It’s practically impossible to rank high in the search result’s pages if you don’t use SEO. If you have the skills you can go ahead and take the plunge and optimize your site, but if you don’t have the skills or the time to do it, you should hire a SEO professional to provide you with the SEO services. When scouting for a professional you should look out for these features:
SEO strategy
It’s impossible to undertake proper SEO without a serious SEO strategy. Before you hire a professional take time to ask him/her how he/she is planning to improve your ranking. A good professional will let you know where he/she will start from. Most reputable professionals will start with on-site optimization then go to off-site optimization.
For a long time, external links have been very important in SEO and they will continue being influential. Ask the professional how he/she is planning to get the links and the sites that he/she planning to target. Remember that no two links are the same and one good link is worth more than a hundred low-quality links. A reputable company should get high quality links from reputable sites such as entrepreneur.com, inc, and others.
Communication
How well does the SEO company communicate? A reputable company should send you weekly or fortnightly updates. If you feel that the reports are too often, you should ask the company to send you the reports once a month. In addition to the company sending you progress reports, it should also be easy to reach it in the event that you have a problem or you want something to be clarified. As rule of thumb a good company shouldn’t take more than 24 hours to respond to your email.
Past work
Just like when hiring any other service provider, you want to work with an experienced SEO professional. The only way to know that the professional is experienced is to see the past work. An experienced professional should give you 2-3 big, well-known clients that he/she has worked with in the past. When looking at the past clients, pay close attention to the length of time that the professional has worked with the client. Shady SEO professionals use short-term SEO tactics in the bid of impressing the client. After sometime, the tactics backfire jeopardizing the site.
A good SEO should have worked with a big client for at least a year. This shows that the professional uses white hat SEO tactics that give results and this is the reason why the client keeps him/her around.
#1 rank guarantee
The sole aim of SEO is to improve your ranking in the results pages, but no SEO professional company can give you a number one ranking guarantee as he/she doesn’t have control over it. Google is the one that controls how algorithms work and a simple change in the algorithms can greatly affect the ranking of your site. If you come across a professional and he/she gives you a guarantee, you should run for the hills.
Conclusion
These are the features that you should look out for when hiring a SEO professional. When hiring, remember that SEO is a gradual process that can take up to months before you start seeing results; therefore, you should be patient.
Google and Bing Certified, Trained Students Of IIT Kharagpur, Montpellier University.Visionary Entrepreneur and Trainer.
