A Practical guide on the why, what, how, when, and where to seek Search Engine Optimization Services with a Professional Consultant
Why SEO?
You want to hire an SEO consultant because your organization wants to have the healthiest of web systems and have a solid, concrete foundation that shares the value that you offer to your audience.
The way this works is that it just doesn’t encompass one streamlined process and say: “Hey, we are doing SEO here!”, if that was the case, we are all SEO consultants.
It requires both analytical, creative, and critical thinking to execute tasks that impact the end result of the system, regardless of any search engine you optimize for, if it was up for me, I would change SEO to “Web System Optimization”.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is a term we use to define what digital experts do in a creative and analytical process to improve and enhance the user experience of their digital product in order to satisfy the users‘ query from search engines with the most valuable, relevant, useful, and helpful information from a specific page in a domain around the Internet.
There are multiple words that surround this main topic and you might have heard of them before:
- Keyword and Market Research
- Information Architecture
- Content Strategy
- Page optimization
- Web Core Vitals
- Keyword Gap Analysis
- Competitive Intelligence
- Topic Clustering
- Web Audits
They all work towards the same goal, which is to deliver the greatest experience to your target audience, (and this is only one channel out of multiple touchpoints across the user journey).
How to do SEO?
To execute digital marketing processes is to finish your story points in tasks that are delegated to specialists that understand and comprehend the application of such changes in order to improve the likelihood of your website’s pages being indexed, updated changes, track the time and date of tasks completed, and be accountable for their value by tracking their position in ranking pages and tracked keywords, evaluating the value of your backlinks to develop an SEO process that improves content strategy and increase conversions, sales, client lists, and recurring revenue through financial projections.
When to do SEO?
If you have a website and it’s taking off or you are thinking of building a site that has a lot of potentials to increase your objectives, we recommend looking into having your digital system to be analyzed by a technical web audit as well as keyword and market research by analyzing competitive landscapes through online tools that you can see opportunities in gaps on the market to improve traffic and help a ”more” interested audience to find your site’s content.
SEO starts even before the website is even thought about. It requires skills to find gaps in online markets, and even in adaptation phases where the web system requires to evolve as the market demands evolve as well.
One of the biggest steps in ”when” to do SEO is when identifying the demand of online users to meet their needs on a regular cadence.
Where to do SEO?
The importance to understand where the core focus will be on your website is to understand the hierarchical structure of the web system, if there is a digital compass that focuses on a domain, URL, and a keyword, it will be best to have a general overview of different topic clusters and ecosystems around that content to nurture users with what they are searching for.
This helps both the website and the end-user to synchronize at an accelerated scale what they are trying to reach, it might be an article, a landing page with a form, a product page, visuals, infographics, galleries, virtual/digital products, and services, ebooks, or videos.
So why hire an SEO consultant?
We are consultants because we have confidence and that he or she will make a great job at not just looking at your website through your business objectives but through the audience in an unbiased way but to help your business grow your bottom line which is improving user experience (page speed, mobile design, content design, etc.), increasing recurring sales revenue and client lists.
I strongly recommend asking the level of expertise in specific business industries and content categories, it is far greater to have a consultant that has helped more people around your industry as its reputation precedes them and has more potential to accelerate your online growth.
SEO experts are happy because they are nurturing and growing websites that give fruits to their harvesters, which are their stakeholders, executive teams, investors, board members, etc.
#1 Your Web Team needs a Digital Compass
It’s a great opportunity to align both your team’s compass with an expert navigator that knows the waters and by building this partnership of collaboration they can both guide the ”digital ship“ to have the best results.
#2 Your Team needs Support and Confidence
A consultant can act as a coach and not just as technical support or a person that just thinks in numbers and percentages but, he/she can motivate and connect ideas that inspire others and sparks executing processes that improve time and the quality art of every single task done.
#3 Your Digital Team needs Training and Advice
Your team needs a mentor or a master that already knows everything back-end and in front-end technology and understands how search engines to index, users think, and websites work.
They can share advice And suggestions with specific team players to support their projects and implement new things that work to boost online valuable exchanges.
#4 Your Digital Team needs to Know How to Prove ROI
As your consultants can help improve financial results as well as translate how one page or one interaction can exponentially increase traffic and engagement across your website.
Ernesto Agustin lara Castro
“Most importantly, you should consider consultants that will take care of your website like if it’s their own.“
How SEO Consulting can work:
Charge per hour:
Based on the value exchanged, the effort, complexity, and priority of the task at hand, a consultant can help clients per hour based on either simple or complex projects.
This helps both parties to maximize their end result and this can be a great way for small to medium-sized businesses need to execute digital processes that are capable to focus on the end result of the business.
Charge per project:
If a client needs a greater level of complexity and it needs to outsource all the system to a consultant, this can be effectively done by using sprint boards, accountability charts, and Gantt charts.
This helps the consultant to keep all the necessary communications, tasks, and any contingencies aligned with the final results of the project.
It is optional for the client to keep a fee for system administration that can help both parties keep the momentum of the value and the “digital health” of the web System.
The consultant has to know both the software and the hardware needed for a digital web system, this means that they can consult around hosting providers as well to provide the best servers, which includes, processors, necessary RAM needed, amount of space in the Solid State drives inside those servers, even the necessary extra components, such as:
- Server temperature and airflow cooling.
- Number of cores inside the processor
- Amount of RAM, and what type of RAM (DDR3, DDR4, ,etc)
- If the server needs video and 3D rendering, a video card might be needed and evaluated to keep the web system stable and share with users without lag issues.
- Type of connections from servers: Cat6, Optical fiber cables, etc.
- Motherboard set up and optimizations on the BIOS settings
- Installing the proper Operating System (Windows, Linux, Apache)
- Installing the server properly in the company’s secured office space.
Charge per web audit and technical analysis:
The consultant uses multiple online and offline applications to help a client’s website to diagnose the site’s health such as:
- 404 pages
- Missing meta tags
- CSS/HTML/JS Errors
- Server log errors
- Data/Information Architecture
- Schema markup optimization and creation
Charge per training and advice:
- Consultants can charge per session.
- There can be 1:1 sessions for both clarity and focusing on the end result by breaking them down to principles and fundamentals.
- HTML/CSS/JS training.
- Content Management System Training.
- back-end processes explanations.
- White board collaborations and sessions.
- Sharing and explaining complex processes.
- Developing an Action Plan with the client or client’s team.
Charge per sharing suggestions, recommendations, and insights:
Consultants can share suggestions, recommendations, and insights at a higher or deeper level based on online tools that can help analyze:
- Recorded Sessions
- Heat Mapping
- Web Analytics
- Advance events tracking
- Multi-channel Attribution Reports
Charge per taking action:
If there is a strategy developed and needs to be executed, the consultant can tackle the necessary actions that make the most impact towards the end result and track performance along the way to prove the initial return of investment.
Pay for equity based on financial results from digital optimizations and strategic processes:
High stakes can be addressed by tying the consultant to the end result of the partnership. This can be helpful for organizations that need to build a long-term relationship that affects a great part of the executive’s performance and meet the end result to board members and investors.
Any business and consultant are aware that we are abiding by Google’s search engines guidelines, a consultant, although they love their job, cannot guarantee any position due to algorithm updates, competitor’s strategy, bandwidth, resources, server capabilities, web core vitals changes, etc.
This partnership is closely monitored by both parties that are tying every single second and action to the end result.
This pushes both parties to innovate and disrupt simultaneously and keep constant synergy between the performance of the team’s organization, and the overall website experience.
A great way to compare SEO consultants is to hire them and test their level of expertise and observe in detail all their clients and successes. It should be easy to release consultants as they are too, finding partnerships with similar digital goals to serve digital audiences.