10 Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Consultant

If your website does not appear on the first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results, your potential customers may not even know it exists. Better visibility on search engines is essential to increase website traffic, which can increase brand awareness and higher sales and profits. 

But what if you don’t have the time and technical knowledge to improve your website’s search engine rankings? It makes sense to hire an experienced and reliable search engine optimization (SEO) consultant. 

Here are 10 key questions to ask yourself when considering a potential SEO consultant: 

Can I get a list of current and past clients? 

"A reputable SEO consultant should be willing to share a short list of current and past customers and their contact information," said Vanessa Fox, author of Google Times Marketing (Wiley, 2012) and founder of Nine By Blue in Seattle. SEO software provider. These links can help you evaluate the effectiveness of the candidate and whether person is actually involved in certain SEO activities. 

According to Fox, customers may not provide specific analysis, but they should at least be able to tell you whether they see a positive impact on their search rankings, especially conversion rates and audience engagement, which is a direct result of the consultant’s work. 

How does this improve my search engine ranking?

Away from SEO consultants who are not free to discuss their methods in detail, Rand Fishkin warns that he is the founder of Moz, an online marketing software company based in Seattle, and the Art of Search Engine Optimization (O'Reilly, 2012) Co-author. They will use it to improve your website’s search engine rankings and measure how long it actually takes to achieve the SEO campaign goals you agree with. Make sure that the candidate’s proposal includes a preliminary technical review of your website to rule out issues that may affect your search engine rankings, including broken links and error pages.

 The consultant should also provide page optimization to make your website as search engine friendly as possible. This includes improving your website URL and internal link structure, as well as developing titles, titles, and tags for your pages. Also, ask the consultant if they provide an off-page SEO strategy to post your content on other websites, usually through blogs, social media platforms, and press releases. 

Do you follow the search engine webmaster guidelines?

 You need a consultant who strictly adheres to the best practices for webmasters published by Google, which explicitly prohibits 12 common SEO practices, including automatically generating spam and adding false hidden text and links. If candidates do not follow these guidelines, their site’s score in search results may be extremely low, or worse, Google can completely prohibit them from displaying search results.Bing and Yahoo also published best practices for webmasters that must be verified by consultants. 

Can you guarantee that my website ranks first on Google, Bing and Yahoo!?

 If the candidate's answer is yes, Fox will suggest: "Turn around and run to the other side as quickly as possible." Although it is impossible to guarantee the number one position on the search engine, some unethical SEO consultants will provide false guarantees. When a candidate claims a privileged relationship with Google or any other search engine that ranks first in search results, it can be regarded as a red flag. Only Google, Bing and Yahoo can control how high or low a website appears in search results. 

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Do you have experience in improving local search results? 

Rand said, in order to get close customers. You need a consultant with local SEO technical experience. If your website is optimized for local SEO, it will appear when someone in your area searches for keywords related to your business. To do this, consultants must add their company’s city and state to the title tag and meta description of their website, and make their website appear on local Bing, Google, and Yahoo listings, which are online company directories for specific geographic regions . city ​​square. 

Would you like to share with me any changes you made to my website?

Search engine optimization will most likely require extensive code changes to existing websites. It's important to know exactly what adjustments the consultant is planning to make and how many sites are making adjustments. If you want candidates to get your permission before opening and modifying your website code, be sure to let them know. For example, will the consultant add new title tags to the existing HTML or modify the existing tags? Will they provide additional content for the copy and highlight their products and services to increase drowsiness?