How To Choose Your SEO Consultant

How To Choose Your SEO Consultant
by Matthew Dowell
SEO consultants cover a wide ranging subject area through their role, from discovering coding faults in your website that are preventing it from ranking effectively to raising your sites popularity with search engines through creating the required links. Because Search Engine Optimisation is quite a new industry, SEO Consultants have varied backgrounds. Each consultants background and path into SEO will have an effect on their favoured type of optimisation method The main purpose of an SEO Consultant, however, remains the same and that is to develop and apply techniques that will better your rank within Google and other similar search engines.
Websites who have been manipulating their search engine rankings by using underhand SEO techniques are commonly sniffed out by search engine companies such as Google. More often than not, penalties for bad practice of this kind will result in a temporary ranking drop until they display a modification in optimisation techniques, but in the worst case a site can be totally de-listed from the search engine. There are good consultants and of course there are bad ones, just as there are in any other profession. To assist you to select a good one and avoid being penalised, take a look at the following tips and pointers.
Does the SEO consultant adhere to SEO search engine guidelines and best practices? Search engine companies issue policies regarding how they wish to see websites constructed and marketed, they additionally publish a list of practices like; buying back linksand website cloaking that will attract strict penalties. It is essential that your chosen SEO consultant practices only 'white hat' techniques and follows the set guidelines of the search engine companies as underhanded practices could damage your sites reputation and be detrimental to your business.
Make certain that your brand will be secure and that the optimisation method is going to offer consistent results. You would be severely disappointed if a month or two after hiring an SEO consultant your ranking with the search engines began to fluctuate in an unstable way and your site was negatively affected. Business could be affected and your clients could get a poor impression. Talk in detail with your SEO consultant and establish exactly how they plan to optimise your site before they begin work, you may not comprehend all of what is said but questioning the consultant will encourage them to adopt a more methodical stance to your site.
Will the strategies used appeal to web users? The experience of web users should always be kept in mind. The major search engine companies have stated that all sites should be built to provide visitors the best experience possible with good, relevant content and a simple structure of navigation. A good SEO consultant can give you advice to help you maximise the relevance of your site content. Keep in mind that your purpose is to meet the needs of your site visitors, not simply rank as highly as possible in searches. Most SEO consultants will be happy to offer examples of sites they have previously optimised. It is important for you to visit these sites as it will allow you to gauge the quality of the content and your experience.
Which is more important; quality or quantity? The quantity of your site visitors is not equal to the importance of the quality of the site visitor. By this I mean that it more advantageous to have 100 site visitors and make 10 sales than to have 1000 site visitors and make nothing. The keywords you select to target for optimisation purposes are fundamental. Imagine that you sell blue coloured Widgets. You might get a huge amount of visitors to your website thanks to successful optimisation of the website for 'Widgets', only the individuals visiting are all looking for green Widgets so this has minimum increase in sales. If your site had been optimised with the keywords 'Blue Widgets', however, you would have a much better chance of seeing an increase in your sales.
Exactly what type of services are offered by the SEO? You should know exactlywill be provided by the SEO. Some SEO consultants offer an advisory role and will write a report detailing the action which is necessary to improve the ranking of a site. That is fine if you have a development team available, but not so useful if you don't. Others will implement the work for you after they have carried out the strategy work.
What will the consultant charge you? This is the most obvious question of all but is not really that well understood. In order to explore effective comparisons you need a clear understanding of the services you have been quoted for. Find out what the usual rate would be for optimising a website equal to yours and question price quotes that are very high or very low. You may want to avoid a consultant who promises to get your site to a no.1 position as it is impossible to guarantee this.
Do you get on well with the consultant? You don't have to become the best of friends but a great working relationship will go a long way to making your SEO campaign more successful. InSEO there will be times when a consultant may either just do enough to fulfil their contract or go the extra mile to get you better results. If you have a great working relationship with your SEO consultant and are friendly it is sure to encourage the best results.
My name is Ade Lewis and I am an <a href="http://www.search-engine-optimiser.net/">SEO Consultant</a> providing a wide range of SEO services from fixed price SEO packages through to high level SEO consultant services. I can offer you help and advice to get your website ranking in the top Google organic search engine listings. I can help you succeed in gaining higher search engine rankings. <a href="http://www.search-engine-optimiser.net/">SEO Expert</a>