Hiring an SEO expert for your website requires you to ask some tough questions. It is necessary to ensure that you are not wasting your money. How can you tell if an SEO consultant knows what he or she is talking about? These questions will help you determine whether or not your SEO consultant is a true expert.
How will you help me?
Before you even ask the question, you need to know what services you want your consultants to provide. Will someone else in your company be responsible for some of the SEO essentials, such as keyword research and page optimization, and link building, or will you? Afterward, inquire about their expertise in those services.
What will be the first thing you do?
Your website’s current performance in terms of achieving your marketing objectives should be the first step in the audit process performed by experienced SEO consultants. What’s working and what’s not? Getting a baseline for the project at hand is imperative. No one wants to fix something that isn’t broken or break something that has been attracting attention, even if this takes some time to get going. It would be great if they could provide you with an SEO guide to help you understand their methods.
Were you previously employed by a company in our industry?
If an SEO consultant hasn’t worked with a business in your industry, that doesn’t mean they’re unqualified. If they haven’t worked in your industry before, it’s more important for them to show you that they have a wide range of experience or that they can quickly adapt to yours.
Ask for a few examples of clients you’ve worked with and the services you provided. Also, tell me how things turned out for them. There should be case studies showing the “before” and “after” of a client’s SEO success for any SEO consultant worth their salt (or gold, depending on your preference). To be on the safe side, you should always ask for references from the companies they discuss with. If they squirm at the mention of it, they may be concealing something or they may not be able to provide any examples.
How long do your business partnerships with clients last?
As long as their budget allows, most businesses will keep their SEO consultant unless they decide to bring it in-house or they don’t see any results, which is the case for many.
If they say a year or more, you’re probably on the right track.
What steps will you take to help us rise in the search engine results?
However, no SEO consultant can guarantee you immediate results despite their best efforts.
One can never be sure enough in this situation. No matter how good your search engine optimization is, people may still avoid your business if Google’s algorithms change, your competitors’ websites change, new competitors enter the market, or a bad review about your company is published.
Do you know how backlinks will help us get more visitors?
They should be able to tell you that after conducting research, they have an idea of where to place those backlinks and which websites you should be directing them to. Because not all backlinks are created equal, scattering them about will do you no good and may even backfire on you in the eyes of Google. In order to avoid costly mistakes, you should work directly with your consultant in order to find valuable backlinks.
What are your favorite SEO tools?
Although this is purely a matter of opinion, it’s safe to assume that an SEO consultant who relies solely on free tools does not have access to the most up-to-date data with which to make an informed assessment and report. In theory, if this is how someone makes a living, they should be looking for the best possible SEO tools to help them achieve their goals
What kind of reports will you be able to provide to us?
Sharing monthly reports is a good way to ensure the success of SEO. sharing reports on a quarterly basis is not out of the ordinary. They will be able to record sufficient information to determine which needles are moving and in what direction, but it won’t be so frequent that it becomes meaningless, as may be the case with a weekly report.
Their reports should include a breakdown of the SEO techniques that they’ve applied, where you rank with the keywords that you’ve agreed upon, and the rate of conversion that visitor experiences as they move from one phase of the sales funnel to the next. Hopefully, their efforts will result in an increase in search traffic.
How do we determine whether or not your efforts were successful?
Any marketer worth their salt knows that before beginning any project, goals need to be defined. At the first meeting, you won’t be able to define them, but the SEO expert should be able to give you a sense of what kind of goals were set for other organizations based on the result they were hoping to achieve.
Conclusion
If both parties agree to the terms, there should be no room for misunderstanding. Either you reach the numbers or you don’t. There is no middle ground. A competent consultant may also offer some constructive criticism regarding your objectives, particularly if they are unrealistic or, on occasion, insufficiently ambitious.
