If your website doesn’t appear on the first page of search engine results, your potential customers might be completely unaware that it exists. Improving your search engine visibility is absolutely crucial to boosting visits to your website, which in turn can lead to better brand awareness and an increase in sales and profits. But, what if you lack the time and skills to improve your website’s search engine result ranking? It definitely makes sense to hire an experienced, professional SEO consultant. When hiring an SEO consultant, here are some questions that you need to be asking.
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How Will You Improve My Rankings?
A good SEO consultant will always be honest and clear about the SEO methods that they are planning to use in order to improve your website’s search engine ranking. Steer clear of any consultants who are reluctant to share their methods with you, as this could well mean that they are planning on using black-hat or other frowned-upon techniques. They should be able to easily explain the strategies that they are going to use in order to drive your website’s ranking up, as well as estimate how long this should take. For a good SEO consultant who’ll always share their plans with you, see https://www.flagstonesearchmarketing.com/.
Do You Follow Google Best Practices?
When looking for an SEO consultant, you want a professional who will adhere to Google’s publicly posted webmaster best practices which specifically lay out guidelines and prohibit twelve different common SEO tricks including automatic generation of spammy content or adding bogus, hidden links or text. If your SEO expert does not follow the rules and guidelines set out by Google, your website could well suffer and end up being reduced to a drastically low search ranking. Even worse yet, Google could penalize your website for failing to follow the rules and ban it from the search results altogether.
Can You Guarantee a Number One Spot?
You might think that the answer you want to hear when asking this question is yes, but the truth is, you’re looking for an SEO professional who says the exact opposite. No matter how good at SEO they may be, they will not be able to guarantee to get your website to the number one spot in the Google search results. However, beware of bogus SEO ‘professionals’ who will try and make these kind of claims. If a consultant says that they can definitely get your website to the number one ranking, experts recommend steering clear.
Local Search
Local SEO is becoming more and more important and for a number of businesses, appearing in general results alone is not enough – it’s vital to appear in Google’s Local Search results, too. For this reason, you should ask any potential SEO professional candidates whether or not they are experienced at local SEO, especially if appearing in local search results is essential to your business. Don’t assume that improving general SEO also improves local SEO.
Before hiring an SEO consultant, it’s important to make sure that you’ve made the right choice.
