I offer search engine optimisation consultations face to face in Brighton, Hove and East Sussex. I assess what areas you need help in and can give regular face to face consultations where we work together to improve your website’s rankings.
I can also offer a more managed tailored approach where we decide how much help you need together, and in what way I can best help your online marketing with your budget.
If you are unsure who to choose as a consultant, whether we are worth the money we charge, or how to tell if we are doing our jobs properly I put together the following guide.
Send me an email and I will be back in contact to arrange a free initial consultation and we can take things from there, or read on if you are unsure.
What is an search engine optimisation(SEO) consultant?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation - making your website the best it possibly can be for a search engine. There has been a recent trend in saying that ‘SEO is dead and search engine optimisation consultants are snake oil salesmen’.
SEO in 2015 has evolved into a legitimate trade. There is a lot of work involved in getting your website to be the best. That is not to say that SEO consultants have powers which are beyond small business owners - which many larger firms would lead you to believe.
With the right level of help anybody can make a website rank. A good search consultant will be able to identify how much help you will need in achieving your goals. A SEO consultant should give the option to train you to manage your own campaign if that is something you want to achieve.
What should a SEO consultant do onsite?
This isn’t a do it yourself SEO guide so I will keep this very simple. SEO consultants are here to give your business personalised advice on how to rank better on the internet against your competitors.
It is an SEOs job to make you rank higher on Google for the phrases of your choice. In 2007 this meant keyword stuffing, finally in 2015 Google’s technical ability has finally caught up with it’s philosophy so SEO can now be quite hard work.
A search engine optimisation consultant’s main job is to audit your website - ensure that on page you are compliant with the best practises as we currently understand them. This is a rapidly evolving world and how much general marketing skill your SEO consultant has at this stage will define just how good they are.
You really want a consultant who is giving you recommendations not just on search engines but also how to improve conversions when people reach your page. Ensuring that people engage well with your content is a vital part of SEO which a lot of consultants don’t take the time to do.
There is another group of “search engine optimisation consultants” who know next to nothing and just outsource their work to India (sweatshops bring in low quality work). Other’s copy competitor’s work with the goal of getting their inferior copy content ranking.
Really what truly good SEO consultants do is optimise your website for both user and search engine. Getting you more traffic, and a higher conversion rate of traffic into paying customers.
A few years ago you could cheat to get better rankings at the cost of user experience. Thankfully those days are now behind us - to rank well you must be good, but to be good doesn’t mean you will rank well.
Depending on the type of consultant you are employing you may want somebody who will make all the necessary changes themselves, or just somebody who will advise you every step of the way. Because all businesses are unique I negotiate a package to suit you based on the level of help you need.
What should a SEO consultant do offsite?
The reason a lot of incompetent search engine optimisation consultants are now running round like headless chickens proclaiming the death of SEO is that Google is slowly moving away from link building as a ranking method. This is not to say that link building has no place in an SEO strategy, things have just become more complicated.
There is no internationally recognised qualification so many of the people who have been shouting that “SEO is dead” just don’t have the skill set required to continue at their jobs, and want to give the rest of us bad press.
Off page in 2015 a large amount of our job is down to link analysis. Is it worth building a link here? Is that old link from a bad source? There is a strong overlap between search engine optimisation and social media which I regularly blog about. Really all web marketing is interconnected.
In 2015 be careful about how link focused your potential SEO consultant might be - and make sure they look at all traffic sources and not just Google for ranking opportunities.
How to choose the best SEO consultant?
This is a hard section to write. Every business is different and your SEO consultant has to be able to recognise that otherwise they are worthless. Don’t sign up to a scheme where you give somebody on fiver your URL and they submit you to a few search engines.
It is often best to start with an SEO audit where you speak one on one to a consultant and they tell you what issues your site may have and how to fix them. From this audit you should be able to pick up whether your potential SEO consultant will help you some of the key points I raised in the previous sections:
- Do they just look at on site SEO?
- Do they just look at linkbuilding?
- Do they understand not all links are good?
- Do they understand social media and other marketing methods impact on SEO?
These are just a few things to think about. Large firms are often resource rich and time poor. You only want one SEO consultant. A personalised approach like this is vital to build a strategy and stick to it.
I would always advise going with a small team, or a sole trader(me). Sole traders are cheaper but it is important to be sure they know what they are doing. Your search engine optimisation consultant is like a marketing team member. Don’t be afraid to essentially give them a job interview.
The best way to get an idea of whether you local SEO consultant will be the right fit for you is to take a look at their existing work. Read their blogs and case studies. I believe that if you can build yourself a website, with the right training you can market yourself. I have a blog designed to give the necessary tools to you if that is the path you want to take.
If you want more personalised training, consultation or implementation get in contact with me. Remember I offer face to face search engine optimisation consultations in the Brighton area so read some of my work and then contact me to discuss how I can help you grow.
Full SEO Strategy for 2015 - Do it yourself SEO
Send an email - I will be in touch. I can garuntee that even if you don’t want to employ me I will find some things to improve on your website in the free initial consultation.