Why do people hire an SEO consultant anyways?
Imagine a Tennis Coach. Not a great Tennis coach like the one Novak Djokovic recently rehired but one who feeds balls to your younger brother after school at the local park.
He’s not going to break any records in success by any means. But after a while, he’ll sense an opportunity to set up his own business. He’d been grinding away every day for ten years as an employee for the City parks and recreation department.
Not a particularly noble pursuit.
So Jeff, yes, most coaches are named Jeff, decides to set up a website and he calls it “Jeff’s Tennis Academy.”
Great, now all he has to do is wait for people to register on his site and pay for their lessons. The only problem is nobody is coming to Jeff’s site to book tennis lessons. Why?
His website is not properly optimized for people who are looking for tennis coaches.
Why make an example of Jeff? Because it’s the perfect scenario for hiring an SEO consultant.
What Does an SEO consultant actually DO?
Well if we stick with Jeff’s problem there are some very specific things to be done to get people booking on his website so he can feed tennis balls at the park and get paid fairly in doing so.
- Jeff’s website needs to be properly configured to load fast. Jeff was using a free template and server like wordpress.com. While this is great for a casual blogger or grandma who wants to share her photos there are certain things Google just does not like.
- Jeff’s Website needs to be easy to navigate so people searching for his service or his great tips on how to hit your serve like Djokovic are available without much effort.
- Jeff’s website needs to encourage people to actually book their tennis lessons through his site. It needs to be properly optimized for CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).
- Jeff’s website needs to provide multiple means of reaching him via social, chat, email and telephone.
As you can see, an SEO consultant does a lot of rather specific but wide-ranging things to improve the search opportunities for Jeff’s website.
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- Optimizes your site for speed load
- Ensures your site is easy to navigate
- Finds the correct keywords to feature on each page
- Encourages users to become customers once on the site
- Finds other sites to link back to your site
- Fixes errors that Google might penalize your site for
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How to Get Jeff to Hire You As An SEO Consultant?
This is no different than any business where you are considered an expert.
An SEO consultant needs to work tirelessly so they can be recognized as an SEO expert.
The good news is there are many forms of SEO expertise and the type of consultant that Jeff needs is going to be exceptionally different than the one another much more famous Jeff would need.
Yes, Amazon is perhaps one of the most aggressive users of SEO consultants on the planet. After all, they are the go-to search starting place for 49% of buyer intent (also referred to as searcher intent) on the internet as of last year. It means that not only do you need to optimize websites and other branded social media properties for clicks but you need to research, where is the traffic likely to come from.
There are some great tools that can help you with that. Perhaps the best one is Google’s own search console. Here’s a super basic trick I use to find what people are actually searching for when Google suggests your site.
Steps to getting more chances on appearing in multiple search engines.
1.Open search console
2.Tick impressions
3.Download the list of impressions Google matched to your site
4.Clean up the list (make sure there are no irrelevant keywords)
5.Filter these keywords by their value to your brand. Keep in mind the more competitive the more expensive and time consuming it will be to rank for those keywords in all search engines.
6.Attack the “low hanging fruit” with multiple forms of content. Blog articles on your site, guest posts, videos, and reviews. This is the dirty secret to great SEO: THERE IS NO SECRET ITS JUST CONSISTENT HARD WORK
So how to become an SEO expert again?
Practice!
Subscribe to the SEO Quora Feed where experts and wannabe SEOs from India often give tediously long answers to simple questions.
Write about very specific SEO issues that you observe in your own SEO research.
Test results when you implement strategies and refine them according to the data which you discover. Don’t be afraid to report on errors you’ve made in the process though.
Here are some of the best SEO studies I’ve come across on the web that have actually made me better at optimizing websites for my clients.
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- The Impact of Site Speed on SEO Performance
- How the number One SEO Educator Got Ranked Number One for “SEO Backlinks”
- A Case Study About Ranking YOUTUBE VIDEOS The Aggressive Way
- An Authoritative Case Study on Ranking an Affiliate Marketing Blog (hint: don’t monetize with Amazon!)
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The Best SEO Experts Report their failures and successes
One of the best ways to develop a reputation as an SEO expert is to talk about your failures. Some of the world’s leading SEO experts have made millions talking to sold-out audiences about the mistakes they have been responsible for. One of my favorite new SEO gurus on youtube is Chase Reiner.
This guy is fearless. He’s been broadcasting live while giving free site audits on local businesses for more than a year now and if you were to review some of his older videos you would see a very different type of SEO being practiced. I have to give him credit. He’s really opened my eyes to the value of self-improvement in the public sphere.
Now that Jeff finally found an SEO consultant that matched his budget and objectives, he’s now fully booked and enjoying life finally. He’s not training champions just yet but he heard about a kid who hits the ball like a freight train and just loves to play with fuzzy yellow balls. So if there’s a chance for Jeff in building a business online, there’s a chance for pretty much anyone.
If you are looking for an SEO consultant and you run a small business online, you should probably give me a shout.
I have some pretty interesting ideas about how to run an SEO campaign which will make you a lot more money online. Don’t just take my word for it, ask Jeff himself. Well, not Jeff, but take a look at this SEO case study on one of my oldest and most successful SEO clients.