In order to be known for your services, your business needs to have a strong online presence over search engines, especially Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
If your business is not listed on any of these search engines, you will definitely lose a bigger share of the online market in your industry.
For increased brand awareness and higher sales & profits, better search engine visibility is necessary for your business.
For securing top rankings on search engines, one needs technical expertise & experience in SEO. Therefore, it may make sense to engage an SEO consultant who can provide the best SEO services. Now, the question arises; how do choose the best SEO consultant?
In this blog post, I have listed 8 questions that you can ask SEO consultants before choosing the best among them. Here are those questions:
Question#1: How you can improve my search engine rankings?
If you find any SEO consultant who won’t freely discuss their methods in detail; steer clear of them. Ideally, an expert SEO consultant must know the exact methodologies that he/she would be going to adopt to increase the traffic on your website along with an estimated timeframe to achieve top rankings on search engines.
An SEO consultant must also be able to analyze your competitors’ SEO status and make appropriate strategies for your website to get ahead of theirs.
Also, make sure that an SEO consultant must be able to provide a clear insight into the website issues related to search engine optimization.
In other words, he/she must be able to provide you with a report of the on-page optimization status of your website.
Question#2: Will you seek approval before you publish any content on my behalf?
Content marketing is an important part of any SEO campaign which involves writing and submitting several write-ups every month in the form of articles & blogs.
An SEO consultant must get all the content checked and approved by you before submitting them to various sources/directories. Since you are an expert in your business and know every aspect of it in detail, you must make sure that every piece of content is aligned with your business interests before it go public. This is also important for your business branding.
If your SEO consultant is hesitant to send you the write-ups for approval every time he/she intends to submit them, you must start looking for some other consultant.
Question#3: How will you measure & share the progress with me?
This is again a great question to ask SEO consultants before you hire them for SEO services. In order to measure the success of SEO efforts, you must track the details of keywords & location from which the traffic is being sent to your website in order to make sure that you are getting targeted traffic only.
If any SEO consultant is hesitant to share these details with you and just focuses on the top page rankings of your website on a certain set of keywords, you must look for another consultant who knows the importance of targeted traffic from the right keywords/location & share valuable analytic reports every month to let you know the next step on the improvement of your website promotion based on the current analytics report.
Question#4: What is your fee structure? Are there any hidden charges?
You must make sure to have a formal contract in place while finalizing any SEO consultant for your business promotion which should state all the payment structure and terms clearly.
Also, an SEO consultant must disclose all the hidden costs, if applicable, before you sign the agreement with them, and therefore you must insist to ask him/her to let you know about any additional charges that may incur additionally. These charges could be for website repair, code rectification, etc.
During my practice as an SEO consultant, I have come across many clients who would complain that their previous SEO company used to charge an additional amount to rectify the codes on the website to make it SEO compliant which they never disclosed while finalizing the agreement.
Ideally, every SEO consultant must keep these charges into consideration while proposing the SEO proposal to their clients.
Question#5: Can you share your past work and clients with me?
No matter how efficiently an SEO consultant explains the process and makes promises to rank your website; you must ask him/her for the list of websites and clients for whom he/she has worked in the past. Feel free to contact those clients in order to get a fair idea about the commitment and support that you can expect from this consultant.
Those clients can at least share their experience with this SEO candidate and the positive impact he/she has brought to their business in terms of search rankings and acquisition of new customers.