Don’t Fall as a prey ..in hurry to hire an SEO!!! 2017

Thinking of hiring an SEO firm or consultant?

Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.

Here we would share advice to help you to hire a useful SEO and prevent hiring a bad SEO, one who you might pay a lot of money without positive results and even worse implements shady practices on your website that negatively impact your search rankings. To some SEO may seem like black magic.

Following Google search for over 5 years I have learned two important lessons.
1. It is not black magic
2. If you want long term success there aren’t any quick magical tricks that SEO will provide so that your site ranks no.1

It’s important to note that an SEO’s potential is only as high as the quality of your business to your website. So successful Seo helps your website puts your best foot forward so better ranks appropriately. In the spark where an unbiased potential customer would expect your site to be seen.
A successful SEO also looks to improve the entire searcher experience from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting.

A good SEO would recommend best practices for a search friendly site. From basic things like descriptive page titles for a blog or small business, two more complex things like language markup for a multilingual global site. SEO’s ensure that you are serving your online customers a good experience, especially those coming from a search engine and that your site is helpful whether they are using a desktop computer or a mobile phone.

In most cases, the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business, first implement improvements and then see potential benefits. My strongest advice when working with an SEO is to request that they collaborate their recommendation with a documented statement from google either it helps an article, video or google over response in a forum, that supports both

1. The SEO’s description of the issue that needs to be improved help with ranking
2.The approach they prescribe to completing the task
requesting these two bits of information will help prevent hiring a poor SEO who might otherwise convince you to do useless things like add more words to the keywords meta tag or buy links. Because if you search for google’s advice on this topic you will see blog posts and videos from them clearly explain adding keywords in the meta tag wouldn’t help.

Furthermore, while Google uses links for pagerank our documentation highlights that we strongly advise against the approach of buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank. One basic rule is that in a majority of cases doing what is good for SEO is also doing what is good for your online customers. Things like having a mobile friendly website, good navigation and building a great brand.Additionally, if you’re a more established brand with complicated legacy systems than good such friendly best practices likely involves paying off some of your sites technical debt such as updating your infrastructure, so that your website is agile and able to implement features faster in the long term. If you are in a small local business you can probably do the initial work yourself.
Check out google’s 30 min video series on how to build an online presence for your local business.

Now if you still believe you wanna hire here is a general process

1. Conduct a 2-way interview with your potential SEO. Check that they seem genuinely interested in you and your business
2. Check their references
3. Ask for (you’ll probably have to pay for) a technical and search audit
4. Decide if you want to hire
Let’s break the ice and start with step 1.
1. Conduct a 2-way interview

In the interview here is something you look for, a good SEO doesn’t focus only on search engine ranking but how they can help your business
Some useful questions they should ask you like

1. What makes your business, content and/or service unique therefore valuable to customers?
2. What does your common customer look like? How do they currently find your website?
3. How does your business make money? And how can search help?
4. What other channels you are using? Offline advertising? social networks?
5. Who are your competitors? What do they do well online(and potentially offline)?
Some useful questions to ask an SEO include

1.Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
2.Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
3.Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
4.What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame? How do you measure your success?
5.What’s your experience in my industry?
6.What’s your experience in my country/city?
7.What’s your experience developing international sites?
8.What are your most important SEO techniques?
9.How long have you been in business?
10.How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

If the firm/consultant doesn’t seem interested and learning about your business from a holistic standpoint look elsewhere. It’s difficult to do good SEO without knowing about a business their goals, their customers, and other existing marketing efforts.
They should complement your existing work.
2. Check their references

If your potential SEO provides prior clients, you should check their references. You want to hear from past clients the SEO was able to provide useful guidance and worked effectively with developers, designers, UX researchers and our marketers. A good firm/person should feel like someone you can work with, learned from the experimental way and who generally cares about you and your business. Not just getting your site the highest rank. As ultimately those techniques URL’s last long if they work it out. They want to educate you and your staff how a search engine works so that SEO becomes part of your general business operations.
3. Ask for (you’ll probably have to pay for) a technical and search audit

If you trust the firm/consultant give them a restricted view not full right access to your google search consolidate data and even your analytics data. Before they actually modify anything on your website have them conduct a technical and search audit to give you a prioritize list what they think should be improved SEO. If you are a larger business you can hire multiple SEO’s to run audits and prioritize improvements see what each has to say and then determine who you could work with the best. Related Read:GROUP BUY SEO
AUDIT STRUCTURE

The firm/consultant should prioritize the improvements with a structure like:
1.The issue
2.The suggested improvement
3.An estimate of the overall investment
another words the time, energy or money would take for your developers to implement the improvement and for google search as well as searchers and customers to recognize the improvement.The firm/consultant will need to talk with your developers to better understand what technical constraints may exist.
4.Estimated business impact
5.Plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation or how to experiment and fail fast should results not meet expectations
that cover the structure of technical and search audits Related Read:GROUP BUY SEO

Now let’s discuss each of these audits individually