Having a beautiful and well-kept website, e-commerce or blog is not enough today. In fact, if the site and the topics covered are not displayed on the first page of Google for the related keywords that bring traffic and conversions, potential customers may not even know of our existence: obtaining better visibility on search engines is in fact essential for increase visits to the site, which can lead people to know better the project, the brand and consequently increase sales and revenues for example from advertising.

But what to do if there is no time or technical skills to improve the search engine ranking of the website? It might make sense to contact an experienced and reliable SEO Consultant  , or a person who deals with this job, to make sure that by typing precise keywords the website appears first on Google – or at least in the first positions of the SERP .

Being able to emerge today in the sea of ​​content on the Web is not easy, but there are real strategies that allow you to emerge, undermine the competition and reach a level of success and satisfactory earnings. That’s why in this guide we will go over everything on the subject, what to pay attention to when contacting one and how to undertake this work.

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What is it, or rather who it is?

The SEO consultant is  a professional who analyzes, reviews and implements all the changes to be made to websites so that they are optimized for search engines. This means that idea of ​​the strategies and puts them into practice to maximize traffic to the site, so as to improve the so-called page rank on Google and Bing.

The overall goal is to increase the level of traffic to a website by using keywords and key topics to improve the user experience and meet the search engine guidelines.

In other words, it means that it manages to make your site appear at the top of the search engine results for those specific keywords (or keywords) useful for that specific activity. Years ago the work took place very differently from the current one; then, with the many changes to Google’s algorithms introduced in the last period, it now requires having a set of specific skills.

Expertise

In fact, a consultant must have specific skills: he must first of all be a solver of technical and content-related problems, must have the ability to prioritize key actions before identifying them, must be able to analyze a website, perform keyword research, implement link building strategies and develop relevant and engaging quality content.

It is not for nothing that the most famous phrase among professionals is “content is the king”. So when you specifically ask yourself what an SEO consultant does, the answer lies in this list:

  1. understand the customer’s marketing objectives, the competitive position in the sector, its business niche, the products or services it has and the brand positioning factors
  2. perform an SEO audit , i.e. examine, test and solve website problems
  3. website optimization both through on-page SEO techniques (content structure, H tags, images, formatting and internal linking) and through off-site SEO techniques (technical aspects and link building)
  4. search for main, secondary and long-tail keywords , which means knowing how to identify new potential targets to attract readers and customers
  5. implementation of keywords on the site
  6. work on the user experience
  7. diagnose technical problems and solve them
  8. know Local SEO if your SEO consultancy activity is aimed at local businesses
  9. SEO copywriting skills
  10. know the news of the sector and keep up to date on the changes that are constantly introduced by the search engines
  11. know the CMS for the management of sites and content, such as Magento, WordPress, Prestashop etc.
  12. optimize the structure of internal connections
  13. use KPIs to evaluate the effectiveness of the SEO campaign
  14. design and implement link earning and link building strategies
  15. make monthly SEO reports to be sent to the customer.

SEO and Web Marketing consultant

The SEO is a piece of a broader marketing strategy, therefore, the labor consultant goes hand in hand and can be entrusted to one or more professional experts. NYC SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is also a branch of Inbound Marketing , a set of strategies that allow a website to be found by customers and entrepreneurs / professionals to stop looking for them one by one.

How to become an SEO consultant

This question can only have one answer: study, study, try, test, bang your head, test again, understand how to continuously improve and grow the projects you are working on. In fact, he is a highly requested figure in the current market and there are many ways to undertake this profession; even if there is no pre-established path or a degree course dedicated to this figure, it is possible to become an SEO consultant:

  1. reading the many articles found on the Web, first of all on foreign sites such as the Moz blog, an inexhaustible source of information on SEO
  2. reading the books dedicated to the subject
  3. by following an online or classroom SEO course
  4. entering the web marketing agencies as an intern
  5. studying as a self-taught, i.e. building websites and blogs and trying to position them on search engines.

In fact, millions of theoretical notions can be acquired, but then the practice is what really makes you learn. However, there is no SEO certification, so these are the only ways to go.

E-commerce consultant

It is that figure specialized in the optimization of online stores and therefore, in addition to having all the skills of an SEO strategist and specialist for websites and blogs (corporate and otherwise), he knows the infrastructure and architecture of e -commerce and their positioning factors.

How much it earns

There is no single answer. The cost of a consultation can in fact vary from a few hundred euros to thousands of dollar, it all depends on the project that is commissioned.

What questions to ask to choose the right one?

Are you looking for a consultant who can help your online project grow? Here are some questions to ask before entrusting a consultation that will avoid you finding yourself in a difficult situation, in which you could contact the hired person and say “I want my money back !”.

  1. Can I have a list of your current and past customers?
  2. How will you improve my positioning on search engines?
  3. Do you comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines?
  4. Can you guarantee that my site will become first on Google? If he answers “yes”, it is better to run away: nobody can guarantee similar results.
  5. Will you let me know all the changes you will make to the site?
  6. How will you measure the success of SEO campaigns?
  7. How will we communicate and how often?

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Finally, what will happen as soon as your contract expires? Think about protecting yourself from the start: you should still retain ownership of everything that has been optimized, so make sure that the contract indicates that at the end of the job it will not remove anything from the work done (and paid).

When do you see the results of SEO consultancy?

It depends. The results can be achieved within a few months or a year, everything varies according to the project being treated.

 

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