5 SEO Tips to Know Before Hiring an Expert

You’ve started a business and created a website? Congratulations! Stepping into the entrepreneurial waters is a challenging endeavor, especially with so many competitors emerging every day. Unfortunately, creating a website is not nearly enough to help you stand out from the crowd.

It takes a well-optimized website with high-quality, useful content to help you reach customers and stand out. Businesses worldwide have taken this seriously and are investing in >SEO to help them rank higher in Google search results.

However, before you turn to an SEO agency to help you boost traffic to your website, there are a few factors you should consider. Here are 5 things you should know before you hire an SEO expert.

Know Who Your Audience Is

Before you seek SEO services from a local agency or freelancer, take a moment to consider what do you know about your audience. Who are they? What kind of problems do they have? What sort of content do they want to see?

If you know who your target audience is, you will know what problems they’re facing and subsequently how you can help them. It is only when you’ve got this figured out that you can start producing useful, relevant content that helps them solve their problems.

After carefully analyzing the data, you will know exactly what type of content to create: articles, customer reviews, infographics, case studies, etc.

If you haven’t figured this out yet, we strongly recommend getting to know who your audience is before you hire someone to help you increase your ranking and conversions.

Understand the Difference Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO

Another important thing to know before hiring an SEO consultant is the difference between these two practices. Black Hat SEO implies using certain unethical practices to increase a website’s ranking in search results. Such practices include keyword stuffing, cloaking, link farms, duplicating content, sneaky redirects, etc.

While they do increase traffic to a website, these tactics are not following Google’s rules and your website could be severely penalized. It could take years to recover from the penalty and get back on track again. It brings more damage than benefits.

Black hat SEO is a sort of a quick fix solution that no professional SEO agency will even consider implementing. Learning what these unethical practices are will help you when choosing an agency to hire.

If the SEO agency you’re talking with is mentioning any of the scammy tactics mentioned above, it is safe to assume that they practice black hat SEO.

Seek an agency that implements legitimate, white hat SEO practices only.  In this way, you will increase organic traffic using approved techniques therefore, you won’t don’t risk being penalized by Google.

Don’t Expect Overnight Success

It of the utmost importance to be patient and know that success doesn’t happen overnight. Many businesses expect almost immediate results when they hire an SEO expert. But you won’t just wake up 3 days after later and see that your website has ranked on the first page of Google. This doesn’t happen.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. You are not likely to see results immediately. You should know this because it will help you find a good SEO agency. If they claim they can ensure quick results and get your website to rank on the first page in a very short amount of time, steer clear of them as they are probably scamming you. It’s a bait and many naïve entrepreneurs fall for it.

Every experienced SEO consultant knows this is not possible to achieve and so they don’t make such promises. Real, solid results are a consequence of time and effort and every legit agency will tell you this.

There Is More to SEO Than Links

Building links is important for boosting your rankings in search results. Very important. But it’s definitely not everything. There are many other aspects of SEO that we must focus on including user experience, load time, etc.

While it’s great to have reputable websites linking back to your pages, if your website is too slow or isn’t user-friendly, you’re not going to get many conversions. If there is one thing that users hate, it’s slow loading time. No one has the patience to wait for a website to load for more than 3 seconds. This is a very negative ranking factor.

Also, if your website isn’t easy to navigate so that users can find what they’re looking for, they will leave never to come back.

As you can see, SEO is about plenty of other things, not just links, even though they still represent the most important ranking factor.

Be Willing to Invest in SEO

If you search for >SEO services online, you’ll see prices ranging from as low as $100 to up to thousands of dollars a month.

If we’re being honest, most of those cheap so-called experts aren’t going to do much for your website. And even if it is $100 a month, it’s still wasted money.

We’re certainly not saying you should necessarily get the most expensive option. But we do think you should be willing to invest in quality services. As they say, it takes money to make money. And for a $100 a month, you are probably only going to get a bunch of spammy links, that’s all.

Additionally, they might be using some unethical practices that will cause your website to be penalized.

Instead of risking it with the cheapest option out there, find a reasonably-priced SEO package that will bring you guaranteed results. If you can’t afford it, then you should wait until you are. There’s no point in wasting time and money on inefficient services.

There is no doubt that good SEO can transform your website over time, boost your traffic, and help increase conversions. At this day and age with so many new websites being launched every day, investing in SEO is practically mandatory.

But as you can see, not all that claim to be SEO experts are indeed experts. It helps if you’re prepared before you decide to hire someone.

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