Businesses spend a fortune on the design and development of their website, ensuring it looks appealing and brings value to the customers. Unfortunately, some business owners shortchange their website’s capability when not investing equally in optimization strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer a buzzword but a mainstay. It’s here for good, and if you fail to harness its power to propel your website–and thus, your business–to the top, you’re missing a lot.
Then again, well-intentioned business owners do things on their own SEO-wise. Some even hire an individual who will do the basic tactics and fetch up scattershot results. And yet the website’s ranking is still too low–not even on the second page, traffic is minimal to zero at all, and no leads or conversions to drive sales and profitability.
What will you do? Consult with an SEO expert!
Why, you might ask. Below are the answers to your whys.
First off, let’s learn what an SEO consultant does.
Who is an SEO consultant?
Much like other consultants who specialize in a specific subject matter, an SEO consultant is a professional paid to give advice to whoever needs it. Some of these pieces of advice involved generating higher rankings, more targeted traffic, leads, conversions, sales, and ultimately, more profits. The SEO consultant purports to assist you in reaching your goals with minimal costs, including payments to paid advertisements since SEO is organic.
Fundamentally, an SEO consultant can be an individual, group of people or a company like Optimind that has been in the site optimization business since 2002. An SEO consultant is an expert with extensive knowledge and experience in on-page SEO, off-page SEO (which is basically link building), technical SEO, and content marketing.
SEO consultation process
Although the consultant will not execute the strategies included in the optimization report, which comprises SEO recommendations, it pays to work with someone who has a network of SEO specialists. Better yet, work with an SEO consultant who is also a part of a digital marketing company.
Here’s what the consultation process entails.
- Analyze the client’s online presence.
- Conduct an SEO audit.
- Perform keyword research and analysis.
- Perform competitors analysis.
- Develop an SEO strategy.
- Create an SEO report.
- Discuss the report with the client.
- Prepare an implementation guideline.
How the SEO consultant helps businesses grow
Now, SEO consultation and the professionals themselves provide consultees with essential benefits.
1) Increase website ranking
There are no shortcuts to ranking on Google and other search engines. If another provider tells you otherwise, run away. This is especially true for Google, which captures almost 93% of the search engine market share as of June 2021. In addition, Google constantly publishes algorithm updates to ensure that the users get the experience they deserve–indeed, Google is big on user experience (UX).
SEO consultants keep themselves abreast of these algorithm changes. They are aware that technical requirements may change instantly, so they need to keep themselves informed. This is also why no two SEO reports are the same because the consultant prepares the report for you and you alone. At the very least, the consultant will identify keywords and landing pages and match them to maximize ranking effectiveness. The content of each landing page is especially scrutinized to generate the highest traffic possible, which will not happen if the page is not ranking.
2) Generate organic traffic
The SEO consultant ensures that the website generates not just any traffic but also convert-ready traffic. This traffic comprises potential customers who are ready to buy and finally decide to do so after exploring your website. These figures solidify how valuable organic traffic is for any business, particularly those that recently started.
- Organic search is 5x more valuable than paid search
- Organic search clicks are 70% as valuable as ad clicks
- Organic search has an overall ROI of 6.1, which means earning 6x higher than a business would by using paid search
Furthermore, the SEO consultant’s job is to increase your website’s discoverability through intent keywords and conversion through on-page elements that compel the users to take action. Ranking and traffic is just one part of the optimization process–the goal is to drive conversions with boost profitability and, thus, business growth.
3) Optimize resources
Of course, SEO requires a sizable investment. Some businesses are not quite ready to devote a more significant chunk of their digital marketing budget to optimization strategies. And so they cut corners. For instance, they would buy SEO software that they don’t know how to use because they lack the technical expertise to tackle this aspect. Yes, that’s another investment down the drain.
While SEO consultants also use software applications and tools, the difference is that they are technically proficient in using these. They are trained to use SEO tools and generate insights that will help a website climb the top spots in Google’s results pages. So it’s either you, as the business owner, buy a license to the software and hire a consultant to guide you on how to use it to maximize your investment or hire an SEO consultant who has its arsenal of apps, tools, databases, etc. and create a six-month SEO plan for you. We are leaning towards the second choice.
4) Prevents penalties like deindexation
Another equally important aspect of doing SEO yourself is the inevitability of Google penalties (or manual actions). There are many unknown ways how Google penalizes a website. The two of the most common are:
- demoting the website or page to a lower ranking in favor of websites that meet its quality guidelines
- deindexing certain pages or the entire website when they fail to meet the said guidelines
The problem with Google penalties is that they can be challenging to recover from, especially when you don’t know how to do it. It may take months before Google may even remove the penalty, provided that you take action fixing the page or pages. Even so, the ranking and traffic that you lost because of the penalty may not be recovered at all.
Take control of your SEO
Of course, you don’t want your website to get penalized–and neither do we. Thus, optimize and improve your website’s SEO performance by hiring an SEO consultant. We offer SEO consulting services, and our primary goal is to make sure that the foundations of an SEO-ready website exist. Optimind’s SEO approach is straightforward: understand, design, and execute. Call us now!
