The most popular digital marketing directions, like pay-per-click advertising and social media marketing, work as long as you invest in them. However, high rankings, increased visibility, and the generous traffic that comes with them are only possible through search engine optimization (SEO).
Contrary to popular opinion, SEO isn’t as simple as adding keywords to your content and waking up the next morning to an enormous increase in website traffic.
In fact, effective SEO doesn’t happen overnight — it’s usually a massive long-term activity that involves multiple aspects, takes time and requires professional expertise.
The good news is that the time and effort spent on search engine optimization do pay off if you’ve done it right. More good news is that you don’t have to play a guessing game by DIYing your SEO strategy. Instead, you can use professional SEO consulting services to help you nail your marketing goals.
What Is SEO Consulting?
SEO consulting is a professional service provided by individuals or agencies with expertise in search engine optimization.
SEO consultants offer the ultimate guidance, advice, and strategic recommendations to businesses, nonprofits, website owners, etc., to help them improve online visibility and search engine rankings.
The goal of SEO consulting is to optimize a website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately drive more organic traffic to it.
What Does An SEO Consultant Do?
As mentioned, a well-thought-out search engine optimization goes beyond keywords — it entails numerous essential steps to ensure the best possible results.
Let’s explore the key phases a typical SEO consultancy involves and what a professional SEO consultant can help you with.
1. Conducting an SEO audit
SEO consultants start by performing a website audit. This helps them assess various factors affecting search engine rankings, such as the site’s structure, content, keywords, backlinks, and technical aspects (including speed and mobile-friendliness).
The audit allows SEO consultants to identify and prioritize areas for improvement and fix the detected errors.
2. Developing an SEO strategy
Based on the audit results, an SEO consultant devises an SEO content strategy. This is a comprehensive plan outlining specific actions, techniques, and tactics to improve the website’s visibility and attract organic traffic through competently crafted and promoted web content.
An SEO content strategy usually includes keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, link-building activities, a content plan, and a setup of analytical tools for measuring the effectiveness of the campaign.
3. Performing keyword research
Professional SEO advisors use a combination of specialized tools to perform keyword research. It allows them to identify and select quick-win keywords and phrases that the website’s target audience will likely type in when searching for products, services, or information.
Keyword research is a fine science as it requires you to select the keywords that are relevant and have an accessible keyword difficulty score and a good search volume.
4. Creating the semantic core
Next, SEO consultants expand their findings from keyword research by ideating variations, synonyms, long-tail keywords, and related terms.
After collecting a substantial list of keywords, SEO experts categorize them into groups or themes based on their relevance and semantic relationships and prioritize them according to factors like search volume (how frequently they are searched), competition (how difficult it is to rank for them), and relevance to your business or content.
5. Mapping out a content strategy
Based on keyword research and your goals, a website SEO consultant will help you create a content strategy.
This usually involves determining the types of content to create, for example, blog posts, articles, product descriptions, etc., and assigning keywords to specific pieces of content.
In addition, SEO consultants provide recommendations on keyword density, visuals, and structure and provide more tips to make content easily scannable by paragraphing and incorporating lists, etc.
6. Planning on-page SEO
After analyzing the findings of the website audit, an SEO consultant creates a list of recommendations concerning on-page optimization.
These recommendations usually involve removing duplicate content (it’s disastrous for your rankings!), optimizing meta tags (titles, descriptions, alt texts) for each page to make them more search engine friendly, enhancing your website structure, and incorporating internal linking.
7. Working out a link-building strategy
One of the critical aspects of SEO is link building — backlinks immensely impact a website’s rankings and the amount of organic traffic it receives since they directly influence the site’s Domain Authority.
The SEO consultant will develop a link-building strategy tailored to your website and goals. This strategy includes defining the types of websites to acquire backlinks, identifying target anchor texts, and setting KPIs (the number of backlinks required to rank web pages at the top of Google’s SERPs).
8. Devising a local SEO plan (if applicable)
If your business has physical locations, optimizing for local search is essential.
An expert SEO consultant can help set up or optimize your Google My Business profile, research and insert locally relevant keywords, and provide recommendations on amending your website’s content and meta tags so that local audiences can easily find you.
Benefits Of Partnering With A Professional SEO Consulting Agency
Hiring a professional SEO consultant has several decisive advantages over doing SEO on your own and even over hiring an in-house team.
There’s a plethora of courses that allow you to learn SEO and use this knowledge to improve your website’s rankings. However, this takes time and effort. And to top it off, can distract you from more important aspects of your business.
Moreover, a lack of experience can reduce your chances of generating fast and effective results.
On the other hand, by hiring a professional SEO marketing consultant, you can save time and use it for other critical tasks.
SEO agencies and individual SEO consultants have years of practical experience in search engine optimization, which enables them to select the best tactics to enhance your website’s search engine rankings, drive more organic traffic, and, as a result, achieve your business goals.
In addition, extensive experience enables them to do it faster than an SEO newcomer.
And that’s not all: An average search engine optimization consultant typically has experience working with various industries, meaning they can create a winning strategy to address your exclusive needs, taking into account industry specifics.
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Access to professional tools
SEO consultants buy access to premium SEO tools that help with keyword research, competitor analysis, performance tracking, and more.
When using professional SEO consulting services, you won’t need to pay for these tools, saving your budget.
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Avoiding link building scams
Link building is where we recommend partnering with an SEO professional beyond just creating a strategy. Your link building success will greatly depend on the quality of the sites your links will be placed on.
And if at least one of them has low Domain Authority, is part of a PBN, includes links to restricted content, or has been previously banned by Google, you’ll risk getting penalized.
Luckily, this is easy to avoid by working with a professional SEO consultant. SEO consultants usually have a database of dependable websites they’ve been partnering with for years and can help you acquire high-quality links.
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Meeting Google algorithm updates
Google constantly updates its search ranking algorithms — this is vital to ensure that users see the most relevant search results.
SEO experts keep track of the latest Google updates to consider them when developing SEO strategies for their clients.
5 Signs That You Need To Hire An SEO Consultant
Still hesitating on whether to hire a professional SEO consultant? Here’s a list of signs to help you make a winning decision.
If at least one of these points applies to you, it’s time to start looking for a professional SEO consulting agency to help you out.
1. Your website is getting poor traffic and has low rankings
If your website isn’t getting the desired number of visitors and is lost in the sea of competitors somewhere on page 10+ in Google results, it might be high time to hire an SEO consultant.
The specialist will perform an SEO site audit to find out what keeps your website from ranking high and receiving good traffic and design a strategy to improve the situation.
2. You want to ensure your site performs flawlessly
Google algorithms change, and it might be risky to rely on what makes your site work well today.
For example, some technical issues (such as a configuration error in the sitemap) that are unnoticeable and can be revealed only through a technical audit can drop your traffic overnight.
Just as people regularly undergo a medical checkup, it’s wise to have your website’s condition checked by a professional, especially if your profits depend on the organic traffic you get.
3. You and your team can’t afford to spend time on SEO
Managing a business requires time and effort, and so does search engine optimization. By trying to cope with all that simultaneously, you risk ending up with gaps and costly errors here and there.
That’s why it’s best to entrust your SEO strategy to a professional while focusing on your core business. A win-win!
4. You have time but have never done SEO before
When it comes to your business, experimenting with DIYing your SEO can cost you a lot.
Without proper expertise and relevant experience, you risk making things worse. Not to mention, you’re also going to pay for SEO tools, play guessing games with Google updates, and worry about getting into a link building scheme.
Do you really want that?
5. You’re about to do a website redesign
Hiring an SEO consultant is vital if you’re planning a website refresh. The expert will help you devise a winning strategy to ensure that your new website is SEO-friendly, both technically and content-wise.
Conclusion
Outsourcing some aspects of marketing to professionals is always a good idea, especially those that require technical expertise, like SEO.
Hiring an SEO consultant can give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing your strategy won’t miss any details, not to mention access to professional tools, networking with the right websites for effective link building, and experience with various industries.
At ReVerb, we provide the full range of professional SEO services, from SEO consulting to technical site audits to link building and content creation. Contact us today to start leveraging the massive potential of search engine optimization!
