Written by Aaron Rains October 7th 2022

SEO consultants help your business get found by more potential clients and customers online. This article will teach you what they do and how to hire one.

If you have an online business, chances are you want more organic traffic, leads, and ultimately sales.

To achieve this, your online presence needs to be attractive, accessible by search engines, and enticing to potential site visitors.

To rank your website on the first two pages of Google, you need high-quality content, significant inbound links, and a smooth-functioning website. This will build your site domain authority and search engine rankings. An SEO consultant will ensure you achieve this.

Anyone specializing in SEO will help you build and maintain a highly attractive website for future visitors and search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The SEO process is ongoing and not easily achieved overnight. It takes time to see results and can be challenging to achieve success if you do not understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization.

The truth is, SEO will always be a vital role in your online marketing budget, and an SEO consultant can save you time and make your budget stretch further.

What is an SEO Consultant?

SEO consultants should generate more organic traffic, qualified business leads, and higher search engine ranking positions (SERPS) for your site.

An SEO consultant that does their job correctly should bring in more website clicks and qualified search engine traffic to your site.

The job of a search engine optimization consultant is to examine, review, and optimize the performance of websites and search engine results. They also increase the number of incoming links and provide expert advice, guidance, and recommendations to business owners.

SEO Consultants’ job descriptions have evolved in recent years to include more advanced skills. SEO specialists must now be skilled in content strategy, E-A-T models, and semantic keyword targeting. This criterion is necessary to develop informative, unique, and remarkable content, as well as enhanced user experiences.

SEO Consultants must be strategic, analytical, tactical, and critical thinkers. They must optimize your site according to the Google Quality score, create high-quality content (long-form material), and understand user intent.

A crucial part of the search engine marketing consultant’s job description is to promote and develop an authoritative website that solves the searcher’s intent.

All the while, they need to track user behavior, keep a close eye on your competitors, and analyze the latest Google algorithm changes.

It is essential to keep up to date with Google’s ever-changing algorithms, or you can experience a dramatic loss in organic rankings and traffic. To avoid this, it is important to meet with an SEO consultant every month to work on any necessary website adjustments.

What are the main benefits of hiring an SEO consultant for your business?

Although it’s not always cheap, hiring an SEO specialist is a wise investment for your business.

A search engine optimization specialist’s main mission is to attract, convert, and get you found on Google. They do this by using SEO strategies to attract targeted site visitors from search engines and turn them into paying customers.

Most SEO Services will start implementing and making changes that help your website to become more attractive and deliver a better visitor experience. This means you are more likely to turn your website visitors into paying customers – increasing the bottom line.

Hiring an SEO consultant is extremely beneficial to companies. It is cost-efficient, as a business doesn’t need to hire from within or pay current employees to learn the complexities of search engine optimization. This allows businesses and management to focus on internal business needs and do what they do best – meeting sales targets and corporate goals.

Primary Goals of a Search Engine Marketing Consultant

Every SEO consultant has one primary duty: to ensure that their client’s website ranks high in organic search results.

Now, that is no small task. Below is a detailed summary of an SEO consultant’s primary goals:

1. Get your website found online

Why would you invest time, effort, and hard-earned money to create outstanding content and build a beautiful website if no one can discover you? That’s like spending money on an expensive car but not knowing how to drive it or put gasoline in the tank.

A search engine marketing consultant will turn that beautiful website of yours into a traffic-generating machine. They will identify what your target audience is searching for online, create high-quality content, and ensure your website is optimized to reach them.

2. Stay ahead of your competition

Do you use Google on a day-to-day basis? Yes? Well, so does almost every other human being on earth with a smartphone and an internet connection.

If you aren’t implementing SEO effectively in your marketing strategy, you aren’t reaching a huge number of your customers, and you are leaving an enormous amount of revenue on the table.

Guess who is capitalizing on SEO and eating up all that revenue? Your competitors.

By not optimizing your site to its full potential, then your competitors have one less business to compete with to earn sales.

A successful SEO consultant will provide you with a thorough competitive analysis that assesses your strengths and weaknesses. By reverse-engineering their content, keyword profile, and backlinks, your website will be able to capitalize on opportunities they are missing and target them where they are weakest.

3. In-Depth Keyword Research

Any SEO consultant worth your time must do keyword research.

This includes finding terms/questions your target audience searches for on Google or another search engine. Using Ahrefs or SEMrush, the consultant shortlists the most relevant and profitable keywords.

SEO consultants use a variety of metrics, including:

  • Search Volume: the number of keyword searches. If few people search for that keyword, don’t bother.
  • Keyword Difficulty (KD): demonstrates how tough it is to rank for a specific keyword based on its search traffic, quality and depth of existing content, and reputation of websites currently ranking for it.
  • Domain Authority/Rating: demonstrates your website’s ability to rank for difficult keywords.

4. Create a Content strategy

The SEO consultant uses their keyword research to construct a content strategy and help you find high-quality content writers and marketers.

This includes:

  • Thinking up new blog ideas
  • Creating a detailed content calendar
  • Assisting with finding guest-posting opportunities
  • Ensuring that the content is both keyword- and search-intent-optimized.

5. Improving On-page SEO

This is where the SEO consultant’s technical knowledge comes into play.

On-page SEO optimizes a website’s user experience. This includes technical SEO like:

  • Ensuring HTML, Javascript, and CSS files are optimized for mobile and desktop
  • Fixing site and page speed issues
  • Ensuring all pages are keyword-optimized
  • Ensuring the website is correctly indexed
  • Security and SSL certificate
  • Using Google Analytics and Search Console to track performance.

6. Create and implement a link-building strategy

Link building is the process of developing high-quality backlinks (i.e., links from other websites pointing to yours).

If you’re not investing enough resources in developing quality backlinks, your website will struggle to rank – especially if you’re in a competitive niche. Google and other search engines consider link quality to be an extremely important ranking criterion.

The SEO consultant applies many link-building strategies, such as:

  • Guest posting
  • Content outreach (such as sharing infographics)
  • Finding unlinked references to your website
  • Broken link opportunities

Key Questions to ask an SEO consultant before hiring

So, what else should you ask an SEO consultant before hiring them or bringing them onto your team as a specialist?

We have listed some key questions below, these should help you understand the consultant you are dealing with and work out if they are the right fit for your business.

1. What experience do you have with SEO? 

Think of it like any interview you would perform when hiring for your company. This is where you get the chance to learn more about the candidate’s background, their work, and how they can assist you. Based on their response, you can extract key information and ask follow-up questions to learn more about their experience.

2. Have you worked in a similar industry to mine before? 

An SEO consultant with experience in your industry or local area will have a better understanding of the things that work, and more importantly, the things that don’t. If possible, you want to hire a consultant with prior experience working with a business like yours.

3. What areas of SEO do you specialize in?

Search Engine Optimization is an enormous field of work. There is a lot of ground to cover and some consultants may only specialize in one or two areas, while others may be good at managing and executing an entire campaign. Below are some of the areas an SEO specialist may excel:

  • Technical SEO 
  • Creating content
  • eCommerce
  • mobile apps
  • online reputation management
  • SEO Strategy

4. What is your strategy for increasing my website traffic?

Perhaps one of the most important questions. How are they actually going to get results? And how will they measure them? Ask them to give you an overview of their strategy for improving your organic traffic. After all, what’s the point of hiring an SEO consultant if they don’t know how to grow your traffic?

5. What are your prices? 

The money question. Get your prospective SEO consultant to give you a quote, and timeline to complete the job. You can also ask them how long it may take until you can expect to see results. Consultant’s rates vary significantly based on the amount of work required and their level of SEO expertise.

Hire an SEO Consultant

As you can see, hiring an SEO expert for your organization may be a time-consuming process, albeit an essential one. You want to ensure that you select the most suitable candidate for your business, so don’t be afraid to shop around and ask them the questions above.

Regardless of who you choose, a competent SEO agency or consultant should be an outstanding communicator, handle your business as if it were their own, and follow the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates.

As SEO is a long-term investment, it is crucial that you find a consultant willing to work with you long-term and to grow alongside your business.

If you would like to chat more about what an SEO consultant can do for your business, shoot me an email, or book a free 15-minute consultation! I’m happy to answer any questions you may have!