SEO Consulting 101
Have you planned to get in touch with an SEO consultant to boost your website traffic? There are some things you have to know before you approach them. This can help you find the right SEO consultant who does not just speak, but show results.
Research
Get on the internet and have a research on the consultants available. It’s not good to go for a consultant who has loads of other clients. He/she would take weeks even months to just respond to your query. They would come up with recommendations but would not be available if you need to ask if you have done the right thing. It would be a mere waste of money and your precious time.
Calling up the Consultant
It’s always better to speak to the consultant rather than an e-mail. First send him your website details and your requirements and fix a call with the search engine optimization consultant. It would be of no use talking to a business manager of that company.
Ask various questions about his experiences, what’s wrong with your website and how he can exactly help you out. Search engine optimization consulting can go on for months even years depending on the nature of your website. Our goal is to get the best in the best possible time.
Dos and Don’ts
Try to get a detailed plan for every month. Like for example: A week of analysis, first two months in internal website optimization, the third month link building, weekly progress and analytics report (This is not a standard timeframe and will vary depending on the website category and depth of content).
The search engine optimization consultant should not just provide you advices and instructions but should also be able to follow-up and keep you updated on at least a weekly basis if not daily.
Do not ask during search engine consulting, can you get my page to the top 5 rankings. Rather be realistic depending on the search term. If you have a Mortgage Loan website with few pages, stop dreaming about bringing your website up in the top 10 rankings as there are about 33,000,000 websites out there and at least a thousand websites having hundreds of pages doing serious optimization.
I remember one clients who had a mere 20 page website on “Real Estate” asking me if his website would come up No.1 if we search for keywords like “land”, “estate”, “loan”, “home” etc on Google. The best part was he was not willing to add or edit any of the content on the website. Get realistic and not ridiculous.
Provide a list of keywords or choose from the list of keywords the search engine optimizer provides. After selecting the keywords, work on a detailed systematic plan.
I suggest not to go for consultants who proclaim they would submit your website to a thousand directories or a million websites. You have to note that they do this by means of automated software tools which would not prove useful and can even bring down the website rankings.
Conclusion
Good content, great external links and proper focus on the keywords can certainly boost your rankings and traffic. After all, bringing in targeted clients is the key to increase in revenue. Bad traffic or irrelevant visitors can just increase the bounce rate and cannot be fruitful.