Presently, search engine optimization is the most important form of digital marketing. Gaining organic traffic, reputation building and the promotion of your business are goals of website optimization.
Your company’s Website may look great, with plenty of multimedia sizzle. But if the site isn’t consistently attracting targeted visitors and converting them into customers, then it’s not doing its job, and this can negatively affect your revenue.
If you want to make your business visible on the leading search engines and grow traffic for your site, you need an expert to do the job for you. Hiring an SEO consultant is a great investment into the long-term growth of your business, provided you hire the right one. But what do you even look for in an SEO expert?
SEO results highly depend on the strategies of the specialist you hire and their campaigning style. So, while hiring an SEO professional, you need to ask the right questions and consider certain important things.
Your assessment of candidates should focus on the following factors.
SEO Experience
Anyone can set up an SEO Agency overnight and call themselves an SEO expert, but that doesn’t mean that they know what they are doing.
There are hundreds of little things that go into the bigger picture of doing SEO and it takes many years of experience to know what works and what doesn’t.
While hiring an SEO professional, you need to make sure that you find yourself an experienced one. Communicate with them well to know their years of experience and success in the field.
The SEO market changes quickly, and an SEO professional has to stay updated with this capricious field. So, while hiring one for your website, you should ask a lot about their years of experience in the business. Their qualifications, success rate, and approach to being up to date with the changing courses of the market should also be subjects to bring up in inaugural conversations.
Proven Track Record
It’s easy to talk a good game in SEO, but it’s another thing to have happy clients.
When choosing an SEO consultant, look for a track record of producing desirable results for businesses similar to yours. This is the most effective method to check whether the SEO service provider you have contacted is the right one for your website.
If you have chosen an experienced SEO expert, they will be more than happy to share their previous work records and success to establish their competency. A proven SEO consultant should also show how multiple optimizations that they used contributed to the clients’ bottom line.
You can verify their claim by reviewing the previous jobs that they are associated with at the review sites. Check out what their previous clients are saying about them. Thus, you can pick the right SEO professional for your company.
Here at ClickSlice, you will get SEO experts with a proven record of successful SEO work for established and new websites. This is a necessary factor considering the rising number of snake-oil salesmen on the internet these days.
Understanding of SEO Levels
Search Engine Optimization consists of three tiers:
- Technical – This is the structure of a site that, more than often, determines how easy or difficult it will be for search engines to crawl and index your content.
- On-page optimization – involves using such elements as keywords and HTML tags in ways that help to generate increased search engine traffic to your site.
- Off-page optimization – off-page strategies such as link building help you increase traffic on your site.
You should make sure that you can get personalized services from the expert and off-page SEO strategies to increase awareness of your content on other websites through social media posts, press releases.
Knowing this, it goes without saying that the expert you hire must be up to date on best practices and the latest trends in SEO. They should have a strong command of SEO toolsets and platforms that facilitate keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink optimization.
Of course, you don’t want a one-dimensional SEO expert. You need someone who will approach their strategy from all three angles to maximize success.
Realistic Strategies
It is better to get yourself an SEO professional who doesn’t promise overnight results. Does the expert focus on conversions – converting a visitor to your site into a customer – or are they more concerned with search engine rankings?
Ideally, Getting ranked on the first page of the search engines is not the goal. Also, high traffic is not the goal. All you need is valuable, relevant traffic that generates leads. But that is not easy.
The focus of any SEO strategy should be to accomplish a relevant goal, with a realistic strategy, like increasing conversions, and not achieving a certain rank. A top-notch SEO expert will carve out a strategy that will set you up to consistently be and remain competitive in the search channel by developing a genuine insight into the product, the users, the revenue model, and the competitive landscape.
One sign of a blue-chip SEO expert? They will always start by asking you lots of questions around the business to inform their thinking on building your online visibility.
Find a Creative Geek
When looking for an SEO consultant, you want to hire someone who can come up with ideas, implement them, and measure their impact.
An SEO needs to be comfortable doing relatively geeky analytical and technical stuff day in, day out. The expert will have to crunch through a lot of data and spend time to come up with new ideas and strategies, so they should have a certain sharpness and ability to draw insights.
As Rand Fishkin cites, Finding an SEO who can recite the IP addresses for all of Google’s crawlers is great, but finding one who’s deeply curious and constantly investigating how that crawler works is even better. Ever-growing knowledge is a craveable trait in an SEO Expert you’d want to hire.
There are a lot of self-proclaimed SEO specialists out there, but true experts are few and far between. When hiring an SEO Expert, separating the wheat from the chaff takes time and effort, but finding the right expert to help you grow is well worth the investment.
Thanks to the mentioned factors, you are now aware of hiring methods, skillset, and things to remember about hiring SEO professionals. Give a boost to your business with effective SEO services and drive, not just traffic, valuable traffic from search engines.
