What Should You Expect From Your SEO/SEM Consultant?

Fri, Aug 7, 2009

Link Management, Search Engine Optimization, Work From Home, seo, seo-tips


Knowing what to expect from an SEO consultant can dramatically improve your odds of getting the results you are looking for. Let’s face it, there isn’t any regulation as to who can become a SEO consultant and sell his services. Also there’s a lot of information available out there on the Internet, some of it is free and some of it is not. The truth is that it is relatively easy to learn the basic ropes of SEO, almost anybody can do that pretty quickly, but to truly demonstrate ability in SEO, this is only the fruit of experience and much more global skills than just getting a better ranking.

It’s not all about ranking!

The very first mistake and assumption is ranking. People tend to think that it’s all about your ranking position in the search engines. People become so overly mesmerized about it that they lose focus about everything else. Sure, ranking is important but it’s not everything in SEO, far from it. Search Engine Optimization doesn’t mean getting a high rank in the search engines, it means leveraging on the search engines to get the best results possible for your site/business! There’s a huge difference between both statements. I don’t think that I need to tell you again why it’s worthless for your “Shoe store” website to rank number one for a keyword like “low quality and dirty shoes”… Ranking in the search engines, anybody with basic SEO knowledge can do that, so it can’t be a criterion to decide on your SEO/SEM consultant.

There’s always a why!

A professional SEO/SEM consultant won’t just be able to rank for a keyword, it will be able not only to tell you which keywords your site or pages should be optimized for, but even more importantly why it is so! And when I mean why, I’m not talking about saying things like this one has low competition, or this one is easy to optimize for. What I’m referring to is strategic and analytical skills here. A professional SEO/SEM consultant will be able to decipher your site and its visitor’s behavior, then from such information, he’s able to devise a plan of action as to which keywords your site should be optimized for based on:

  1. Your Traffic Sources.
  2. Your Visitors Behavior.
  3. Your Conversion Rate.

This, I can assure that it is not something that a person with limited skills or experience can do for you. But let’s look even further…

PPC Knowledge

Again, this sounds like something overly simple. Anybody can launch a campaign, so what’s the big deal about it? If you are considering hiring someone to take care of your PPC work, then whenever you talk to that person, he or she should ask you the following question beyond your maximum budget: “What is your customer lifetime value?” Just like SEO is not about having a top ranking for a keyword but rather making sure that the right page is presented to the right people at the right time, PPC is not about writing some ads and letting people click on them until your budget is maxed out. So beyond writing good ads that get clicked through, your consultant should know about and being able to estimate the cost limit for your campaign per bid and not just seeking to max out the budget. Without consideration of ROI, even if your ad gets 11% click through rate and you can boast yourself of another excellent 6% conversion rate, your campaign may still be losing money or being worthless if your cost per acquisition exceeds your average customer lifetime value. Not only that, but since performance is involved too, your SEO/SEM consultant should be very experienced in split testing knowing exactly how to test and optimize not only your ads, but also your landing pages. Remember, you don’t need to be an expert to get ads that get clicked on and maxing out a budget, so you can’t base your decision on that!

In Conclusion

There’s more to a professional SEO/SEM consultant than just basic stuff. He or she’s your partner in business to help you succeed as much as possible. For those reasons, such consultant knows more than just keywords and clicks, but he’s really capable of doing thorough analysis, planning and suggestions to you that will really contribute to your business success. If you ever need a consultant, referring to such skills will help you screen out “fakes” and “unskilled” people, increasing your chances to get your money worth!

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This post was written by:

Nicolas Prudhon - who has written 8 posts on Work From Home Business Blog. Nicolas Prudhon, PhD is a professional SEO strategist, as well as published author.He's dedicated to provide SEO help to people through his site. Join his latest free SEO training course "21 Days SEO Mastery" now!

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  • SEO/SEM is all about link building. If you have some knowledge you can do it by your self.
  • I like this post. Its all about link building its another great post.
  • pozeabsolvire
    Thank you Nicholas for sharing this info. Some of the tips are great . These kind of posts can help very much at least for some of us.
  • Thanks Nicolas, useful guestpost.

    I think, that SEO/SEM should start from the business plan and to follow rather the quality targets than the quantity targets.
    It is true that this is a numbers` game but still conversion beats the quantity. For instance, I have tested different site titles and descriptions and found out that they have an influence on the visitor amounts and actions on the site. And I always, when possible, prefer long tail keywords.
    All in all, the whole marketing chain should follow the business plan and support a NICHE strategy.
  • Very well explaining details on SEO and Ranking. I've learned a lots after reading your post.

    Thanks
    Kha
  • Nice article Nicolas. SEO and SEM are such a minefield, and I've heard so many horror stories of large sums of money paid out for very little return. It's refreshing to see someone right about what the results should be, it's no good ranking really well if your traffic isn't converting.

    I read an interesting article not long ago, I can't remember where, but it gave a rough guide on how to avoid bad SEO/SEM companies. Some of the things it mentioned was to avoid companies that put too much empahsis on things like keyword density, and not enough talk about visitor stats and tracking. Nice to see that opinion backed up with your piece here.
  • hey you got me thinking about this...surely there are also SEO/SEM's that doesn't know what to do. They just think they are SEO's hehehe
  • We all have to realistic and honest with ourselves, like I wrote, the end goal of SEO is not to tell the world that we have a top ranking.

    SEO despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly popular is still something quite unknown to many people, and all the terms used can very easily confuse anybody who doesn't know anything.

    Sadly, many people also learn 1 technique or 2, get good results from it and suddenly consider themselves as Gurus... in essence, any SEO specialist is a testing expert, remember the most important part in S-E-O is the "O" for "Optimization" which means taking something and making it better.

    Unless you can identify and analyze properly where your site is and measure the effect of the changes you are making, you can't talk about optimization.
  • Very true Nicolas, an SEO might get the rankings, but a good SEO will get results. That's the biggest difference!

    Best,
    Ed
  • yeah, GOOD results are the best that you can get from good SEO's
  • Seo is more than building back links. I can prove that major big time. I have sites going for the same exact keywords and one has 200 relevant links and one has 20. Guess which one is in spot 2? Yes you guess it the 20 link site. The structure of the second site is much better. Back links is going to the way side as google is getting tired of people in the same industry, just swapping links.
  • That's right, backlinks are important but they are not everything, far from it. My homepage is the one that has the most backlinks, but it hasn't the highest PR at all (for example), while some other pages for which I didn't even do anything at all to build backlinks, have higher PR.

    What makes your SEO/SEM work effective is a combination of multiple factors, and not just one alone.
  • Yet another great post Nicolas ;)
  • Hi Mikael,

    Thank you, it could almost have a been the 4th part to my recent mini-series.
  • oh, I like the article...really, SEO's do not stuck on ranking only.
  • That's right, SEO doesn't stop at ranking, and because you know the basics doesn't mean that you can do a professional work.

    Everybody (or most of the people) know their alphabet and how to write, now, that doesn't make them a professional copywriter.

    I know how to write, maybe people like my posts, but there's a huge difference between that and being a professional copywriter (which I'm not).

    People just need to learn the differences too when it comes to SEO/SEM.
  • haha i like what you said here. i'm writing too but still trying to make my writings look even better co'z i know in some aspects i suck.

    Thanks man, you opened my mind. I hope we can share some thing about writing sometimes.
  • I don't mind to do that, however I just consider that I'm not qualified to do that ;)

    This reminds me of when I was giving lecture to some teachers regarding child education, and some teachers came back in a later workshop with their position being upgraded to "Gifted Education Specialist"...

    I felt a bit uncomfortable about that, considering that person only attended a 3 hours workshop... Of course, I can't name the teacher nor the school here, but I won't forget about that anytime soon...
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