What to Know About SEO Before Hiring a Consultant

Search engine optimization or SEO can be the most powerful form of marketing your business can have available. It is targeted like no other form of advertising is. It uses inbound marketing to attract customers to a business rather than using expensive sales people or ads to find the customers. But, if you are looking for a SEO consultant to help with your efforts, there are a few things you should understand first.

First, you need to understand the importance of keywords. Keyword research is the first, and most important, step to an SEO campaign. Keywords are what the entire campaign is built around. If you try to blow past this step, you will be building a campaign on guesses and theory.

Before even meeting with a SEO consultant, you should sit down and brainstorm keywords. Sit down with a pen and paper and think like a potential customer. Think of all the keywords or phrases a prospect would type into a search engine to find your services. Spend 30 minutes to an hour doing this. Try to come up with at least 30 to 50 words and phrases. You will present these keywords to the SEO consultant you hire.

If you are interviewing SEO experts and they want to do all the keyword research for you, you should be careful using them. They do not know your business better than you do. Yes, they can think of some words on their own.  But, chances are they will need input from you to get all the angles.

Another important element of SEO is the on-page optimization. It is the actual content and text on a website. The content is read by the search engines and the visitors. The content should be well written with visitors being considered first and search spiders second. If a SEO firm tells you they have tools that auto write content to make it SEO friendly, run away as fast as possible.  This means they will be using tools that will just spin together content that is difficult to read and understand for visitors.

The machine-generated contents will lead to visitors abandoning your site and will not help your site rank in the long term. A high abandonment rate is a metric that many search engines use now to rate a website. If they see a lot of people hitting the back button on a website it will hurt the site in the search results.

The last factor in SEO to know about is off-page optimization. This optimization is typically associated with link building. A top SEO expert in Denver says that If a consultant tells you they have tools that will get you hundreds of links directly to your website then look elsewhere. The search engines have changed their algorithm to detect this manipulation, and will penalize sites that do this. It is better to have a more manual, natural approach to link building.

Hiring a SEO expert is a good idea because it will help the business owner focus on other things. However, careful attention should be paid to the tactics and methods they use. Hopefully, this article will provide the business owner some insight into what is important when hiring a consultant.