|
|
How to evaluate an SEO
consultant?
If you decide to seek
additional help with your optimization project,
remember that your website is your company's face.
It is the first thing people see. The look and feel
of your website has a direct affect on users'
opinions not only about your management but also
about your products. By associating impressions received from your website, users form opinions about your products and
services before they even get a chance to see
them. In fact, many users often even judge your
products and services by the way your website looks
and by the quality of content it exhibits.
An SEO consultant
working on your site becomes an "invisible
spokesman" for your company, a person whose
education, knowledge, skills, and even personality would be
manifested through your website, influencing users'
decisions and affecting your company's revenue.
If you are thinking
of hiring a consultant to help you with your SEO
project, it is wise to ask and receive answers to
the following questions:
-
How many industries has an SEO consultant been
exposed to in the last three years? Ask for
specific examples.
-
How many web sites
did an SEO consultant work on in the last three years? Ask to provide
customer references. -
Does an SEO consultant have first-hand web
design and development experience as well as
user-interface development experience? Ask to provide
samples. -
Does an SEO consultant have a University
degree, preferably in Linguistics? -
Does an SEO consultant own an SEO-related
website, so that you can evaluate their writing
and marketing skills? -
Does an SEO consultant have previous
hands-on Sales experience? -
Does an SEO consultant have first-hand
knowledge of customer relationship management
(CRM) software, such as
Salesforce.com or
NetSuit, for example?
-
Can an SEO consultant explain, in a
matter of 10-15 minutes, what is involved in a
typical SEO project? -
Does an SEO consultant insist that an SEO
project is a lengthy endeavor that requires
ongoing investment? Note that even a large SEO
project, having been successfully implemented
once, requires very little maintenance in the
future. -
Does an SEO consultant want you to believe
that monitoring keyword-purchasing programs, such
as
Google's AdWords, for example, is a
difficult and time-consuming task?
Answers to these
questions would assist you in evaluating the scope
and depth of an SEO consultant's knowledge and help
you to arrive at an informed hiring decision.
back to top
Why hire a local SEO
consultant?
The largest part of
any SEO project is creation of new and optimization of
existing web content. This
optimization involves revamping and re-formatting
existing pages as well as writing and adding new
ones. As with any writing, it can be done remotely,
so why hire a local SEO consultant?
Hiring an SEO
consultant from your own city offers a number of
important advantages:
-
First of all, when
synchronization across teams or departments is
inevitable, your local SEO consultant can work
onsite, thus gaining access to all participating
team members as well as decision makers.
-
Secondly, if your
SEO consultant is working on your premises even a
couple of days a week, you have a better means of monitoring the
progress and quality of the SEO project.
-
Third, in
business scenarios where Intellectual Property
issues may be involved (technology sector, for
example), the mere signing of a Non-Disclosure
Agreement (NDA) or Non-Compete Agreement (NCA) is
hardly a strong enough measure to secure your most
valuable assets. What if you end up in a situation
described by Google:
"What
are the most common abuses a website owner is
likely to encounter?
One common
scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that
funnel users to a site by using deceptive
redirects. These shadow domains often will be
owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a
client's behalf. However, if the relationship
sours, the SEO may point the domain to a
different site, or even to a competitor's
domain. If that happens, the client has paid to
develop a competing site owned entirely by the
SEO.
It is a
well-known fact that NDAs
and especially NCAs are very hard to enforce and
even harder to argue in courts. Just imagine the
type of expenses you would have to incur, if you
would be forced to take legal actions in another
country or even another city. Regrettably, you may
find yourself wanting to settle on
less-than-perfect terms.
-
And finally, consider the time you would spend
arranging conference calls, writing emails,
clarifying previous emails, making sure you avoid
potential or correct the-already-happened
misinterpretations. All of these are parts of a
normal long-distance work process, but why subject
yourself to additional administrative burden?
Having all parties
in the same geographical location offers the highest
degree of comfort, flexibility, privacy, and
security. Needless to say, however, that albeit its importance, the geographical
location of your SEO consultant should not
be the main factor influencing your decision.
The level of education, writing skills, and
previous SEO experience are the three most
important things you need to think about when
selecting an SEO consultant.
back to top
What can be outsourced to an SEO consultant
Once you learn what is
involved in a successful SEO project, you will
quickly see that you cannot outsource your SEO
project 100%, and that your SEO consultant will be
working with you or your team very closely in the
course of the optimization project.
The question is what is
best to outsource to an SEO consultant and what is
best to do in house?
Based on my experience,
I find that it is best to get your SEO consultant to
do the following for you:
Explain to you and your
team what is involved in an SEO project (in the form
of a presentation or a short workshop). You can't
manage well what you don't understand.
Conduct a critique and
review of your existing website and record all
pluses and minuses (it is best to have an outsider
do this for you; otherwise, it is very easy NOT to
find flaws and problems with your website, thus
falling prey to what can end up being very expensive
self-complacency).
Conduct a competitive
analysis and produce a detailed report. Time and
time again I see how companies dive into a lengthy
and expensive website re-design and optimization
project without conducting proper competitive
analysis. To out-do your competition while remaining
cost-effective, you need to spend 5-8 hours on each
competitor. Here is a nice format you can use to
create a summary report (here
is a good format you can adopt). Make sure to
check the following:
Website
size (number of HTML pages and supplementary
materials, such as white papers, demos, help
manuals, product sheets in pdf, etc.)
Look-and-feel and user-friendliness of their website
and whether or not it is appropriate for their
business
Current
ranking on search engines (use
this free tool)
Ads on
Google and other search engines
Incoming
links (use
these free tools)
Outgoing
links (use
these free tools)
Keywords
and META tags (use
this
free tool)
Whether
or not their website copy is keyword-rich?
Do they
conduct lead registration through their website?
What kind of questions do they ask in their
registration form?
Do they
offer free web seminars and if yes, what service do
they use (Techonline or proprietary?)
Do they
issue newsletters?
Quality
of their white papers and related documents
Management team and their background
Financial reports or VC reviews
Other
questions that will help you better understand your
competition
Page-by-page
optimization of your existing pages for specific
keywords
Optimization of your
Title tags and META tags as well as image ALT tags
Creation of internal
links along with a Site Map
Creation of
supplementary web content to boost your rating and
create outgoing links (creating 'Resources' section
for your users, for example).
Directory listings to
create incoming links (make sure you go over all
links carefully)
Enrolment in Google's
AdWords campaign and other keyword purchasing
programs (make sure you monitor the results)
If you are in a general
consumer business, your SEO consultant can be your
SEO copywriter as well, but keep in mind that this
service is expensive.
Depending on how
experienced your SEO consultant is, in some cases,
you can hire them for a few months to do a rewamp of
your site and optimize it for all of your desired
keywords.
Note from the
editor
If there
are specific Web Marketing and Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) topics that you would like me to
discuss in this newsletter, please do not hesitate
to
drop me a line.
For
related Web Marketing and SEO information, browse
through the Resources
section on this site.
To
unsubscribe from this free monthly
SEO
Ottawa newsletter, click the
unsubscribe link, enter your email, and press ‘Unsubscribe’. You
will be automatically removed from the list.
back to top
|
Anna
Tulchinsky 
