Hire the Best SEO Consultant
Hiring a skilled SEO consultant is essential for modern business success.
For an online business, SEO is undoubtedly the most essential digital marketing channel.
Until your SEO is in order and search engines are serving you for your desired keywords, your brand will lack visibility and authority, forcing you to rely on paid search advertising to drive traffic.
Depending on paid search advertising can feel like a hamster wheel. Although you can pay for clicks, optimizing a campaign and closing leads and sales through paid clicks is not automatic, and it involves analysis and fine-tuning to be lucrative. The costs of analysis and changes build up over time, and once you stop paying, you’re out. There will be no more traffic.
Social media marketing can be effective for some firms, but most e-commerce and local businesses, particularly those with local searchers looking for actionable information about local services, will not find solutions to their questions from a social network profile. It is almost always a webpage.
With thousands of aspects that go into the mechanics of what page makes one-page rank higher than another, it’s crucial to have an experienced SEO consultant or SEO agency with data-backed decision making and knowledge to advise you.
Choosing the best sort of web marketing to promote your company is unique to each company. The owner’s choice of digital marketing will be influenced by factors such as the stage of the firm, short-term and long-term goals, the local market, and the online competitive landscape.
What is an SEO Consultant?
An SEO consultant is an SEO specialist that offers SEO consulting services for businesses.
An SEO consultant’s role is to guide a company’s decision-making process and the implementation of SEO activities with the goal of increasing search engine traffic and maximizing the impact of SEO methods.
What do Search Engine Optimization Consultants Do?
Hiring SEO consultants has the ultimate purpose of increasing top-of-funnel organic traffic for specific keywords that generate income for organizations. This is often accomplished by:
Increasing the Number of Keywords a Site Ranks For
You want to increase the total volume of keywords a site ranks for. Ranking for 10 keywords will be tough for a business to squeeze profit out of. On the other hand – ranking for 10,000 keywords will provide more traffic and brings us to:
Identifying Keywords that Drive Business and Formulating a Strategy To Rank Them
Following up on the point above – a business owner needs to work on keywords that have commercial intent and can earn business online. A local business not targeting actionable keywords or blogging about any old local thing are missing out on the point of search engine optimization – to drive ACTIONABLE, COMMERCIAL business via search engines.
Improving the Position of Ranking Keywords (First Page Rankings)
Once commercial keywords are identified you can then begin working on improving their positions moving them up the rankings from whatever page they start on, on up through Page 3, Page 2, the bottom of Page 1 to the top of Page 1.
You want to increase the total volume of keywords a site ranks for. Ranking for 10 keywords will be tough for a business to squeeze profit out of. On the other hand – ranking for 10,000 keywords will provide more traffic and brings us to:
Identifying Keywords that Drive Business and Formulating a Strategy To Rank Them
Following up on the point above – a business owner needs to work on keywords that have commercial intent and can earn business online. A local business not targeting actionable keywords or blogging about any old local thing are missing out on the point of search engine optimization – to drive ACTIONABLE, COMMERCIAL business via search engines.
Improving the Position of Ranking Keywords (First Page Rankings)
Once commercial keywords are identified you can then begin working on improving their positions moving them up the rankings from whatever page they start on, on up through Page 3, Page 2, the bottom of Page 1 to the top of Page 1.
SEO is a long journey with top of Page 1 keyword rankings being the final destination.
SEO Consultant Responsibilities
The SEO consultant job description will vary from job to job and the specific needs of each company looking to hire their own SEO specialists. But ultimately you can expect the job description to contain some or all of the following regarding the process of SEO:
Working with an SEO Consultant – The Process
Keyword Analysis
Understanding and performing in-depth keyword research and analysis determines what keywords will bring traffic to a site, which will bring sales to a site, and how to target these keywords to create an influx of traffic and leads and/or sales.
Latent semantic indexing is a technology used by Google that analyzes not only targeted keywords, but the surrounding topics to determine the quality of a potential search result so hammering away on your top 3 keywords and keyword stuffing will most likely not get you where you want to be if you have decent competition.
Thorough keyword analysis and strategy is the basis of successful SEO consulting engagement.
Technical Audit
A technical SEO audit is a critical part of the SEO process because it helps identify any technical issues with a website that could be preventing crawlers from crawling the website, indexing content, or preventing the site from ranking well.
Some common technical SEO issues:
- Meta Robots NOINDEX Set
- No HTTPS Security
- Missing or Incorrect Robots.txt
- No XML Sitemaps
- Canonical URL Issues
- Multiple Versions of the Homepage
- Broken Links
- Slow Website Loading Speed
- Poor Mobile Experience
- Rel=Canonical Errors
- Missing Meta Title Tags & Meta Descriptions Tags
- Indexing Issues
- Problematic HTML Markup
This is just a tiny sample of potential technical issues and ultimately each of these can result in the website not being crawlable, not being crawled properly, and pages not being indexed for desired keywords, thus rendering you invisible to the internet.
Through an in-depth technical SEO audit you can discover opportunities to improve the mechanics of your website and earn more organic search engine traffic.
Onsite Audit
The term “onsite” in regards to SEO is typically referring to the website content:
- Do you have the right pages onsite to rank for desired keywords?
- Do you have the related keywords onsite?
- Is there a content marketing strategy in place or are articles and pages being published all willy-nilly with no plan or strategy involved?
- Site Structure
These are all critical elements to examine on site. A skilled SEO consultant will be able to spot issues with your onsite fast and formulate a strategy with actionable tasks, based on your unique landscape, to tweak or generate pages that will bring you more online visibility.
Competitor Analysis
Above I mentioned “your unique landscape” and how we don’t do basic “gold”, “silver” and “bronze” packages. This is because your entire strategy and plan of attack should be based on your competitors. To shorten the time it takes to rank you must:
Examine Competitor Content
- What are they ranking for?
- What keywords have volume?
- What keywords are keywords that would drive sales?
- What supporting content do they have on site?
- How much content do they have onsite?
- How much content are they publishing monthly?
Examine Competitor Onsite
- Site layout: How is the site laid out visually?
- How is the website content structured?
- What is the URL structure?
- What are the meta titles and descriptions?
- What schema is being used?
- How are they interlinking pages?
- What pages are in the navigation?
These are all super important issues that dictate how search engine spiders crawl pages, how authority flows through pages, what pages rank for desired terms, and how link juice flows through the site. Expert SEO consultants can help guide you through understanding your competitive landscape and help to make the best decision on how to proceed for your business.
Backlinks Analysis
Link building aka off site SEO is key to building the authority of a website. You must conduct a backlink audit:
- How many backlinks does the competitor site have?
- How is the competitors overall backlink profile?
- What pages are getting links?
- Are they quality backlinks or low-quality links?
- What’s the DR of the incoming links?
- What sites is the competitor getting backlinks from?
- What is the backlinks anchor text?
- How many backlinks per month?
- Are they doing press releases and public relations?
The backlink profile of a website has a lot to do with how a site ranks so the above are all very important aspects that need to be identified.
Search engine optimization is part science, part art, but having a clear idea of what a competitor is doing for their link building will not only provide an idea of how you should tackle your own link building but how to make it cleaner and more effective to rank ASAP. SEO consultants can help paint this picture and make the process and strategy clear for you.
SEO Strategy
Once all the data from the elements above is gathered, you can then formulate an SEO strategy. Typically an SEO strategy is focused more on what you will do based on opportunities afforded by competitors and what order to attack tasks.
SEO Implementation
The order in which you attack tasks can be the difference between a rockstar campaign and a campaign that gets shut down because the owner didn’t see value in how the project was progressing.
Each campaign will have different objectives and therefore will have different means to meet objectives. It’s important to have swift and skillful implementation as search engine optimization is very tech-focused so implementing something haphazardly will yield weak results. Strong attention to detail for implementation and analysis is essential for successful SEO campaigns.
SEO Reporting
In SEO, monthly reporting is how you convey progress. You want to get periodical reporting showing increases in:
- Google Search Console Organic Visibility (Impressions)
- Google Analytics Organic Traffic
- Form Fills & Leads Generated
- Time Onsite & Pages Visited
- Number of Keywords a site ranks for
- Target Keywords Positions
- Brand Searches & Direct Traffic
Highlighting strategic SEO wins along the way is important as it shows you are moving down the intended path to achieve your search marketing goals.
What Does it Take to Become an SEO Expert?
What does it take to become an SEO expert? This is a great question. I think an SEO expert must be tried and tested in the field, understands how the Google Algorithm works and has maintained success through multiple Google Algorithm updates. Not only just being able to talk about theory, but actually producing desired results, and rectifying negative impact from Google updates.
The sad fact is that search engine optimization has received a bad reputation because of the number of charlatans in the industry. To be a true SEO expert requires passion, years of dedication, unpaid hours of uncovering layers of information, reading Google white papers, understanding and mastering SEO tools, Google updates, and finally – how to put it all together. An expert SEO has a natural inclination for discovering how things work and becomes obsessed with using these machines for their own benefit.
Are SEO Consultants Worth It?
Yes. Very much so.
When it comes to ranking factors and what it takes to rank higher, we barely scratched the surface above.
Add an element of “it depends” to every situation and search engine optimization SEO is an endless series of unique situations that for an amateur at best can lead to an endless sequence of questions and analysis paralysis, and at worst actually negatively affect rankings and possibly de-indexing your website.
From the very foundation of a search engine optimization project from the keyword research to the content creation to the off site, hiring an SEO consultant for their expert advice and past experience will yield better results for your business.
Whether you have a full-time employee you think can handle SEO, or a traditional marketing team you think can handle the SEO, SEO is really a beast of it’s own and it’s critical you have a true SEO expert on your side with the required skills and past experience to know how to execute an effective SEO campaign for your business website.
Does SEO Really Work?
Yes, SEO really works.
Millions of local businesses rely on local SEO for lead generation and to bring in streams of potential clients and new customers consistently.
Millions of media organizations rely on SEO to optimize their websites to rank at the top of search engine results pages to earn the clicks and traffic to get the volume of traffic needed for advertisers to advertise on their website.
Millions of ecommerce websites rely on SEO to increase sales in competitive online marketplaces and drive sales from searches on search engines.
In all these instances, SEO is needed to remain competitive in competitive search results.
Working with an SEO Consultant for Website Redesign & Digital Marketing Success
If you’re creating a new website for your business it’s important to hire an SEO consultant or have a competent SEO on your marketing team review the new website and ensure that you don’t kill your rankings when you hit go live.
In addition, there are specific elements that need to be intact for different types of websites:
Local Brick & Mortar Businesses
- Mobile-friendliness
- Schema
- Service page setup
- Passing core web vitals
- Great user experience
Service Area Businesses
- Service area pages
- Hyperlocal SEO with Neighborhoods & Local Landmarks
- Schema
- Mobile-friendliness
- Optimized for conversion
E-commerce Businesses
- Choose a website design that complements the type of searchers that search for your products. Some products learn towards a desktop searcher while some lean towards a mobile searcher.
- A Canonical URL strategy to minimize duplicate content
- A handful of other technical SEO factors that are specific to ecommerce websites
Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO is a different beast. A small mistake can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue. Your in-house marketing teams may not have the skill needed for a project of this level of importance hiring an SEO consultant with enterprise experience is super important to make sure you maintain and improve the existing SEO of the website.
Multi-location SEO
- Multiple City Pages
- Schema
- Local Phone Number for Each Location Onsite
- Local Optimized Copy
- A Locations page with all locations address and phone numbers
How Long Does it Take to See Results in the Search Engines from SEO?
There are a few levers that SEO pulls on to drive traffic:
- Impressions
- Rankings
- Traffic
- Conversions
The level of actual traffic you see will vary based on keyword targeting, competitors, and the specific strategy you choose to go with but in general, you should see rankings and impressions improvements within 3 months of making changes to your website.
Do You Offer Ongoing SEO Consulting Services?
Yes. We work with companies in different capacities:
Strictly SEO Consulting
Larger size companies tend to have their own team in place. We do enterprise SEO with enterprise companies and this tends to be:
- Analysis
- Strategy
- Managing Implementation
Complete Outsourced CMO
For local businesses and e-commerce businesses we can work on purely SEO, or what tends to happen most often, is that we take on more of an outsourced CMO role, managing the entire digital marketing process from A to Z doing not only SEO consulting, but strategy and implementation including Paid Search, Social Media Management, and Email marketing.
How Much Does it Cost to Hire an SEO Consultant?
SEO consultant’s costs can vary there is no standard pricing and it depends on the type of work you need to be done.
How Much Do Your SEO Consulting Services Cost?
If you hired us for a year-long engagement our SEO services and consulting start at $48,000 a year and can go up into the 100’s of thousands of dollars depending on your competition and your goals.
One thing about our SEO consulting services is that we do not offer cookie-cutter packages.
Quite frankly companies that offer cookie-cutter gold, silver, and bronze type packages tend to not be the most effective.
Impactful SEO requires a custom SEO strategy based specifically on your business and its competitors.
There are so many elements of SEO that your strategy needs to be dialed – from your keyword strategy to your onsite strategy, to your content strategy, to your link-building strategy.
To be truly impactful this must be based on your competitors – not a blind package-based approach.
Let me repeat that again:
To be truly impactful this must be based on your competitors – not a blind package-based approach.
What Kind of Companies Do You Work With?
Any and all companies that need search engine presence.
Digital marketing and search optimization are here to stay. As expert SEO consultants with over 15 years of professional experience, with both in-house and agency experience we know the in’s and out’s of the industry, the latest search engine algorithm updates, the latest SEO software, and tools and SEO best practices and I can help you dominate the search engines for your targeted keywords in any industry, guiding your to have a better understanding, and make better decisions for your unique market and goals.
Whether a new company, a startup, or an established business I, an expert SEO consultant with 15 years of professional experience, can help you increase your online visibility, leads, and sales from organic traffic to your website.