Hiring SEO Experts

What is SEO?

Before we dive too deeply into what we can offer you and your business, let’s take a moment to discuss what SEO really is. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a content marketing strategy that boosts your website’s ranking in search engines such as Google. 

When customers and clients need a product or service, where do they go? They jump on the internet, pull up a search engine, usually Google, and type what they are looking for in the search box. The search engine then provides them with a list of content related to what they typed and selects what they are looking for.

If your content is at the top of the search results, there’s a good chance that the person searching is going to click on it and end up on your website. Once there, your optimized website and carefully crafted landing pages will do the rest. Next thing you know, you’re working with a new client. 

Traditionally, businesses find new clients and customers through advertising. After all, how else are people going to discover your business exists? However, ads are often costly and challenging to get in front of your target audience. What’s more, they’re not practical for every business.

For these reasons, SEO is often a more effective strategy than traditional advertising. When someone types something like ‘local lawn care’ into Google, if your lawn care business is at the top of the search results, it’s highly likely that person is about to become a new customer. 

On the internet, the SEO process works for all kinds of businesses. Whether you’re running a local restaurant or a global tech company, if you want to stay competitive, you need to master the art and skill of SEO.

SEO is how your website becomes better than your competitors.

Why Hiring SEO Experts is Good for Business

The internet is a powerful tool for business. Your website has the potential to grow your business and increase sales single-handedly. But first, you’ll need a strategy in place to drive traffic to your website. SEO offers the tools you need to do this effectively, but it’s not an easy process. For this reason, hiring SEO experts is good for business, as well as the following reasons.

SEO Experts Know What They’re Doing

You can spend a substantial amount of time researching SEO best practices, then practicing and implementing them. There is, of course, nothing wrong with doing this. However, don’t expect to become an SEO expert overnight. In addition to the technical aspects, there are also many things that only experience can teach you.

Even if you’re a savvy internet user, there are many parts of SEO that are not intuitive to the average content creator. Website optimization takes an intimate understanding of Google’s algorithms, dedication, and time, which are all excellent reasons to hire SEO experts.

SEO experts are well-versed in the techniques required to achieve positive results. They understand Google’s algorithms and how to rank pages in search results. Plus, the rules are constantly changing, so unless you’re prepared to keep up, you’re better off hiring an expert who is entirely focused on SEO best practices. 

SEO Experts Give You Time to Focus on Your Business

If your business is small, you may be able to handle your own SEO, at least at first. However, as your business grows, you’re soon going to find that you don’t have time to keep up on the research and techniques necessary for proper SEO. Even if you are just starting out, your time is better spent focusing on your business. 

Leave the SEO to the experts. Time is money when it comes to business. Every minute you spend on SEO is a minute you’re not using to grow your business. Keep your focus on what’s essential, and hire experts to handle your SEO. 

SEO experts are uniquely qualified to handle the ever-evolving search engine landscape. The experts will navigate potential problems and build your website using trusted techniques and content marketing strategies.

SEO Experts Boost Your Return On Investment (ROI)

SEO is a marketing strategy that typically has a positive ROI. Optimizing your website and content drives traffic to your website, boosting page views and engagement with your CTAs. The more this happens, the more leads and conversions you’ll generate, which means, ultimately, more revenue. 

When you work with an SEO expert, they’ll help you to put a long-term plan into place that will begin to achieve results in around six to nine months. On the other hand, if you attempt to handle your own SEO, there’s a significant learning curve, and it’s easy to make mistakes. Hiring SEO experts is a great way to put your business on the road to success.

SEO Experts Increase Sales

Optimizing your website is a crucial part of running a successful ecommerce business. When your site is well-designed and easy to navigate, it goes a long way towards increasing conversions, which means more sales.

SEO experts know how to optimize your website for increased sales. They can help you to rank highly in search engines, building trust with potential customers. After that, your new SEO strategy drives traffic to your website, which leads to more revenue.

SEO Experts Build Connections

There’s a lot more to SEO than optimizing your website. SEO experts are an integral part of any marketing team, and they know how to ensure you get the most out of your content, not only on your website but also on social media. They can help you link your content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to drive traffic to your website.

Building connections across your entire platform is something that SEO experts know how to do. Whether they’re working with your in-house marketing team or on their own, the professionals can help you fast-track the growth of your business.

What Does an SEO Expert Do?

An SEO expert or a Search Engine Optimizer is someone with a mastery of the ins and outs of search engine algorithms. They're also excellent strategists and planners with a specific set of skills they use to build a business's online presence. Here are a few of the things that SEO experts do.

Audit Your Website and Provide Recommendations

When hiring SEO experts, one of the first things they'll do is take a look at your website and come back to you with a list of improvements you can make to boost engagement. There are several different audits a professional SEO might conduct, including a content audit and a technical audit.

A content audit focuses on the content pages on your website, including landing pages and blog posts. When an SEO expert conducts this kind of audit, they will provide a list of recommendations to refine and improve the content that search engines have already indexed. 

These recommendations might include suggestions for pruning, improving, and consolidating content. They should also include keyword research for your top-performing pages to help boost them in search engine rankings.

On the other hand, a technical audit dives into your website's metadata and other technical aspects behind your content to provide a list of recommendations to improve your website. A technical audit includes optimization recommendations for your robots.txt file and XML sitemap, crawl error fixes, redirect implementation, rendering issue fixes, and advice on other technical SEO best practices. 

Provide a Keyword-Researched Content Strategy

Another thing that an SEO expert will do for your website is to examine your content and provide an optimized content strategy. This strategy will take the content you already have and recommend some changes to align it with specific keywords or other guidelines. 

A content strategy will help your business to focus on what's going to attract your customers. It's a plan to create and optimize your site's content based on sound keyword research. It should also be tailored to your industry, with tactics proven to work for your type of business, whether it's e-commerce, publishing, lead generation, or something else.

Offer On-Page Optimization Assistance

When you hire SEO experts, a content audit will typically provide a list of researched keywords to optimize your content. However, utilizing these keywords is much more involved than simply plugging them into your content. On-page SEO is vital to ensure your website can rank for these keywords and where SEO experts can be an invaluable asset. 

SEO experts can offer advice on implementing this strategy or may jump on your website and perform the on-page SEO themselves. It depends on the expert and how comfortable you are with providing access to your website. Basically, it will depend on whether your business has employees equipped to implement the on-page SEO themselves or not. 

Identify Link Building Opportunities

Implementing a link-building strategy is trickier than you might think. The wrong kinds of links can adversely affect your website. Google's algorithms, in particular, are tuned to weed out low-quality links, so hiring SEO experts who know what they're doing can save you from some serious headaches in the future. 

SEO experts who know what they're doing can identify topically-related websites and competitor content useful for link building. They also know to avoid directory links and not to focus too much on anchor text.

Another thing that SEOs can do for your business is research and identify content contributors, also known as guest posting, opportunities. Including content from websites leading the industry in your field can provide a significant boost in SEO. Providing insightful and high-quality content from experts in your industry also helps to build your brand.

Ensure You Are Using Proper Analytics 

A significant part of optimizing your website involves collecting the right kind of data. With proper analytics in place, you and SEO experts can better identify high-performing content and optimization opportunities. 

Many businesses use Google Analytics, but SEO experts know how to read the information it provides and recommend additional tools. For instance, how many companies are using Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools?

There are also many paid analytics tools that can be immensely useful, such as SEMRush and Moz Pro. The additional reporting metrics provided by these tools provide the data necessary to track keyword rankings, acquired links, errors, and traffic. They can also reveal content opportunities. 

Measure the Results of Your SEO Efforts

One of the frustrating things about SEO is that it's difficult to tell when it's working. Often, your SEO efforts will take time before they begin to show results. Other times, you may see a boost in traffic but not know which of the things you've done is responsible.

For this reason, it's crucial to have SEO experts to be able to read and translate analytics data. They will be able to tell you what's working and what isn't. They will also know to focus on more than simply ranking for specific keywords and build organic search traffic to generate leads and revenue growth. 

Overall, it's vital to realize that SEO is about meeting long-term goals. You should begin to see results in three to six months after working with an SEO expert. While this growth may start small, your cumulative efforts should provide consistent growth.

What to Look for in an SEO Expert

An SEO expert who knows what they're doing knows how to find growth opportunities in your business. They will look for ways to grow organic search traffic, leads, and sales. To do that, they will get to know your industry and the particulars of your business as much as possible. To ensure you're working with the best SEO expert, consider the following qualities. 

Understand Your Revenue and Traffic Goals

When hiring SEO experts, one of the first things they should do is begin asking lots of questions about your business. The reason for this is to identify your goals. Although you might think the goal is simply to grow the business, it helps to have more specific and measurable goals in mind.

After getting to know your business, your SEO expert may set a few goals along the lines of "get this much traffic by this date." In this way, you'll have a specific method for measuring growth. One common approach is to use SMART goals. 

Identify Your Business’s Unique Value Proposition

One of the most crucial things to know about your business is what makes it unique. How do you stand out from your competition? This information is also extremely valuable to your SEO expert, who should be able to use it to tailor your SEO strategy for the greatest success.

A quality SEO will know how to leverage your business's unique value proposition. Once they've identified it, they will be better able to research the best keywords, optimize your Calls to Action (CTAs), improve your metadata, and offer advice on boosting your content to better align with what makes your business unique.

Educate You on SEO Best Practices

Part of an SEO expert's job is to help you understand what SEO is and why it's essential. After all, if you don't know what your SEO expert is saying and doing, it isn't easy to see its value. On top of that, SEO is an ongoing process, and you and your staff will need to be able to keep it up once the expert is gone.

When you understand the recommendations your SEO expert provides, you'll be better able to adapt the business for success. Many SEO experts will provide you with source documentation and case studies to back up their strategies.

Offer Honesty on Your Ranking Potential

If an SEO consultant says you can rank number one for all of the top keywords, they're probably lying. The truth is, it's extremely difficult to rank competitively for the most-searched keywords. So, unless your business is already the largest in its field, it's unlikely you'll be able to compete.

That said, an SEO expert will be able to identify keywords that you can rank competitively. They should be honest with you and offer solutions that will grow your business in increments over time. They will target relevant keywords that are the most rank-able for your business. That’s the power of SEO. 

Be Upfront About When You See Results

Another thing that an SEO expert should be honest about is the timeline to achieve results. SEO is not a magic bullet that drives traffic to your website all at once. It's a process that takes time and dedication, but it provides lasting and long-term benefits when done right.

Depending on your business's industry, it can take up to nine months before you begin to see organic search traffic growth. Google takes time to index websites. Your ranking is based on a number of factors, including the quality and quantity of your content, your profile authority, and many other things. 

Anyone who suggests they can make your website rank highly in a short amount of time is not being honest with you. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

How SEO Can Benefit Your Business

The fact is, customers are more likely to trust a business that shows up on the first page of search results in Google. SEO helps businesses to build a robust web presence, attract new customers, and grow their brand awareness. For businesses both small and large, SEO is a crucial component that helps your brand get an edge on the competition and the following significant benefits.

Attracts New Customers

Your website is designed to find new customers and close more sales. However, if no one can find it, it’s not going to amount to much, which is why SEO is so vital. Without it, your website will sit in cyberspace collecting virtual dust. 

Websites that are SEOed attract more customers and help grow the business at a faster rate. Plus, the customers that your website does draw to it are already actively searching for your service or product. It’s an effective marketing strategy with the potential for big returns. However, you have to know what you’re doing.

Makes Your Website User-Friendly

When you work with an SEO expert, you'll soon discover that SEO goes much deeper than keyword research. A large part of it involves creating a clean and uncluttered website that's well-structured and easy to navigate. It's about improving the user experience.

Having a user-friendly website compels visitors to stay longer, decreasing bounce rates and increasing conversions. Plus, when your site is packed with relevant, high-quality content that helps users find the answers to their questions, traffic will naturally increase, and search engines are happy.

Builds Brand Awareness

The higher your website ranks in search results, the more trust you’ll create with potential customers. You’ll stand above your competitors as a solution, thereby building brand awareness. 

Investing in SEO is one of the top ways to grow your business. As your website begins to rise in the search engine rankings for keywords relevant to your business, so too will your brand awareness. Your online presence is critical to success.

Increases Conversion Rates

As your optimized website grows, so too will your conversion rate. The more traffic you drive to your site, the more chances you have to convert new customers. When your site is easy to read, navigate, and is packed with quality content, you’re far more likely to gain subscribers, loyal customers, and returning visitors.

Bypass the Competition

When you have an optimized website, and your competitors do not, you will attract more visitors and customers. In this way, SEO is a powerful strategy for getting ahead of other businesses in your industry. When done correctly, SEO is one of the most effective ways to grow your business.

Hiring an SEO Expert FAQ

Below you will find the answers to some of your frequently asked questions.

How do I write for SEO?

When you write content for your website, you should always have SEO in the back of your mind. The four most important attributes of quality content writing are:

#1. Research your keywords

When it comes to content, employing an effective keyword should be the backbone of your strategy. Start by researching keywords to see how popular they are. Tools like Google Keyword Planner will provide you with information on the average monthly searches and the competition level you can expect.

From there, you’ll be able to select keywords that are relevant to your business and that you will be able to rank highly for in search results. Then, you should weave your keywords into your content, including in the title, meta description, and headings.

#2. Implement a linking strategy

Implementing a linking strategy is more than sprinkling links throughout your content. Google is strict about linking relevancy. As a general guideline, you should include a few internal links and two to three external links to sources directly related to your content for a 1k word blog post.

#3. Optimize your title, headings, and meta description

Your title and some of your headings should contain your keyword, preferably at the beginning of the title. You should also include your keyword in your meta description, which summarizes your content in 150 characters or less, front-loaded as much as possible. It's worth noting that if you do not write your own meta description, Google will typically use the first or second paragraph of your content, so be sure to craft your introduction carefully. 

#4. Write quality content

Ultimately, the best thing for SEO is to write quality content. When you provide valuable information to your readers, many will return in the future, which creates natural, organic traffic. And the thing about traffic is that the more you have, the better your website will rank in search engines.

At the end of the day, carefully including these elements in your website content will help you attract and build an audience. Then, once you have readers on your site, your quality content will win the day, furthering your website's cycle of growth.

Is it worth hiring an SEO expert?

The truth is SEO is more important than ever. SEO is not a static product or a magic bullet, but it is an effective way to grow your online audience. It also delivers a higher quality visitor than Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

That said, SEO is an investment that requires time before you see results. Optimizing your website and content marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business, but it's not the fastest way to go. If your business is small, you may be able to do a lot of your own SEO.

However, SEO is an involved process that takes time to master and utilize effectively. For many, hiring an SEO expert is an investment that will pay for itself down the road. Hiring SEO experts can save you time, boost traffic to your website, and bring in more business. 

What should I ask when hiring an SEO expert?

No matter how amazing your website is, if it doesn't rank on the first page of search results, there's a good chance no one will ever see it. SEO helps boost your website's ranking to become visible to new visitors and potential customers. Plus, it builds brand awareness and can increase revenue.

That said, SEO's ins and outs can be somewhat technical, and the rules are constantly evolving, so you have to keep up. All in all, it's a time-consuming process that hiring an SEO expert can save you from. However, it's vital to hire someone with experience and true expertise. 

To ensure you find the best possible SEO expert, you'll need to ask any potential consultants the right questions.

These questions will help you to find the SEO expert that's right for you: