Stop calling yourself an SEO: How you can tell who’s an expert and who isn’t
Posted May 5, 2016
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When you’re ready to hire an SEO expert, you may be inundated with people who claim to be SEO professionals. How can you really tell the true experts from the amateurs, though? Price alone may not be enough of an indication – after all, you could find someone who charges a lot but still doesn’t deliver high quality work. While you don’t want to go with the cheapest offer, a high price tag doesn’t necessary guarantee professionalism either. Here’s how to figure out if you’re potential SEO expert is the real deal or not.
1. Ask for their client list.
Any reputable SEO expert – or freelancer, for that matter – should be able to give you a short list of past and current clients that you can use for a reference. Not only will you be able to verify that the SEO expert did, in fact, work on SEO for multiple clients in the past, but you can gauge how good of an experience the client had. Don’t expect to be able to access analytics reports, but do ask if the SEO work had any impact on their ranking, brand awareness and conversions.
2. Ask them how they’ll improve your SEO.
SEO experts should be comfortable discussing their process and methods in detail. They should explain the strategies they’re going to use and also let you know how long it should take you to achieve your SEO goals. The proposal should include a technical review of your website. Other things to look for in a proposal include:
• Improvements to the URL
• Internal linking
• Web page titles
• Web page headings
• Tags
The proposal may also include off-page SEO strategies, like social media promotion, guest blogging and press releases.
3. Ask them about the webmaster guidelines for each search engine.
Experts in the SEO field should know how to adhere to webmaster best practices, particularly Google’s, which includes a list of SEO tricks to avoid. For example, you should never work with an SEO expert who generates spam or who uses bogus links. If your website falls into these traps, Google could punish you with a low rank or, even worse, a ban.
4. Find out about their guarantee.
If the answer to, “Can you guarantee that my site will rank on the first page?” is, “Yes!” find yourself another SEO expert. There really is no guarantee that your website will rank on page one, even with all of your SEO ducks in a row. Some hack SEO “experts” claim to have an inside connection to a search engine – they don’t. Even Google says as much.
5. Determine if they’ll be able to approve your local search results.
For businesses who target a specific geographical area, like a city or county, local search results are highly important. Brick-and-mortar businesses have to attract customers who are in the area. Websites that are locally optimized will appear in local search engine results, like when people use keywords that are relevant to your business and geographical area. In order to do this, SEO experts add your business’ location information to meta descriptions, alt text and title tags.
6. Find out if they’ll share the changes they made to your website.
A full-scale SEO update will require a lot of changes. You’ll want to know the exact changes that are made during the update. You also may want the SEO expert to get permission to change website code. Not only do you have to find out what they’re going to do ahead of time, but you also want to know what they’re doing as it’s happening, or at least have a final recap of all the changes that were made once the project’s complete. A few to ask the SEO expert include:
• Will new title tags be added to existing HTML or will the existing HTML codes be modified?
• Will you provide written content that highlights my products and services? (This will improve the on-page keywords that are visible to customers and will improve rank.)
• Will you redesign the website navigation?
• Will new pages be added to the website?
7. Ask about how results are measured.
No quality SEO expert will setup a campaign without also factoring in analytics. The only way to gauge how well an SEO campaign is performing is by tracking how much traffic is going to web pages and where it’s coming from. SEO experts should use Google Analytics to track website traffic and search engine rankings, as well as the links from other sites that are driving traffic to your website and the keywords that people are using to find you. In addition to measuring the success of the SEO campaign with these analytics, you should ask if they’re going to share those results and reports. Furthermore, will they regularly update your website to improve those results?
8. Find out how much you’ll communicate about the project.
Styles can vary greatly from one SEO consultant to the next. You want to make sure you’re working with someone who puts a high value on delivering great customer service. Their approach has to fit your needs and personality. Ask how the consultant prefers to communicate – are they okay with getting on a phone call or Skype call, or are they only reachable via e-mail? Also, find out how they will contact you with status updates.
9. Ask about contract termination.
When your contract expires or is terminated, make sure that you still have ownership of the optimized SEO that you paid for. This should be part of the contract so that you’re protected.
If your website isn’t ranking highly in search results on the major search engines – Bing, Google and Yahoo! – people who could become your customers won’t even know you’re out there. When you lack the expertise to improve your SEO, you’ll need to hire someone to do it for you. Hiring an SEO expert to improve your search engine visibility is a great idea, so long as you work with a professional.
