When you’re looking to hire an SEO expert there’s a lot on the line and one single mistake can make a tragic difference for your website. We are here to make sure you have the cheat sheet to help you hire the best possible agency or consultant for your website or project.
Hiring an SEO professional can be tricky.
In this blog, I am going to show you some tools that you can use when going through the process of hiring an SEO Expert. I pull back the curtain and take the mystery out of picking the right person for your business.
When it comes to SEO Experts there are 2 types, the first type is the high technical SEO expert. Their job is to just work on the back end of your website to meet the google algorithm. The problem with technical SEO is that it tends to forget about human SEO.
A technical SEO person is not necessarily going to be tapped into the emotionally intelligent side of your business. So, remember that if you hire a technical SEO expert, they’re not the person to give you ideas on content. They’re not going to look at your website and come back to you with a bunch of ideas.
What you need to do is work with someone who understands how the human side and the technical side need to work together creating the underbelly of your site. You need an SEO expert that gets you and when you are going to trust your website to an SEO Expert you need to go old school and check references…
Ask for their top 5 clients’ websites and look into the keywords that drive the most traffic to those websites. So here’s the big misnomer: most SEO or so-called SEO companies, come in and dazzle you with promises that they will make some little changes here and there, not paying attention to keywords that people are actually searching for, they promise you the moon and you pay them loads of money, get a report once a month and then crickets. And you are not ranking and your phone is not ringing then they are nowhere to be found. Leaves you asking “What Am I Paying For?”
The average turnover rate in the lifecycle of an arrangement between you and an SEO business is one year. And it is basically because you have no idea about SEO and you don’t know what you don’t know and all the SEO Company wants is your money.
One example, I was speaking in Washington, DC. and before we got going, a guy walked in with a big report and proceeded to Slam it on the table and said, “What the F is that?” And then he looks at me. And I’m like, “Nice to meet you too.”
He’s like, “I am sick and tired of you experts giving me reports like that, that say I am doing great but I never see any actual performance or increase in revenue. What the heck?” So, I had a whole 3 hours to explain to him about where he may have gone wrong. This is very, very typical, and avoidable if you do your research.
What you want to look for is not how many keywords rank number 1 in google, You want to look for your specific keywords that rank. What is the percentage of traffic that’s driving potential clients to your site from that one phrase? One of the tools I like is SEMRush as well as Mos.com these tools will help you get that data.
But at the end of the day, it’s not about how many keywords you rank under.
It’s about which of those first page keywords are actually driving traffic to your website. That is incredibly important!
I always tell my clients, “Pick your 20.” These are the 20 keywords that you know if you rank under them you are going to be findable by your ideal customer. 20 keywords, not 100, 500 or 1000 you just need 20, and then when you rank for those 20 then you can try for 20 more.
It’s important to stay focused, you know your business the best. Nobody else knows your business. If you hand it over to an SEO company and just hope for the best, it’s not going to work out. You as a business owner have to be responsible for educating that SEO vendor about all nuances of your business. What you know about your customers, their pain points, and what solutions you offer, and what sets you apart from your competitors.
Do not let the SEO agency provide a keyword list to you, you need to give them your list and have them work with the keyword you provide or a keyword map.
The biggest reason I think that people don’t have success with SEO firms is because they tap out, they walk away. They say, “Here’s your check. Make it go away.”
The ideal situation is if you have someone in house that could be trained in SEO, If you don’t have someone in-house then you’re going to have to hire an SEO expert.
Hopefully, these insights that I have given you in this blog help you to focus on your current situation with your SEO expert, or if you are looking into hiring one.
Keep in mind that you’re not an SEO expert. Hiring SEO Experts, it can be challenging. So, if you follow some of these rules, it is going to help you to connect either externally or internally with a strategy and process that is going to finally deliver results for your business.
WATCH the full video here: https://bit.ly/33H4OTv
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