10 Things to Consider When Choosing An SEO Consultant

In the early stage of the internet, there was the importance of creating websites just to have an online presence. Later, getting top page rank on search engines was the topmost priority and easy by putting certain keywords repeatedly. Nowadays, online competition has increased a lot.

Everyone wants his or her company to grow and succeed. You also know that your company’s online presence is not as great as it could be.

(SEO) is a constantly growing evolving practice, as search engines keep updating their algorithm and rules to improve user experience. As mentioned earlier, SEO at once upon a time could be easily done with keyword density and cheaply bought backlinks. Nowadays, the latest SEO only works as part of an integrated digital marketing strategic plan. With many SEO techniques, it has become very challenging to determine which one you should stick to.

So, how do you begin? How can SEO help? How SEO can be helpful in growing your traffic to your website, your business and toplines? This post will be of great help to decide who you should choose as an SEO consultant? Hiring SEO help can build or break your company. Choosing a company can be Challenging. There are many SEO consultants or SEO agencies who yell for their services. But, we need to be wiser here in choosing an SEO consultant.

SEO requires a good level of skills and technical know-how. So, it is one of the main reasons companies choose to hire an SEO company. Here, we will discuss the things to check before you choose an SEO consultant. These points are very crucial as the entire your digital marketing plan will be affected by SEO consultant’s exposure and decisions he makes.

Before selecting which SEO consultant, please be sure to go through the checklist of the following things.

1.Knowing why you need an SEO consultant.

You should know the reasons, purpose for hiring an SEO firm. You need to check where you or your organization fit into. The reason can be any of these as follows.

• You want to build a website for the online presence and need an SEO consultant for it.
• You have a website but lacking traffic.
• Getting good traffic but they are not getting converted into customers or orders.
• You want to get new customers in other digital markets or geographical areas.

2.Getting SEO Audit

You should get an SEO audit of your website before you decide for an SEO consultant. An SEO audit is basically an assessment of a website.

Please do get an SEO audit before getting any work done is important. An SEO audit is basically an evaluation of your website from the perspective of its weaknesses and strengths. It should also explain the possibility of long term growth and success.

An SEO audit is a good way to determine if you can improve your website to raise it’s rank in the search engines. By having this done, you can note whether your SEO consultant of selection can understand the needs of your business. Additionally, you should be able to tell if it is capable of doing what’s necessary to gain your customers and increase your profit line.

If you don’t get a full explanation of the limitations and good of your business, then the SEO company can not help you to do better.

3.SEO needed as an in house SEO resource or needed to hire an SEO consultant.

If SEO needs to be a skill for long term or core competency for the company then you need to, bring it in-house. An agency or consultant can never do as great as some employee can do. You can start with a consultant externally and then bring someone in the house.

4.Identifying and preparing the list of SEO consultants or companies.

One needs to check whether they have an online presence. Please check in Google search. You can also find them through word of mouth. Ask your friends or on online social media, personal and professional networks. Collect and prepare the list of SEO consultants.

5.Checking their website.

One of the ways to identify good SEO consultants or agencies is to assess their website. Check whether their website ranks on top of the search results of famous search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. This will give you hints on whether they have effective SEO for themselves.

6.Knowledge and Understanding of your industry.

You need to know whether an SEO consultant or SEO agency has a good level of knowledge and understanding of your industry. They should be able to tell you how their skills and expertise will help you to reach your business goals.

7.Knowing about client portfolio and their results

You need to get information about the business they worked on. Successful SEO consultants or agencies have a list of previous clients that they can refer to us. Also, how long they worked with their longest client. If you get a list of referrals to ask for, then it will be wonderful if you get good feedback from them.

8.Skills and expertise of a team of SEO consultants

It is important to know that SEO consultants do have a proven track record in industries. It is good if their employees have their certifications like Google Adwords etc. Also, know how much-experienced SEO executives and account managers are who will be leading the projects.

No SEO company can transform a poor product or service into one that customers want. That starts with you. An SEO consultant will work in creating awareness of the brand. Few agencies can also assist in business consulting on top of SEO services. There are many things to do in SEO and development side. So, it is important to know the expertise and skills of the team.

9.Defining success of SEO consultant job?

How do they determine the success of the results? Will they give quick results through buying backlinks or they take time and discuss your business goals and come up with a plan. The success should be determined by business metrics, more customers, more traffic, more views etc. Few SEO companies can show them differently by providing performance or success guarantee as it is a massive risk. For example, one performance indicator can be ranking your website on the first page in 4 months from the day of starting work. Achieving performance indicators using best & right SEO practices is important.

10.Checking and ensuring they have a practice of keeping clients updated regularly.

It is necessarily important that they do provide regular updates on progress. It is important that you ask sample reports they provide to their clients to get an idea on what kind of updates you can get if you subscribe to their services. Be cautious to interact with companies or SEO consultants who can not provide detailed information on how progress will be measured and details will be shared. So, before you start, you need to have a meeting with your SEO consultant to determine what information will be needed. Your SEO expert should also provide a report on the ranking of your primary keywords.

Few reports which can be asked from your side to SEO consultant are as follows:

• Unique visit from organic search
• Number of leads generated
• The number of keyword rankings in top 10, top 20 and top 50 of search engine rankings.
• All reports with comparison to previous month

Few SEO consultants and companies can connect their activities directly to revenue. So, it is important that such companies with this expertise will be good candidates to contract with.

In short, the process of selecting the right SEO company for your business can be time-consuming. It is important that you wisely consider all steps to choose the right SEO. The above steps if considered and followed up wisely, it will help to manage the pressure of choosing a good one. Last but not the least, SEO budget also matters while choosing the SEO.