Should you do SEO yourself or hire an SEO agency/consultant? Do you know 7 top qualities a Great SEO consultant should possess? Keep reading on!

After you have set up your blog, you need excellent search engine optimization of the site in order to expand its reach. These days, most clients use the Internet in order to find out products, services, and information regarding companies before making their buying decision.

So, if a customer cannot find your site, they won’t have an opportunity to buy from you too. Optimizing your site for search engines and making it user-friendly is more than a requirement– it’s a MUST now.

We agree that you can get by dong a bit of SEO yourself without taking a help from a SEO consultant, there are certainly lot of SEO aspects that you, a internet marketing novice, would need help with.

It would be best to admit that you cannot do everything yourself. You need to seek out for help in areas where you think you require help on. So like with everything, there’s always 2 sides to every argument. Let’s go over each of them, shall we?

Doing SEO yourself – What does it entail?

1.    By doing SEO yourself, you will save money. Most SEO agencies aren’t cheap, and doing SEO yourself lets you save a bit of money.

2.    You have complete control over everything on your site – the content, images, optimization techniques you will use, etc

3.    During the process, you will also learn a great deal about setting up and running a website too, no matter how LONG it takes

4.    You will have to sit down and research everything yourself to figure out what to do for your site’s success, which will take TIME

5.    After research, you still need to SPEND a lot of time tackling SEO

Having assistance from an SEO agency, on the other hand, will give you more time to focus on important things such as running your business.

Hiring an SEO Company – What does it entail?

Hiring an SEO agency or a consultant can guarantee few things:

1.    The internet marketing of your business will be taken care of … completely

2.    You have more time focusing on the logistics aspects of your business

3.    If you want to expand your services, or venture into a new niche, or participate in a creative marketing scheme, you know you have a company you can depend and trust

4.    The only disadvantage of hiring an SEO agency is that you will have to spend money and give a little bit of control to them

From all these above arguments, you can clearly see that hiring SEO consultant far outweighs arguments against it. So it would be wise to spend a little bit of money to reap benefit in the long term.

Now you see have seen how hiring SEO company over doing SEO yourself would benefit your company, now let’s look at what you need to consider before hiring a SEO consultant.

7 Top Qualities a Great SEO Consultant Should Possess:

1. Success Rate of the SEO consultant – You might be tempted hire an SEO company offering services for $50/hour thinking it’s cheap. But cheap doesn’t always translate to be the best. Before hiring a professional SEO consultant, make sure you are aware of what they bring to the table.

For example, you can ask them to show their portfolio, or their previous SEO performance reports to make a wise decision.Sometimes an SEO consultant may possess 8 to 10 years of experience, but look for other things as well. Know about their “success rate” with their previous projects.

2. Highly Creative – You need to remember that SEO isn’t a pure science. Although there are certain key SEO strategies everyone has to follow, nonetheless, SEO is still an art and a science.

Optimizing a site, for example, is more than just “keyword stuffing” and “inserting tons of links.” You need to be creative and think outside of the box to make your sites content truly unique and outrank many competitors within your niche.

A professional SEO consultant knows this and he/she will continue to do trial and errorsuntil they come up with a customized solution based on your project.

4. Not Hesitant to Perform Extensive Research – Without an extensive research, an effective SEO plan can never be achieved. Whether it’s optimizing the site and crafting the content or link building to find out profitable keywords, an “extensive” research is necessary.

So, before you make a decision to hire an SEO consultant, make sure he’s willing to do in-depth research for your project.

5. Good Analytical Skills – Just like web design,SEO strategies varies from one project to another. SEO techniques and strategies that worked well for a site may not work for another. It’s imperative that you hire an SEO consultant who has good “analytical skills.”

In other words, they must be able to look at your site closely and come up with an effective SEO campaign to make it work.

6. Up-to-date with Current SEO Trends – SEO is going to stay for a long time, that’s for sure. In few months, yesterday’s best SEO practices will also become obsolete.

So indulging in aggressive SEO by participating in link schemes, manipulating anchor text, or any other black hat SEO methods to influence search engine rankings will only land you into trouble.

On the other hand, a great SEO consultant always follows the white hat SEO techniques accepted by Google. If he/she isn’t sure about specific SEO strategies, they’ll spend time keeping themselves informed about current developments, upgrades, and trends in the industry.

7. Result-oriented – A great SEO consultant can deliver the “result” your business is looking for within a specific period of time. They have the right tools, expertise, and the know-how to formulate an effective SEO plan, implement them, and follow up with necessary steps to make your site climb higher in search engines and get highly targeted traffic.

Remember, if they can’t show you their progress, they are not a professional SEO consultant. Period!

In this guide, we first gave you few benefits of hiring a great SEO consultant over doing SEO yourself and outlined 7 top qualities a great SEO consultant should possess.

Over to you! Tell us few qualities you consider a top SEO consultant must possess? Please leave a comment below. Every small or big idea is welcome and we’ll reply them … promise!




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