If you find that your website does not show up on the first page of Bing, Google, or Yahoo, then your business may be in trouble. You cannot claim to have any existing or potential clients if this is the case. As such, you need to hire an SEO professional to ensure that your website ranks high on search engines. However, you cannot just hire any SEO Expert like Tayloright because they promise you that they will improve visibility of your website. Therefore, you need to have a strategy to get the best SEO specialist. Here are some of the questions you need to ask any professional in search engine optimization before you hire them.
List of past and current clients
Any reputable SEO professional should ascertain that they have had previous clients and have clients whose projects they are working on presently. According to Vanessa Fox, the founder of Nine by Blue and the author of Marketing in the Age of Google, this is imperative.
It is easy to gauge how effective the SEO specialist actually is using these references. You will also gain some insight on how many SEO campaigns they have managed successfully. Furthermore, find out the positive impact they made in the SEO campaigns they managed. This will provide you with an idea of how well they can help your website gain visibility and improve profitability for your business.
How the SEO specialist intends to improve your search engine rankings
The founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, advises that you should avoid any SEO consultant who fails to discuss how they will improve your search engine rankings in detail. The strategies used should be detailed clearly and simply enough for you to understand. In addition, you should be given an estimate of the amount of time it will take to get the results.
Ensure that your SEO professional provides you with a technical review or assessment of your website. Furthermore, they should tell you how they intend to improve your search engine ranking. For instance, they should tell you about various page errors they find and broken links that they intend to fix. By doing on-page optimization, your consultant will make your site search-friendly. This involves coming up with an internal linking structure and improving your URL. It also entails development of headings, tags, and webpage titles.
Off-page SEO strategies are essential as they raise awareness of the content you put forth in your website. It can be done via blogs, press releases, and social media platforms.
How they manage to adhere to webmaster guidelines for search engines
When looking for an SEO professional, you want one that can abide by the webmaster practices publicly posted by Google. Some of the forbidden practices include:
- Generating spammy content automatically
- Adding hidden links and texts among others
If your SEO specialist does not follow the guidelines, you risk having your website ranking low on search results. Worse yet, Google can ban your website from search results. This would mean that your business would suffer as would no longer be visible on search results.
Your consultant should also be aware that Bing and Yahoo provide their webmaster guidelines.
Ask if your website can manage a number one ranking
There is some caution here. According to Vanessa Fox, if an SEO professional immediately says yes, you need to run. It is possible; however, you need to know how they can make this possible. Avoid those who claim to have inside information on Google or other search engines as these claims are bogus. Only Google determines your search ranking.
Appearing in local search results
For most brick and motor business people, appearing in local searches is imperative. Therefore, if this is you, ensure that you consult an SEO specialist who can make this possible. They should be able to optimize your website to what is called local SEO. By so doing, any search within the area of your business will be given first priority by search engines.
To manage this, your SEO consultant must add your business city and state to your meta data and title tags.
More information that is relevant to your success in getting a good SEO professional includes the following.
- Sharing any changes made to your website in the process of improving its ranking
- How your SEO consultant measures the success of any SEO campaign they manage
- How often they will communicate with you
- The fee required for the service
- If there is a follow-up after their services are done.
With these tips in mind, you will be able to get a great SEO professional who will improve your site rankings on all search engines.
