Google Teaches You How To Hire An SEO

Need to hire an SEO for your business but don’t know what to look out for? The process of searching for reputable SEO consultants doesn’t need to be difficult. Here are some guidelines from Google to get you started on the right track:

Arrange and Conduct a Two-Way Interview with Your Potential SEO

Remember, good SEOs don’t always focus on search engine rankings. SEO professionals should be genuinely interested in you and your business, as well as create solutions that help your business grow online. With that in mind, here are some questions your potential SEO should ask you during the interview:

• May I know more about your competitors? Can you provide information on what they do well online and/or offline?
• Are you currently using any channels to boost your site’s SEO? Are you using social networks, offline advertising, etc.?
• Can you list the ways your business is making money? What are your thoughts on search providing help?
• Can you describe your common customers? Do you know how they currently find your websites?
• What are the characteristics that make your service, content and/or business unique as well as valuable to your customers?

It’s important that your potential SEO makes the effort to learn more about your business from a holistic standpoint, i.e. knowing your business goals, customers, and other existing marketing efforts. If not, it would be advisable to look elsewhere.

Don’t Hesitate to Check Your Potential SEO’s References

If your potential SEO has a portfolio that features past clients, be sure to check their references. You are recommended to find out whether the potential SEO was able to provide useful guidance to their clients and worked effectively with their teams of developers, UX researchers, web designers, and marketers. A good SEO often makes their clients feel that they are easy to work with as well as someone who they can learn from. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, it’s not just about getting the highest rankings. You see, SEO techniques can change from time to time and they do not last forever. That’s why good SEOs strive to educate their clients how search engines work so that SEO becomes part of their clients’ general business operation.

Request a Technical and Search Audit

When it comes to SEO, there should be no cookie-cutter solutions. If a SEO immediately tells he or she has a list of things to do from the get-go, without needing to conduct an audit, they are just going to raise red flags about their service and capabilities. These are some of the things your SEO should be doing, i.e. prioritizing improvements:

• Identifying issues
• Suggesting improvements
• Giving an estimate on the overall investment
• Determine positive business impact
• Plan how to implement changes and improve on them
• Plan how best to react when implementations produce results that don’t meet expectations

For technical audits, your potential SEO should cover (review your site for issues related to):

• Responses codes
• Server connectivity
• URL parameters
• Crawlability
• Internal linking

For the search audit process, your potential SEO should have the ability to figure out appropriate search queries and break them down into branded and unbranded categories. For example, branded search queries (e.g. Gmail) consist of your business name. The latter are general search queries (e.g. email) that are still related to your business niche