What should an SEO consultant deliver? There are many opinions when it comes to search engine optimization, but for businesses it comes down to real results. I’ve spoken to countless business owners who knew they needed SEO, but partnered with an “expert” that left them worse off than when they started. In this video, I’ll share what every SEO consultant should deliver to their clients. Whether you are a business owner looking for help or an agency delivering services, this video outlines some baseline expectations
Video Transcript:
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So today we’re going to be talking about what an SEO consultant or agency should be delivering for your business. Unfortunately, in the 10 years that I’ve been in this industry, I’ve encountered quite a few people who have hired an SEO company or agency and they have been less than impressed with the results that they’ve received. A lot of them have felt that they’ve been taken advantage of. A lot of them have felt like the company did a lot of terrible things for their website. And while that does happen, SEO is still extremely important.
If you want your site to rank, if you want to get targeted visitors using the most powerful engine in the world, Google search, you need to have your site optimized for search and here’s a few things that you should look out for or you need to make sure you’re getting from your SEO agency and consultant.
The first thing is visibility. SEOs are hired to optimize your site for search. If your site isn’t getting more impressions, if you’re not seeing more visibility of your brand online, then something’s not happening. Now, there could be a lot of things going on. Now, the SEO may have just gotten started, which means the results aren’t coming yet, or if they’ve been with you a while and you haven’t seen anything happen as far as visibility goes, you really should be wondering whether or not they’re doing the things that need to be done in order for you to grow your site traffic.
Now this is where Google Search Console is a powerful tool. With that tool. You can see that your site is getting impressions, which means people are seeing your site links in the search results. If they’re not, if there are no impressions happening, it means you don’t have any visibility or much visibility. If it’s not growing over time and there’s a lot of work being put into it, you know that something could be wrong. So make sure you pay attention to that because visibility is the name of the game, but it’s more than just getting visibility.
It’s also about getting targeted traffic. This means people actually coming to your website. Again, using a tool like Google Search Console, you can not just see impressions, but you can also see clicks and you can start to map those clicks back to Google Analytics. This will tell you, hey, people are not only seeing my links, they’re clicking on my links and they’re visiting my website.
From there, you can start to see if they taking those desired actions. Are they making those steps towards becoming a customer or engaging with your brand? So an SEO is not only going to help you get more visibility. They are going to help you optimize your site for targeted traffic, making sure that people are going to click through and visit your website.
Now, three other things that SEOs should be providing for you go a little bit deeper. They should be able to give you deep insights. They should be able to help you understand how Search Console works, what’s going on in those reports. What do impressions mean? What does the average rank mean? What does the click through rate mean, and can we go a little bit deeper and look at things like your crawl stats. Do you have structured data on your website? SEOs should be able to walk you through those different processes and help you better understand holistically how your website is doing when it comes to ranking in search and driving traffic from search. They should be able to help you with your reporting and understanding Google Analytics and what’s happening with those organic users as they move through your website and engage with your content.
SEOs should also be looking for opportunities. This is not a static industry. SEO isn’t a set it and forget it process. You don’t hire somebody one time to improve your titles and your meta and maybe optimize a few images and say, “Hey, thanks. It was really great for that work you’ve done. I’ll see you later.” Search engines are always changing, they’re always updating. They’re always growing and because of that, SEOs need to be looking for new opportunities in order to grow their own sites as well as their clients’ sites in search. This means not sitting back and only doing the basics and letting everything else go away or trying to do these outdated strategies that don’t work anymore.
There’s a lot of people out there doing things that downright are not effective, but they do them because that’s what they know to do, but an SEO should always be up to date and looking for new opportunities to grow their client’s business and if they’re doing that, the client will see results and then hopefully reinvest with that agency or company.
Ultimately, SEOs should be providing ROI. If you’re not getting ROI, if you’re not getting money back from the investment you’re putting in as a business owner, you should really start to question whether or not this is a good business investment or this is the company you should be working with.
Now, an SEO isn’t responsible for your sales. They’re not responsible for all of the UX or the or the customer experience, unless you’ve hired them to do that. They’re not responsible for a lot of the after that somebody comes to your site process, but at the same time, if they’re not driving qualified traffic to your website, then you’re not going to get qualified leads.
So whether you’ve hired an SEO right now and you’re wondering what’s going on, there’s a lot going on. Ask them about some of these questions. See if they can give you a more details. If they answer them, great. You should stay with that company and continue to invest with that and watch your profits soar.
If you’re looking to hire an SEO company, these are things you really want to look at. Are they able to do this for their clients? Do they have case studies proving that they can grow visibility? Can they grow targeted traffic? Can they show you how they’re using data and the things that they’re doing? Can they show you how they’ve not only grown people’s traffic, but help businesses grow and get real business results? It’s what we talk about. You know, the dollars and the cents, the things that matter to the C level.
If an SEO company can do all these things, you’re going to have great success. If you’ve got any questions on SEO or maybe you’re looking for an agency yourself, please comment below. We’d love to help you out and until next time, Happy Marketing.
