SEO expert – 8 big reasons why you need a good one

Whether you want more organic traffic or increase your domain strength, an SEO expert can help.

Your website looks awesome, you’ve nailed the premium content and added sizzling media. But still you’re not getting way enough visitors to convert into customers.

It’s not that your website is not doing its job, it may need a touch of SEO love to boost its domain strength, visibility and ultimately; increase its revenue.

SEO experts come in all shapes and sizes, whether it’s as a hired employee, an individual consultant, or an SEO agency.

What they all have in common is that an experienced SEO expert will review your website; will ask about your business goals and how your target visitors. Finally they will identify strategies to improve your search engine rankings and page views.

Possible solutions an SEO expert might prescribe range from something simple like rewriting your HTML title tags to the more complex structural issues that prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your content or obtaining quality links from relevant, higher ranking domains and external web sites.

Yes, this makes sense I hear you say, but how do I find a good one?

1. Years of SEO experience

With Google placing strong emphasis on page rankings and domain strength – a new industry emerged and a proliferation of SEO experts appeared. But that does not mean that these ‘SEO experts’ know what they are doing.

With Google’s hundreds of algorithm ranking factors increasing daily, what worked years ago may be damaging in today’s world. A top SEO expert will know what has changed and they only know this because of the many years of experience they have developed working in the industry.

Plus every website should employ varying SEO tactics, simply put what works for your business may not work for others. An SEO expert will be able to examine any website and know this.

Furthermore, they will know exactly what needs to be done to gain more search engine traffic, whilst someone new at SEO may apply the same tactics to all websites. This will not only have no impact but could damage your website’s rankings.

2. Understanding of different SEO levels

Search engine optimisation involves three facets:

• Technical (the website’s structure, determines how easy or difficult it is for search engines to crawl and index your content).

• On-page optimisation (correctly using keywords and HTML tags in ways that aid the increase of search engine traffic to your site).

• Off-page optimisation (for example link building, domain strength, social signals).

• Boosting authority - whether for Google's E-A-T or Google MyBusiness.

You can read more about the differences here.

A successful SEO strategy requires the implementation of all three elements. Granted some may be more prevalent than others. A top SEO expert will know which but should be advising you that it is a combination of the three.

An SEO expert should understand the technical limitations of your company’s website, and be able to articulate to your web developers so that these issues can be minimised. Otherwise, if a search engine cannot access all the content on your website, then your SEO efforts will be in vain.

3. A portfolio of SEO success

There is a plethora of online content about how to implement SEO tactics and which ones your business should be using.

Newer so-called SEO experts will be reading this content and applying it to your business. Not that this is wrong to do after all this is how SEO experts learn about the changing world of search engine marketing.

However, before you hire an SEO expert ask to contact their references. You can then gauge whether that expert had a positive impact on a business and whether the client was happy with their work.

4. Sassy about marketing

Technical issues aside, SEO is similar to traditional marketing techniques. The onsite content needs to be written so that the user sees the value of the product or service that you are promoting, and hopefully lead to a sale.

Understanding marketing psychology and user intent are as important as repairing the technical issues on your website. Search engine marketing is where a business’s website is correctly set up to respond to a visitors search for an answer.

If your site does not contain the correct content or if it is not easy to find or navigate around then the visitor will quickly bounce off your site, affecting its page relevance.

5. Understands your business aims

Does your SEO expert understand what your goals are?

Do you want the SEO to focus on conversions (converting a visitor to your site to a paying customer) or raise your webpages within search engine results pages (SERPS)? Maybe you are looking to increase your domain strength?

SEO should be part of your overall digital marketing strategy. An SEO expert will understand and measure your success based on your aims.

6. What SEO toolset will they use?

Usually, an SEO expert will use certain tools to enable them to achieve success with your website. There are several tools that display domain rankings, where to list your website in directories and which keywords rank better than others to determine what content you write.

Whilst all are great, some are renowned for certain qualities – SEMRush is great to monitor how your competitors are doing, Ahrefs is fantastic for checking and monitoring backlinks, Majestic is awesome for building those backlinks.

If you are pursuing a content-driven strategy then Moz could be the tool for you. Looking to add better quality but low competition keywords? Then Long Tail Pro is awesome.

An SEO expert should know this and should be using one of them. What they all have in common is that they cost money – ask your SEO expert will the cost of using them be included in your contract cost or will you have to purchase the software yourself?

7. Excellent communication skills

Regarding their communication style, an SEO expert must be able to clearly communicate why changes to your website are required, in a manner that is sensitive and that all understand.

Remember the condition of the present website is due to decisions that have already been made by others (and the reason why the SEO expert is there in the first place!).

Simply saying all is wrong is going to irk those who have worked on this process already and possibly lead to a toxic working atmosphere within you or your team.

A top SEO expert will know how to work with various types of people whether CEOs, web developers or marketers. They do, after all, want to ensure that your business is successful.

8. Passionate about SEO

Whilst knowledge is important, curiosity is essential too.

Search engine optimisation is an evolving process and even when an SEO expert is collaborating with you they should be advising about newer trends, even if this contravenes originally what they advised to do.

For example “I read and learnt yesterday that this web crawler now works this way, so we should discuss amending our strategy”. Great SEO experts find alternatives to work around challenges and roadblocks.

Having a passion to learn new techniques and a curiosity to apply them demonstrates a clear understanding of your business and that the SEO expert has your business interests at heart.

Whether you are starting a website from scratch or are looking to improve your current one, make sure the SEO expert you hire is a good one! He/she should be hired for the long term as SEO is not a short term strategy but does produce long term results.

Need advice about SEO? Then contact the team and we'd be happy to advise.