How to hire an SEO specialist

A successful SEO project can play a large role in bringing more visitors (prospects) to your website. With appropriate, targeted content, those prospects can then be converted into leads and eventually clients.

When an SEO consultant promises to get your website into the number one spot, walk away. If you want long-term success, there are no quick fixes or voodoo tricks to make your site rank first. Search engines actively defend against blatant manipulation, because it undermines their goal of showing users the most relevant result for a search. To do this, they use artificial intelligence: very complex, self-tuning filter algorithms. Self-tuning, also known as deep learning, makes it practically impossible for a programmer to predict the output of their own search algorithm, because the number of factors weighed in the ranking is far more than the human mind can process. It follows that if the creator can’t manipulate an AI-based algorithm, an SEO consultant with no inside or special knowledge certainly can’t either.

An SEO project’s potential is only as high as the quality of your business and website, coupled with your commitment to implementing the recommended changes. In other words, make your content as digestible as possible for a search engine, so that your ranking for a search term isn’t held back by technical issues that are invisible to you and your visitors, but very relevant to the machine reading and ranking your site.

While a good SEO can help improve an existing site, a great time to hire one is when you’re considering a site redesign or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can make sure your site is search engine friendly from the ground up.

4 tips for choosing an SEO

In most cases, an SEO needs four months to a year to help your business implement improvements and then see a potential benefit.

1. Be committed to implementing the recommended changes.
2. Interview your potential SEO and check that they are genuinely interested in, and understand, your requirements and those of your business.
3. Check your SEO’s business references.
4. Ask for a technical and search audit. (This is normally a paid service.)

What does Google have to say?

Here is what to expect from your SEO specialist. Your SEO should:

1. Recommend and implement best practices for a search-friendly site.
2. Make sure your online customers have a good experience, regardless of their device (desktop, mobile or tablet).
3. Back up their recommendations with documented statements from Google that support both:
   1. the description of the issue that needs to be improved, and
   2. the approach they prescribe to fix it.

Finally, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Ask your webmaster to create a reporting dashboard (we recommend a combination of Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Looker Studio, formerly Data Studio) to help you keep track of your website’s performance in organic search.