Did you know humans can survive 3 days without water? Have you ever wondered how long humans can go without Google? To be honest, not far enough! Today, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second, which account for 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion search queries per year globally.
Thousands of people are searching on Google every second, but the real question is, are they able to find your business on the first page? If your website doesn’t appear on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other major search engine, your potential clients might not even know you exist on the web. To optimize your online business, you must take help of an online SEO consultant who is an expert in improving organic presence of a website resulting in better search engine visibility, lead generation, sales, and return on investment (ROI).
When it comes to finding an online SEO consultants in India or a professional SEO consulting agency, you’ll be inundated with thousands of search results. Selecting the right one could be the wisest thing you ever do for your business, however choosing the wrong one could be your biggest mistake in life. Why? The potential damage caused by an inexperienced SEO professional by practicing unethical SEO techniques, such as keyword stacking and keyword stuffing, tiny text, hidden text, and hidden links, duplicate content or mirror site, link farming, cybersquatting or domain squatting, and typo squatting or URL hijacking could have negative impact on your brand credibility. That’s why it is necessary to take the right decision at the right time otherwise you will end up wasting your oodles of money and time as well. Before hiring any online SEO consultant, you must prepare a checklist of questions that you should ask to make the right choice. Listed below are some important questions you should ask when considering prospective SEO consultant or any agency for optimizing your website.
#1 how will you improve my website search engine presence?
Steer clear of such agencies or freelance SEO consultants who won’t freely discuss their strategies that will improve organic presence of a website.
Instead, you should look for those who explain their strategies in detail that they would use to improve a website online presence and search rankings. A reputable SEO consultant will always give you an estimate of how long it could take to achieve desired results.
Always ensure that the candidate’s proposal includes a technical website audit to weed out those factors that could lower your website search engine ranking, including 404 pages, broken links, missing alt text in images, schema markup, H1 tags, Meta tags, sitemap, robot.txt file and more. An online SEO consultant always provides both on-page and off page optimization suggestions.
#2 How do you conduct keyword research?
In the earlier days, keyword research meant putting a term into a keyword research tool and producing a list of relevant keywords, and developing content around those keywords and incorporating them at several places. Today, this has become a thing of the past. Modern keyword research requires smart effort – today it’s all about understanding user intent. A good SEO consultant always understands the intent behind users search queries.
When considering prospective SEO consultant or an agency, you should always ensure that the candidate understands user intent and talks about the methodologies and tools he uses to determine keyword intent. If the conversation revolves around the number of search volumes and keyword density, it’s clear that the candidate is still operating outdated SEO practices.
#3 Ask them about their link-building strategies
Some SEO consulting agencies or freelancer consultants will promise to create thousands of links for your site within a month, but the reality is that those links will be of no use. Always remember that one high-quality link from a credible, and authoritative site is far better than hundreds of low-quality purchased links or machine-created links in blog comments. The SEO consultant should talk about building quality links over quantity links.
#4 Ask what metrics define “success” for you
This is a tricky question. If an agency or an SEO consultant promises you first-page ranking within 3 months, it is pretty much clear that they will be using black-hat techniques. Steer clear of such agencies or consultants. They may bring a good amount of traffic to your website, but ultimately your website will be penalized by Google resulting in significantly reduced traffic and rankings.
Legitimate SEO professionals will always build their marketing plans around your business goals. For example, if you are looking for more local traffic, they will improve your business presence by optimizing your local business listing profiles and directories. Or, if you want to increase your website traffic, they may prioritize content creation or keyword optimization. In nutshell, an SEO agency’s success metrics will be based upon your business goals.
#5 Always ask how much experience do they have
How long have they been working in the industry? Is it a well-established agency or a new one? Also, don’t hesitate to ask about their previous clients for whom they have worked and achieved desired results. It is imperative to check the agency or freelancer background, experience, and most important thing, who is accountable for your website online presence?
Asking all these questions when considering prospective SEO consultant or any agency for your website will help you in deciding the right agency or a consultant.
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