What does an SEO Consultant do?

If you have a website, then you may have heard about a thing called search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that involves improving the rankings of your website on search engines in order to generate more leads for your company or service. An SEO consultant can help you on a short term and long-term SEO and content marketing strategy that you can use to improve the status of your website.

 

What is an SEO Consultant?

An SEO consultant is someone who understands how to rank websites on Google and can provide you with an actionable SEO audit. SEO audits are reports that provide you with the current status of your website, and identify areas where there’s room for improvement. They will also provide you with monthly ranking reports to show how your website is improving over time.

 

What does an SEO Consultant do?

An SEO Consultant is your digital marketing professional who can provide you with general SEO advice and answer any of your questions. SEO Consultants will also help you identify and prioritize which optimizations on your website will help make the most impact on your rankings. SEO experts invest in SEO tools that allow them to perform keyword research and conduct competitor analysis reports for you. In most cases, SEO consultants are paid by business owners that want to get more traffic and leads from search engines. Since SEO is a long-term investment, you want to make sure you choose a partner who has the best interest in your success.

 

Part of an SEO audit includes a roadmap for how you can improve your website on a month to month basis. Sometimes, your website may need to add some more landing pages to target more relevant keywords. In other cases, you may need to add more blog posts to your website. These tasks will be prioritized based on your needs.

Technical SEO Optimizations:

An SEO specialist will help you with your technical optimizations. Does your website have a SSL certificate installed? Do you have a proper robots.txt. file and sitemap so Google can crawl your website properly? They will also assist you with improving your website URL structure.

Google wants websites to provide a user-friendly experience to people who use their platform to search for solutions. This means that how your website is structured  and how fast it loads can impact your rankings.

Your website should be flexible and load in a convenient amount of time. Your website needs to be able to run on all modern devices. Your images should be optimized to reduce loading times. Your pages should provide enough information to help the user feel satisfied. Does your page answer a question or offer a solution ? An SEO consultant can work with your web development team to help improve the buyers journey throughout your website. These recommendations can help improve the conversion rate of your website.

On-Page SEO

If you need on-page SEO optimization, an SEO Consultant can help you find the right keywords to target. They will also help you optimize your title and meta tags. A general rule of thumb is to have one focus keyword per landing page. This allows you to create more opportunities to rank for a number of keywords with highly optimized pages.

 

It’s also a good idea to keep an active blog, so Google sees that your website is consistently being updated with new information. You don’t always need to add new blog posts, though. Sometimes, going back to improve some of your older content can be just as effective.

 

Interlinking your content properly can help spread out the authority between your web pages. Menu links, contextual links, and footer links can all provide additional value to the user as well. The right interlinking strategy can help improve your rankings with exact match anchor texts.

 

Off-page SEO

An SEO consultant can also help guide you with your off page SEO strategies. This can include methods to acquiring backlinks to your website, or improving your social media presence.

If you’re a local business, a backlink strategy might include building local citations, or updating your existing ones. They can help you figure out how to leveraging existing relationships to secure backlinks from your partners websites. Additionally, your social media profiles need to be optimized so people can find your content on those platforms as well.

 

A good SEO consultant is invested in providing you with an ROI on your investment. While the main goal of SEO is to generate more traffic to your website, the value if that traffic can be worthless if you aren’t targeting the right people. That’s why keyword research and competitor analysis are two SEO focal points that you shouldn’t cut corners on. Avoid hiring an SEO company that is willing to accept your money without properly analyzing your situation. You should also consider that while SEO experts will do their best to achieve hire rankings for your website, no one can guarantee you ranking number one.

 

While there are always algorithm updates to worry about, having a well-designed website and a proper SEO strategy will prevent you from being penalized during any of these updates. An SEO specialist stays up to date with the latest trends in the industry, so you can focus on your business without worrying.

 

If you want to improve your website traffic, the best way is to hire an SEO consultant or agency who understands your goals.

Additional SEO Resources:

Hire a New York SEO Consultant

SEO Onboarding Questions for New Clients

SEO Acronyms and Abbreviations Worth Knowing

Digital Marketing Blog

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