Are you helping or hindering your SEO consultant? Learn how to work with your SEO company to reach your SEO goals.
In an ideal business partnership, an SEO consultant and client should collaborate and work closely together to reach the goals outlined in the SEO campaign strategy. The consultant should not be making any changes to the website without the client’s knowledge but at the same time, the client needs to respect the SEO specialist’s expertise and trust that they know what they are doing. Here are seven ways you can unwittingly thwart your SEO campaign and sabotage your SEO consultant.
Unrealistic expectations
Admittedly when you’re paying your SEO consultant what seems like exorbitant sums of money to optimize your site and you’re not seeing results in the first month, it can be frustrating. It’s also part of an SEO consultant’s job to let you know before you sign on the dotted line when you can expect to see results and to manage your expectations. Search Engine Optimization is a long term strategy and it may take several months for a new website to rank on Search Engines or new website pages to appear in search results.
Ignoring SEO suggestions
You hire an SEO consultant because you want to benefit from his/her knowledge and expertise in the industry but a lot of clients for whatever reason choose to ignore his/her recommendations and suggestions. An SEO expert can only help a company with their Search Engine Optimisation efforts if they choose to help themselves. These suggestions may be as simple as tweaking title tags and adding a landing page through to changing the content management system or rewriting pages of duplicate content. Again, once these changes are made, they need time to take effect.
Accepting links to other sites
Your SEO consultant may have stressed the importance of link building to boost your SEO ranking. These back links need to come from authoritative, trustworthy and credible websites. However, if you are accepting links from your website to other websites that do not have a high link authority* and your SEO consultant does not know about it, you may be unconsciously undermining your SEO efforts. Poor quality outbound links can have a significantly negative impact on your site’s rankings.
Putting duplicate content on your site
Duplicate content on your site can be an issue for several reasons. In respect to SEO, if Search Engines find website pages that are similar on your website or other websites, they will make a decision as to what is the most relevant page to serve up in the Search Engine Results Pages and filter search results accordingly. Your SEO consultant may make suggestions about duplicate content on your website – as a client if you disregard their recommendations, this may be sabotaging your SEO strategy.
Trying your own SEO tactics
Even though clients have gone to all the effort of hiring an SEO professional, they sometimes have their own ideas on how the campaigns should be implemented. Clients should be encouraged to collaborate with their SEO consultants and educate themselves about the SEO process. However, if you are making changes to your website without the consultant’s knowledge, you may be unknowingly nullifying all the changes they are making to your website.
Micromanaging your SEO consultant
A professional SEO consultant will sit down with a client and explain the SEO strategy in detail – what they are doing, why they are doing it and whether they need to make any changes to your site. You should also receive regular feedback and be given the opportunity to ask any questions. Communication is very important, however if you are questioning your SEO expert on every little change and ringing them constantly to get updates on your campaign, it can stop them from being able to do their job properly.
Not responding to requests for information
Your SEO consultant has a role to play and in the process of doing that task, they may have certain requests. This may involve for example adding content to the site, approving changes to the website or trying to set up meetings with you. If you do not respond to their requests in a timely manner, they can’t facilitate the process as smoothly as they would like. You are wasting your money if you do not maximize their time and an SEO specialist continually has to chase you to respond to their emails or calls.
At SEO Works, we encourage our business analysts to partner with their clients and collaborate with them to create and implement customized SEO campaigns that will bring tangible results. Being a boutique SEO agency, you will soon discover that we take a personalized and tailored approach in developing integrated SEO solutions. Speak to an SEO consultant and find out more about the SEO Packages and SEO services we offer.
*Link authority – ‘Authority’ gained by a web page through quality incoming links. This is for instance expressed in the PageRank given by Google. Also referred to as link authority or equity.
