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When I talk to people about SEO, one of the common questions I get is, "Well, actually
I'm a little bit afraid of this process. I don't want Google to ban me from the index
from shady link building practices or whatever. How should I find an SEO consultant?" Other
than the obvious, which is to hire us! There are some questions I would ask any SEO consultant.
The first one is, "What's your philosophy? How do you get results?" and they should be
able to break it down for you. The key things are building a campaign based on keyword research,
looking at the competitive landscape to see what everyone else in that space is doing
(how they're getting results, where their links are coming from, how well optimized
their site is), building out the site architecture, ensuring that there's good content accessibility
and pages are well-optimized. The fourth thing, which quite frankly is the biggest piece of
the SEO puzzle, probably 70 to 80%, is getting links from other sites and to know how the
consultant is doing that, which brings me to my next point.
I would ask the consultant how they get links and just let them talk, right. They should
be very transparent about where they get links, monthly reports should indicate where they
get links. You should be able to see all of them and the number one thing is that they
shouldn't be buying them because Google is openly against buying them. It's printed in
their guidelines and they have been known to ban sites from their index for buying links.
So I would ask a consulting firm what they report on and how often. Monthly reports are
important. You need to see what the key performance indicators are, progress, where the links
are coming from, those kinds of things. Obviously, what you should ask any consultant is, "Do
you have any case studies, testimonials or references?" That's not to say that someone
that's relatively new at this couldn't be a rock star at it, but clearly you want someone
that has a track record of results. And if they're not willing to give you any of those,
I mean, that could be a warning sign. Another question that you might ask a potential
consultant that you want to hire is… Well, I should say I get asked this question a lot,
which is, "What can you guarantee? Can you guarantee me rankings in a certain amount
of time?" and the answer is no. If anyone guarantees rankings, I think maybe that's
a bad sign because we can't guarantee anything with Google. I mean, the algorithm constantly
changes, it's patented and private. However, based on our history and our results, we can
predict what's going to happen. The things that I would guarantee a client are, "We're
going to identify X number of keywords in your niche. We're going to optimize X number
of pages. We're going to deliver an internal linking diagram, an internal optimization
plan. We're going to get you X amount of links per month on these kinds of sites." Those
are very specific deliverables. We can report on that, it's trackable and visible. If you
do, if you do all those things well, the results follow.
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