If your webpage does not appear on the very first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results, your prospective consumers may be unaware of your existence, thus having an improved search engine exposure may be essential for increasing website visitors, which can result in greater brand awareness, sales, and profitability and this can be achieved by hiring a good New York SEO specialist.
However, what if you lack the time or technical skills necessary to optimize your website’s search engine ranking? If this is the case then it might be best that you retain the services of an experienced and reputable search engine optimization or SEO expert.
Here are some critical questions to ask potential SEO consultants:
1. Do you have a list of existing and prior clients and can you provide it to me?
In accordance with the recommendations of SEO software suppliers, a competent SEO specialist must be willing to share a basic list of existing and past clients as well as his or her contact details with prospective clients.
When you have these references, this can help you in ascertaining the effectiveness of the services of your prospective SEO firm, and you can now work on certain SEO efforts.
2. How are you going to boost my rankings in the search engines?
Avoid SEO consultants who are unwilling to discuss their methodologies in detail, as a good SEO company should be able to elucidate the strategies they will use to improve your site’s online visibility, and also provide an idea of how long it will take to achieve the agreed-upon SEO campaign goals.
You should also look into the prospect’s proposal, and this should comprise an initial technical evaluation of your website identifying any type of issues that can affect the search engine ranking of your websites like broken links or error pages. Additionally, consultants should give “on page” optimization, a technique that optimizes your website for search engines. It entails optimizing the URL as well as the internal linking structure of your website, as well as creating web page titles, headers, and tags.
3. Do you follow Google’s website rules for webmasters?
You would rather have a consultant that carefully adheres to Google’s publicly stated webmaster quality standards, which expressly ban 12 typical SEO techniques, such as automatically producing spammy material and inserting fake hidden messages and links, so If a prospect does not adhere to those standards, your website may be demoted to a pitifully low position in the search results. Or, much worse, Google may decide to remove it entirely from search results.
4. Can you provide an assurance that my website’s ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo will move to the forefront?
If the candidate responds affirmatively, then you must turn and run in the opposite way as quickly as you can. Although it is difficult to promise a top search engine ranking, it has been asserted that some unscrupulous SEO professionals offer such fraudulent claims.
Take into account it is a red sign if the applicant purports to have an insider connection with Google or another search engine that entitles him or her to preferential search results ranks.
5. How familiar are you with search engine optimization?
Ranking at the top of local search engine results is critical for small brick-and-mortar companies looking to attract nearby consumers, so you’ll want to choose a consultant that is knowledgeable about local SEO strategies.
If you are more inclined to move towards “local SEO,” then you must be able to see results on people in your neighborhood that are looking up keywords that are related to your business. And for you to be successful, your SEO expert should be able to include the city where your business is located and your title tags should state the meta descriptions of your website along with Bing, Google, and Yahoo’s local directories that cater to certain geographic region.
6. Are you willing to collaborate on website modifications with me?
Search engine optimization should almost certainly necessitate a lot of adjustments to the code of your existing web pages. It is essential that you be able to understand the changes that the consultant has been expecting along with the quantity of the web pages, and if you plan to obtain approval before allowing access including website modification, you should also specify so.
For instance, would consultants create new title tags or change old ones in your existing HTML code? Will they supply extra copywriting content promoting your products as well as services in order to increase the visibility of relevant on-page keywords for your potential customers? And do they want to rebuild the entire or a portion of your website’s navigation or to add new pages?
7. Are there measures to determine how effective is your SEO campaigns?
In determining the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, you should assess the amount of traffic that is flowing to your site along with where that traffic is originating. Thus, it is essential that your SEO consultant is one who has the know-how on Google Analytics, and this can be used to evaluate changes in the search engine rankings of the website, the number of links from other websites that are driving traffic to yours, along with the kind of keyword searches that are being used to reach your site.
8. How much are you charging and you do offer payment terms?
Naturally, you’ll want to determine how much you’ll be billed and if the consultant is compensated hourly, on a retainer, or on a project basis. Payments are often made on a project-by-project basis in the SEO consulting sector, and they can vary significantly depending on the size and complexity of the project. The majority of contract work was within the $1,000 to $7,500 price range.
Additionally, the survey discovered that the most typical retainers varied from $251 to $500 per month on the low end to $2,501 to $5,000 per month on the high end, with the most frequent hourly rates falling between $76 and $200. Fox said that consultants that specialize in serving small firms frequently offer a lower monthly and hourly rates.
