Every business wants to generate organic traffic from Google. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a cost-effective tool for increasing your brand’s visibility on the search engines. Get it right and your organic web traffic will begin to increase. But you need to know what to do.
The best way to get your brand noticed on the search engines is to hire a local SEO specialist. After all, they’re the experts in their field. But what should you look for when you’re hiring an SEO specialist or local SEO Services.
We’ve put together a list of things to look for in an SEO specialist, to help you to make the right choice for your business
SEO success stories
The best way to check that an SEO specialist really is an expert in their field is to ask for examples of their successes. A good SEO specialist will be happy to share case studies with you to prove their expertise.
You can validate this yourself by searching for the companies they’ve worked with to check that you can find them in the rankings claimed.
Over-promising SEO success
Watch out for SEO specialists who over-promise. It’s impossible to guarantee first page rankings for the most competitive keywords without putting months or even years of work into your SEO.
As a rule of thumb, if anything seems too good to be true then it probably is.
SEO experience
It goes without saying that an SEO specialist should be experienced in their field, but many claim to be experts without the experience to back it up. SEO is a fast-changing industry which can be hard to keep up with, so you want to be sure that you’re hiring a true expert.
Ask your SEO specialist how long they’ve been in business, along with qualifications they’ve achieved and how they keep up to date with new developments in SEO.
SEO deliverables
It’s important to ask your SEO specialist what the deliverables are and how they measure success. You want to be sure that you’re getting results when you’re spending your valuable budget on SEO.
Many SEO specialists will provide you with a monthly report to show progress across your keywords. This helps you to continuously evaluate the value that your SEO specialist is providing.
White hat SEO practices
White hat SEO practices involve improving the user experience to increase your search rankings. On the other hand, black hat SEO practices manipulate Google’s algorithm to synthetically improve search rankings, making Google think that a site is more valuable than it really is.
The problem with black hat SEO practices is that although results are encouraging at the beginning, the websites are punished by Google when they’re found out, disappearing from the search rankings completely.
It’s a good idea to ask your SEO specialist for a report of exactly what they’ll do on your website, ensuring that they are using white hat SEO practices to genuinely increase your search rankings.
To sum up
Hiring a local SEO specialist is a great way to boost your rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, it’s important to make sure you ask the right questions before committing so that you can be sure you’re hiring the right professional for your business.
