What Are The Traits of A Good Search Engine Optimization Expert? How Do You Weed Out The Pretenders?
Search engine optimization is one of the most popular digital marketing strategies available to website owners. It is also the most cost-efficient way to establish your website as a credible source of information. But this, like most things, comes at a cost, and that cost is that proper SEO requires a lot of time and expertise.
These resources are often something that business owners don’t have, and it’s also because of this that sometimes it’s much better to simply delegate these tasks to people who are much more qualified in SEO. This way, business owners are able to dedicate their time and energy to ventures that suit their abilities better.
Why Is Getting Good SEO Important?
Because of how expensive SEO can be, there’s a real danger in making the mistake in entrusting your campaign to an under-qualified SEO provider who might not just be ineffective at the task at hand, but worse, might even have a negative impact on your website’s ranking. It’s for this exact reason that the safest way to go is to hire a reputable managed SEO provider. But, if you truly want to work with individual SEOs, then you may gauge their skill before entrusting your site (and your business reputation) to them.
How Do You Gauge An SEO’s Skill?
It can be difficult to gauge a candidate’s level of skill without a practical exam. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. There are many ways through which you can, more or less, determine whether a candidate is a good fit or not. You can do so by basing your decision on these factors:
Industry Experience
Even when you consider the fact that SEO is a fast-changing industry wherein the rules can change without any prior notice, a candidate’s experience is still going to weigh heavily on how well they will be able to react to these industry changes. While there are candidates who are truly gifted in SEO despite not having a lot of experience, you’re going to want to work with experienced individuals because they have been able to hone their skills through the years. More importantly, they are also more likely to perform well.
Expectations
It’s also important to establish the things that you can expect from your candidate should they be hired. This allows you to see if your candidate is able to set actionable goals and this also serves as a knockout question. If your candidate sets goals that are too good to be true (I can make your website rank 1st overnight), walk away. This candidate may not be following the guidelines set by Google and this could end up hurting your website ranking.
Methods and Technique
After setting expectations, you also need to determine how the candidate plans to achieve the goals that have been set. The way that these goals are met is very important because this is where you’re going to be able to determine how the candidate works, whether he makes use of proper SEO techniques or if he makes use of black hat SEO techniques. This is also a good way to check a candidate’s mastery of the craft.
Client Feedback
Now, it’s one thing to have a candidate speak for himself and another for a previous client to speak of him. This is the best way to gauge a candidate’s skill because this gives a clear view of his actual performance as well as his work ethic. And when a candidate doesn’t have previous clients, this can either mean that he is either inexperienced or cannot deliver as promised. Whichever the case may be, you wouldn’t want to hire someone who doesn’t have a clear work background.
Final Thoughts
SEO is not an easy task. It’s important to keep in mind that this is a task that is meant for experts. Certificates are good representations of a candidate’s potential skill, but nothing beats results gained from applied knowledge. It takes time for results to surface and getting things done right the first time is vital to a campaign. Choose your SEO provider carefully, dear readers. Your reputation depends on it!
