Hiring an SEO consultant to optimize your web site for the search engines can be very beneficial. All you do is pay a monthly fee while the SEO consultant does all of the hard work – researching keywords, analyzing your website and your online competitors, and building all the links. However, hiring the wrong SEO consultant can turn into a nightmare if they do not end up doing the job properly, or worse, if they have incorrect beliefs about SEO. This might mean wasted money, and the loss of customers that should on your website had the SEO work been done correctly. To avoid this nightmare, here are 7 ways for you to tell if your SEO consultant was sent from the devil to jeopardize your business.
1. Your SEO consultant does not understand the final purpose of SEO. We all know that SEO aims to get your page on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword. However, there is a much bigger picture. You want your first page on Google so you can get more customers to your website so that they enter your mailing list and/or buy something. An SEO consultant should aim to achieve more sales for you through their work. It’s not about ranking on the first page. It’s about getting more targeted customers. Make sure that your SEO specialist knows this.
2. Your SEO specialist insists that you should submit to hundreds of search engines, and perhaps even charges you for it. Nowadays, submitting your website to search engines is almost pointless. You should only be able to making a website that is valuable for visitors. The search engines will use their spiders to crawl your web-pages and index them. Indeed, submission is unnecessary. In addition, the other smaller search engines are for the most part powered by the three biggest search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Getting index in those search engines means that you will be indexed in the smaller search engines. An SEO consultants that insists otherwise does not have your best interests in mind.
3. Your SEO consultant fails to do proper keyword research. Keyword research is the most crucial step in search engine optimization. If you get this step wrongly, all the other steps such as optimization and rank tracking are pointless. Your website must target keywords that attract targeted buyers, have a substantial amount of searches by web surfers, and a relatively low level of online competition. Furthermore, if your SEO professional is targeting one word keywords, they were likely sent from the devil. One word keywords are ineffective, because it attracts a broad number of people, most of which will not think that your website is relevant. For instance, people that type in ‘dolls’ can be looking for all sorts of things: Barbie dolls, matryoshka dolls, or wooden dolls. On the other hand, if people type in ‘cheap puppet dolls’, you have a greater idea of what they are looking for. An SEO consultant that does not appreciate this should stay away from your website.
4. Your SEO professional promises you that you can be on the first page in under 30 days. If you receive this promises, avoid your SEO professional like the plague. Most likely, they are overpromising, or intending to use unethical SEO techniques to get your website ranked. Unethical SEO techniques are termed black hat techniques. They are effective in getting your website on the first page – for a while. Eventually, the search engines notice and proceed to de-index or ban your site.
5. Your SEO consultant claims that they know from someone from Google, and hence can get your website on page 1 without a sweat. As soon as you hear this, a red flag should go up. No employees from Google can ever influence the organic, unpaid listings on Google. Web pages are ranked according to their popularity and relevance, not by some shady tweaking behind closed doors. Only an SEO consultant sent from the devil would sell you their services based on the fact that they know someone from Google.
6. Your SEO specialist insists that you spend your whole marketing budget on SEO. This is certainly a poor omen for your business. SEO is just one marketing strategy among many. Spending your whole marketing budget on SEO is putting all of your eggs in one basket. It’s very risky, and will make your online business very vulnerable. While SEO is an effective marketing strategy and can pay itself over and over again, you should be considering other marketing strategies, such as Pay Per Click, article marketing, and forum posting. Furthermore, you may even consider offline advertising. Additionally, organic listings can be volatile. Your website may be on page 1 of Google one day, and then page 5 the next. Diversifying your marketing budget will protect yourself against the consequences of this. Doing otherwise would only be following advice from the devil.
7. Your SEO consultant is overly aggressive in their link building. While link building is essential for SEO, and the more links the better, overly aggressively building links may harm your website. Aggressive link building does not look natural to search engines. Once search engines notice, they are very likely going to penalize your website. If your SEO consultant was not sent from the devil, they would steadily build up links over time, so that it looks natural to the search engines.
You have just read 7 ways on how to tell if your SEO consultant was sent from the devil. Using an SEO consultant can be very convenient, and potentially very profitable. However, picking the wrong one may greatly harm your business. Remember the above 7 things when picking your SEO consultant to make sure that they were not sent from the devil to ruin your online business.
