What to Look For When Hiring an SEO Expert For Your Company
Publié le 11 October 2022
Connect with an audience and grow your customer base by knowing what to look for when hiring an SEO expert for your country.
SEO is an important marketing strategy for any business that values website traffic, brand awareness, and long-term solutions over quick fixes.
When a company starts out, they may rely on everyday knowledge about SEO and search rankings to optimize their website, but this rarely offers the sorts of targeted, specialized SEO strategy that industry leaders make use of.
If you want to drive organic traffic and improve your website’s search ranking, it’s time to bring in an SEO expert. But how do you know if the SEO specialist you’re talking to is the right one for your business?
This guide offers essential advice on what to look for when hiring an SEO expert for your company, from questions to ask to skill sets to look out for. This can lead to a long and fruitful partnership, so before taking the plunge and hiring the first SEO expert you talk to, read ahead for what to look for when hiring an SEO expert for your company.
What is an SEO Expert?
An SEO expert can identify and create strategies that improve the overall SEO of a business website, giving it a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO experts make use of a range of strategies and analyses to optimize your website. Keyword analysis and having a content marketing plan for your website is one strategy, but SEO experts can also provide assistance on off-page SEO, such as building backlinks.
SEO differs from other marketing strategies, such as social media marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) solutions, as it usually focuses on driving organic traffic to your website via search engines and other websites.
SEO experts often focus their expertise on specific industries. For example, an SaaS SEO company – a company that specializes in SEO for software as a service (SaaS) companies – can provide niche advice that differs from, for example, an ecommerce SEO specialist.
Benefits of Hiring an SEO Expert
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Why hire an SEO expert? Even if you understand the basics of keywords and Google Analytics, the technical and experienced advice and strategies of SEO specialists offer more targeted and effective tactics.
- More organic traffic: Organic traffic is the golden egg of online marketing and the key aim of SEO experts is to boost organic traffic to your website by upping your ranking on SERPs.
- High ROI: SEO focuses on organic search, which has a higher ROI (return on investment) than other marketing channels such as paid search and social media marketing.
- Niche skills: Expert SEO advice comes from specialists with a wide range of technical skills and experience relating to SEO, content marketing, and keyword analysis, all of which will be able to provide fresh insights into your company’s marketing channels.
- Improve user experience: SEO also covers technical SEO, ensuring that the structure and layout of your website is usable, including on smartphones, so that your users have a good experience on your website and search engines rank you highly as a result.
- Long-term solutions: Rather than short-term marketing strategies such as paid advertising campaigns, SEO aims to ensure your website is consistently highly ranked on SERPs and, with the right SEO expert, regularly analyzed against competitors.
- Time saving: If you and your employees are spending lots of time performing keyword and competitor analysis and trying to optimize your website for search engines, hiring an SEO expert will free up your time to focus on revenue-boosting activities.
What to look for in an SEO Expert
Now you know why an SEO expert could be transformative for your company website, let’s dive into what to look for when hiring an SEO expert for your company. There are plenty of SEO “experts” out there, so how do you sift through your options and find the best candidates when hiring an SEO expert for your business?
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Track record
When hiring an SEO expert, their resume will be the first thing you see. It should show they have the basic skills, from knowing how to make a resume to soft skills like communication, analytical thinking, and problem solving. An SEO expert resume should also cover important hard skills, like use of Google Trends, Search Console, Ads, Analytics, and Keyword Planner.
Another essential quality of any SEO expert is a proven track record. That means they have a list of successful SEO campaigns they have run and plenty of strong online reviews from clients. This should be evident from their resume.
It’s important to ensure that the track record aligns with your own business type and needs too. For example, are you a small business in need of targeted SEO improvements, or a large business requiring enterprise marketing solutions?
Look at the size of previous companies that your SEO expert has worked with and consider the types of businesses they are too. Hiring an SEO expert who has worked with only ecommerce retail websites may not be as useful to you if you’re an SaaS provider. You should also consider what the aims of your SEO strategy are. For example, are you using SEO for recruitment, lead generation, or sales?
The best SEO experts will have worked with a range of different sizes of company, so that they can provide broad expertise that grows with your company. By asking your potential SEO expert to show you a track record based on your needs, you can also assess how well they understand your industry and requirements.
Expertise
Expertise is key when choosing an SEO agency. From how to use Google analytics to technical SEO skills such as site migration, an SEO expert’s track record should show they have a range of SEO knowledge to aid your business.
Some questions you may want to ask when hiring an SEO expert to cover a range of skills include:
- What experience do you have with technical SEO?
- Do you have expertise on both on-page and off-page SEO?
- Can you perform keyword gap analysis?
- What sort of competitor and search engine ranking reports can you provide?
These cover a range of SEO expertise that separates SEO specialists from the types of SEO you could perform in house as it relies on industry and technical knowledge.
The SEO expertise you need should be forward thinking too. Ask potential SEO experts if they make use of AI for content analysis and if they can create SEO-friendly content for newer forms of online searches.
Image sourced from statista.com
For example, voice search is an increasingly popular tool for searching on websites thanks to smart speakers and AI-driven voice search tools like Siri. It’s important that websites are optimized for voice searchers as well as searchers on laptops and mobiles, so discuss with your SEO agency how they are providing for this booming technology.
Realistic and budgetable strategies
Effective SEO doesn’t simply rewrite your website and provide instant results. The best SEO strategies provide short-term and long-term goals, a range of approaches and micro-strategies, and have clear budgets in mind.
Whether you need an ecommerce content strategy or a local SEO strategy to boost your organic website traffic, talk through what sort of strategies and goals your potential SEO specialist will have in place. If they are promising quick wins over long term improvements and competitiveness, you may want to look elsewhere.
Budgeting is of course an essential aspect of your SEO strategy too. Consider the scale of the SEO campaign, such as whether it’s local, national, or international, and how long term it is so you can estimate your immediate SEO costs as well as your long-term return on investment.
High-quality backlinks and affiliates
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Link building with both on-page links and off-page backlinks is a common part of SEO strategies. One of the big benefits of hiring an SEO expert is they will likely have partners through which you can get high-quality backlinks leading to your website, which will help your overall SERP ranking.
Backlinks is something you should discuss early on with an SEO expert so you can get a feel for the quality of backlinks they can offer and what industry most of their potential backlinks will come from.
SEO agencies with high quality partners and backlinks can also help with generating affiliate links. If you’re thinking of joining an affiliate program or leveraging affiliate links for your SEO, be sure to brush up on affiliate program meaning so you can convey your exact needs to an SEO specialist.
If you’re creating an affiliate marketing program, this affiliate marketing template from PandaDoc is a useful tool for pitching yourself to affiliate programs. A great SEO expert will also be able to advise on how you can leverage affiliate marketing links to drive organic traffic to your website without the need to purchase PPC advertising.
Collaborative and communicative
No two companies are identical, so it’s important that you find an SEO expert who is collaborative and communicative from the start and throughout your relationship with them.
This begins with how a potential SEO agency pitches to you. Is this a generic pitch that could be presented to any business, or does it focus on your industry and niche? Are they willing to learn about your branding and ethos? How willing and able are they to answer your questions and adjust strategies to your needs and budget?
Your relationship with an SEO expert should be ongoing. The best SEO specialists provide ongoing reports, including regular competitor and keyword analysis, growth reports, and regularly target new ways you can improve your SERP ranking.
Conclusion
SEO is about much more than over-stuffing your website with keywords. Beware of self-proclaimed “SEO experts” who simply provide a list of keywords and instead look out for specialists that fulfill the qualities and skills listed here.
Ultimately, technical expertise is vital, but you should also look for an SEO expert that has experience in your industry and, importantly, a willingness to find creative, high-impact, and long-term solutions for your business.
