the cheapest option may not be in your best interest.
5 Major Benefit of hiring an SEO company
If you have thought about having an in-house SEO team, you can look at the roles and responsibilities that we have mentioned earlier. If you’re planning to hire an SEO Consultant company, you can achieve better online marketing results and growth.
Here are the 5 Major benefits of hiring an SEO company.
- SEO companies have experience of working extensively on various diversified projects for years, so they know the best practices and what works and what not!.
- Full-service SEO companies can help with more than just SEO.
- You can focus more on your business without much hassle.
- Reach more than your focussed business goals.
- You also save money. With ever changing SEO world, having an in-house SEO team, training them, investing on expensive SEO tools can cost you more than working with an SEO consultant.
Learn more on Investing on PAID SEO TOOLS
Conclusion
With that being said, we have answered all the major questions a business/entrepreneur/individual will have and things they need to know for hiring an SEO consultant. Invest in an SEO company that is going to give you a personalized experience.
We as an SEO Consultant have been working in this Industry from past 10 years in Digital Marketing and over 20 Years in the field of Internet, Web Presence and Web Technology with various industry verticals. If you need a genuine SEO Partner who can help you build a solid online marketing plan for your business using SEO and Digital Marketing strategies, then do speak to us for a no-obligation Free Digital Marketing plan.
If you want to learn more about our SEO strategies and see how we can help you accelerate your business, then Schedule a free consultation or contact us at +91-7026633366 / +91-7026633367 or email us at sales@radical.co.in to ask questions to understand more about how we link SEO with your business goals.
We are happy to schedule a time to talk and discuss your business strategies and if SEO can work for your company. 🙂
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