If you’ve noticed that your website doesn’t show up on the first page of the search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, it’s likely that your potential customers might not be aware that you exist. This is true even if you’re an established business.
Improving your search engine visibility has become a core element of running a business, as it can be critical to boosting visits and traffic to your website. As a result, this leads to increased brand awareness and higher sales and profit.
So, if you’ve decided that you need an SEO professional, there are a few things that you should know before you hire, how to set expectations and why it’s more beneficial to hire an agency rather than a freelancer.
What is an SEO Professional?
An SEO professional uses research and analysis to improve a website’s ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. They’ll find the most relevant keywords that are used when someone makes a query in the search bar. These are then written into pieces of content for a website which helps the search engine find that website and display it to users.
SEO professionals can work at a digital marketing agency, in-house or as a freelancer.
What Can I Expect from an SEO Company?
There are many tasks that an SEO professional will perform for your website. We’ve summarised various SEO professional services that you could expect when hiring an SEO agency.
Introductory Meeting
Once you’ve chosen an SEO company to oversee your online presence, an introductory meeting should be set up either in person or via video call. Typically, in this meeting, you’ll be introduced to the account manager, who’ll be your first point of contact, and anyone else working on the project.
This is a great opportunity for them to ask you additional questions about your business and goals. An SEO professional needs to find out about the services or products you provide as well as locations, competitors and most importantly, your main audience. Once this is established, a clear and concise strategy will be put into place.
Website Audits
Professional SEO services should also include a complete and comprehensive website audit. This identifies any underlying issues with:
- The content on your website.
- Technical issues which could mean search engines can’t crawl your website.
- Site analytics.
On-Page SEO
After completing the audits, an SEO professional will spend a good amount of time on improving your website’s on-page SEO.
This involves extensive keyword research where they’ll identify types of words and phrases that your website has an easier chance to rank for, as well as the biggest money-making keywords for the business.
These keywords are then targeted in the content of your website, which includes blogs, videos and infographics. As well as this, all the title tags and meta descriptions for every page on your website will be optimized with these keywords.
Things to Know Before Hiring an SEO Professional
There are a few things that we recommend you should know and be aware of before you hire an SEO professional.
Look at their Online Presence
If you don’t know where to start when you’re looking for a reputable SEO professional, you should look at their online presence to see if their own website is ranking on the first page of the search engines. This is something that is expected by an SEO professional.
Learn Some SEO Terminology
Before hiring an SEO professional, we advise you to take some time to learn a little about SEO. Now, we don’t mean to spend hours and hours on it or take any courses, but it’d be useful for you to understand the main terminology. This is so when you’re meeting with the SEO professional, you understand what they are referring to.
Communication is Key
Hiring an SEO professional is a two-way thing. After you’ve hired the agency, it doesn’t mean you can leave everything up to them. Having regular communication with the account manager allows both parties to check in with each other.
For example, they can update you with their findings, what work they are doing for the month, and provide reports on how well your website has performed. And, in return, you should provide them with any information they need and also keep in contact with your web developer, for any technical issues the SEO professional may have found that need fixing.
Let your SEO Professional do their Job
Having regular communication and check-ins with your SEO professional is expected, but also be aware if you’re hovering. Let them do their job.
Remember, the more time that you spend in meetings with them, the less time they’ll have to actually perform any actions. Time is money!
Freelance VS Agency
Whilst it’s an option to hire a freelancer to help you with your website rankings, we believe hiring an SEO professional agency is the best way to get results.
This is because an SEO agency consists of a number of experts in the field, ranging from content producers, technical SEO experts and link builders. This means that an SEO agency will be more likely to create a comprehensive strategy that’s tailored to your needs.
Of course, you could hire multiple freelancers from a range of backgrounds, but this would be more costly and timely. Hiring an SEO professional agency means that the right people with the right skill set will already be chosen to work on the project.
Due to the diversity of expertise in an SEO agency, it means that if a member of the team decides to change careers or leave the company, it won’t have a significant impact on your SEO rankings. This is because an agency can simply bring in another SEO professional and work on your project, rather than you having to replace a freelancer – giving you more time and less worry to concentrate on other aspects of your business.
If you’re looking to hire an SEO professional, why not get in touch with The SEO Works? As the winners of ‘SEO Agency of the Year’ at the UK Digital Growth Awards, we can help improve your website rankings and write some incredible content for you.
