How to Choose an SEO Expert

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is your gateway to business visibility and spreading brand awareness online. It’s the single best way to increase your chances of spreading your customer base, while it’s also nowhere near as expensive as PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns. You might have a great looking website, with even better products/services – it won’t matter much if there’s not enough meaningful traffic, which is where SEO steps in.

Since this is such an important task, most businesses opt to hire SEO professionals to help them optimize their website. But how exactly are you supposed to choose an SEO expert, with so many of them available out there? Well, this guide will show you some of the important things to look at.

Follow Up on Your Candidate’s References

Any reputable SEO consultant will be more than happy to share their past and a current client list with contact information. You should clearly follow up on these and check if your candidate has indeed worked for SEO campaigns they claim they did. And while you may not be able to get accurate data about how successful they were, your clients can at least tell you how their cooperation impacted their search rankings. However, there’s also a huge difference between meaningful traffic and the one that doesn’t convert so well, so be sure to always check your candidate’s impact on conversion rates as well.

Avoid The SEO Expert Who Promises Too Much

If your candidate guarantees that they will get you to the top of your relevant SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) – you should just keep looking for the ones that you can actually trust. The thing is, no one can guarantee that you will get to the top of the rankings these days, at least not for relevant keywords that will get you lots of traffic and leads. Such claims should be a huge red flag for you and you should never go on and actually do business with these people. Instead, try to get your candidates talking about the methods they’re actually going to use in order to optimize your website.

SEO Fees and Budget

Before making any decisions on who to hire as an SEO consultant, you should always know how much money you can actually afford it. If you’re looking for something on a budget, you’ll probably find hiring an SEO freelancer a more affordable option, especially if you’re just looking to grow your business. However, if you are really serious about your venture, you might want to get the best possible SEO Sydney has to offer. You can also try and find someone who would charge a percentage of your revenue that comes out of their work. This is one of the safest ways to ensure you’re not over-paying for SEO services, but also to ensure that your chosen candidate will put their best work in for you.

Multi-Dimensional SEO

One of the biggest mistakes business owners tend to make is to hire an SEO expert that’s proficient at one-dimensional SEO. This won’t really get you great results and it will take a much longer time to actually feel anything’s happening. That’s why you need to be searching for someone who can offer you multi-dimensional SEO services, including:

• On-Page Optimization – Keyword research, high-quality content, responsive web-design, website speed, image optimization… These are all on-page optimization processes that are needed to boost your search rankings.
• Off-site Optimization – The most important aspect of this type of SEO is link building, which can get quite a lot of traffic redirected to your website, but also improve your rankings because Google sees well-connected pages as more reliable ones. Other elements that you’ll need are social-media marketing, guest blogging, influencer marketing etc.
• Technical – The technical part of SEO mostly focuses on your crawl rate, or how fast Google’s bots can crawl your website and index it.

Choose Your SEO Expert Wisely

SEO has changed drastically over the years and it will continue to do so as search engines update their algorithms to provide a better service for their users. What you want from your SEO consultant is to always keep in touch with current SEO trends, so that you avoid any sudden drops in your ranking. There are many SEO experts out there who can help you optimize your website, but if you’re brave enough you can also try to do it all by yourself. Keep in mind that SEO always takes time to kick in, so if you’re looking for instant results you can combine your SEO strategy with something like a PPC campaign.

Search Engine Optimization– stock image