An Expert SEO will recommend best practices are integrated into your search-friendly website including basic matters such as description tag, a blog for a small business to complex matters such as language markup for global multi-lingual global business.

SEO expert ensures serving your customers a good experience. Especially those coming from a search engine whether they are using a desktop computer or mobile phone. In most cases, SEOs need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefits.

It is recommended that you should request the SEO expert to corroborate his or her recommendation with a documented statement from Google, either in a help center article, video, or Googler response in a forum, that supports both;

• The SEO expert’s description of the issue that needs to be improved to help with ranking and
• The approach they prescribe to accomplishing the particular task

Requesting the above two pieces of information will prevent your business from hiring the wrong person.

In general, you can start the process as follows;

Step 1 – Conduct a two-way interview with the potential expert. Check that he or she seems genuinely interested in you and your business.

At the interview check whether the potential is willing to help your business growth not just only improving SEO ranking on search engines. He should question you on;

• What makes your business, content, service unique and therefore valuable to customers? They should make sure on these because these things should be highlighted on your website to be visible to your current and potential consumers.
• Secondly, how the common customer of your business look like and how do they currently find your website.
• Thirdly, on how your sales are generated and how the Search helps your business.
• Finally, about your competitors and their online presence and potentially offline as well

Hence, the SEO expert should see the holistic view of your business otherwise the SEO implemented will not compliment your business activities.

Step 2 – Check the expert’s references

If the potential SEO expert is providing prior clients, refer them and make sure that the SEO expert was able to provide them with useful guidelines and worked effectively with their stakeholders.

You should feel like some you could work with, learn from, experiment with, and genuinely care about you and your business, and not just getting your website ranked in Google. Those techniques rarely last very long. This expert should be able to educate on SEO as such the optimizing should become part of your general business operations.

Step 3 – Ask for a technical and search audit on your website

If you trust your SEO potential, give them a restricted view, not full or right access to your Google Console data and even your Analytics data. Before the expert modify the data have them conduct technical and search audits to give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improving for SEO.

If you are a larger business, have multiple SEO experts to run audits and prioritized improvements. See what each of them has to say and select what best suits you and your business.

The SEO expert should prioritized improvements with a structure like

• An issue
• The suggested improvement
• An estimate on the overall investment
• Estimated positive business impact
• Plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation or how to experiment and fail fast should results not meet expectations

In another way, the time and energy your business would have to give for your Developers to do the developments and Google search and search customers to recognize the improvements.

The SEO expert should talk with your Developers to understand what technical constraints may exist.

The SEO expert should discuss the positive impact that the SEO optimizing can have on business may be breaking impact that would lead to more visitors or conversations or maybe a back-end change that would clean up your website to be more agile in the future.

In the Technical Audit, the expert is required to review your website for issues related to;

• Internal linking
• Crawlability
• URL parameters
• Server connectivity
• Response codes and specify you on each separately.

In the Search Audit, the potential expert would likely break down your search queries into categories namely;

• Branded (e.g. Gmail)
• Unbranded (e.g. Email)

For branded queries, make sure customers who know your brand easily find it on your website and potentially convert. The SEO expert might recommend improvements to help the entire search experience from what the searcher sees the search results and what sees when the searcher clicks on the results and use your website.

For unbranded queries, an SEO expert can recommend an online competitive landscape by giving general keyword ideas on updating obsolete content, improving internal linking, generating more buzz, and learning from the competition.

Step 4 – Decide if you want to hire

A good SEO expert should prioritise what ideas your business can bring out more improvements for the least investment. What improvements take more time but help grow in the long term.

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