How an SEO consultant can help you grow your traffic
Looking back, you can only marvel at how your company has blossomed from the first seeds you planted into a flourishing oasis of organic traffic and high CTR (click-through rates). You’ve cultivated a sellable product, an attractive website, and a growing customer base.
But now you’re looking forward, and trying to work out how to increase your website’s traffic even more. This is where SEO – and more to the point, an SEO consultant – comes in. Whilst optimising your website for higher rankings is an important part of growing your business and reaching more potential customers, it can also be time-consuming – and expensive!
Hiring an SEO consultant to analyse your metadata and implement effective optimisation strategies means that you can focus on what you’re good at, and leave the experts to do what they do best, all with the focus of nourishing your garden in order to see the fruits of your labour.
So, what is an SEO Consultant?
If SEO is the sunshine your garden (website) needs, think of an SEO consultant as the gardener, whose job it is to analyse your website’s data in order to implement the most effective SEO tools and strategies.
Their sole responsibility is to make sure that your website is optimised to appear in the highest rankings on SERPs (search engine results pages). This might mean that you bring a consultant in to run SEO strategy meetings with your company in order to demonstrate, and implement, best SEO practices. Alternatively, they might be brought in to perform certain tasks like fixing technical issues or conducting keyword research in order to identify the areas in which your website can be enhanced.
They understand that improving your website’s rankings is a little more complicated than just throwing a load of keywords – or seeds, if you will – at your web page and hoping that they just naturally generate growth. A consultant can help you take a step back and identify the problem areas so that you can get into the nitty gritty of your site’s architecture and move forward with an effective search engine optimisation strategy.
Why you might need a consultant?
You might want to think about bringing in an expert if you’ve already spent time and money on SEO resources but are experiencing little to no ROI (return on investment). Alternatively, perhaps you might be looking to revamp your website or scale your business to appeal to a more niche customer base, but aren’t quite sure you have the expertise to do it yourself.
Even if you do have a fair understanding of tools and resources such as plugins and keyword researchers that do have a positive impact on your site’s rankings, actually focusing on this element of your company’s growth could detract from other company aspects that you would like to focus on.
In any case, no matter how many courses you take to supplement your knowledge around site optimisation, the chances are an SEO consultant is likely to have even more and to be dedicated to that element of your company’s growth so that you, and/or the rest of your team, can focus on the rest.
Some key things to look for when searching for an appropriate SEO consultant are knowledge and experience of things like website audit, structure, and optimization, site mapping and link building, meta description development, and optimisation of user experience (in order to maximise conversions).
As with hiring any service, it’s important to consider their experience and proven results, as well as fair pricing and good reviews, of any SEO consultant you bring on board.
Senior Organic SEO Account Manager, Claire-Marie Wilder, has this to say about website audits:
“We always create a website audit as part of our fundamentals in month one.
It makes sure you get a fresh pair of eyes looking over the entire site, making sure that any detrimental issues get fixed straightaway.
We’d always recommend a full site audit as soon as possible as it means you can put together the best strategy for moving forward.”
How can they help your business grow?
One of the most important actions an SEO consultant can undertake is a website audit. This will allow them to get to the roots of any problem areas you might have missed, and more importantly where you can improve your website’s rankings by taking stock of data analytics.
More than just a link audit, which evaluates how effective associate links are for your site’s visibility, a full website audit will consider all of the things that affect a user’s experience, such as keyword usage, content, metadata, and page speed.
The process can usually range from 2-6 weeks (depending on the size of your website) to carry out a full indexing of your website (of new and updated web pages) to establish its crawlability in search engines. From here, a consultant can help you develop a sitemap. This is basically a blueprint of your website that presents the most important pages and files of your website to search engines. A site map also provides information about these files, boosting relevance and accessibility to your content. This information might include when your site was last updated, or if there are any alternate language versions of the content.
After establishing what is preventing your website from achieving higher rankings, a consultant can help you develop an effective SEO strategy in order to build links between your web pages, and with other relevant and authoritative online resources. Through effective backlinks, your website will become better established as a more reputable source. A good consultant will also be able to identify backlinks to insecure websites which are likely to harm your business representation and reduce your site’s toxicity score.
A consultant can also conduct keyword research in order to understand how search volume, search intent, and keyword difficulty all play a role in generating the most relevant keywords for your website. They’ll do this by identifying by topic which keywords are best to target by providing valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is looking up on search engines.
Someone who understands your company
It goes without saying that in order to build the best strategy for moving forward with your site’s optimisation and company growth, your SEO consultant needs to have a thorough understanding of your company and clients’ goals. This will enable them to apply their experience and commitment to quality control to improve your company’s B2C relationship.
Most importantly, throughout the process of optimising your website, your consultant should maintain productive communication with you and other members of your company by providing regular updates about the changes they’ve made so that you make smart decisions moving forward.
If you have the company budget and if you think your business could benefit from an SEO consultant to get to the roots of any issues that may be preventing your website from reaching its customer appeal potential, they could be a great addition to your blossoming business.
Frequently asked questions
Answred by James Welch
Will an SEO consultant take on my business values?
Not necessarily. Working as a third party, it would be difficult for an SEO Consultant to fully take on and understand business values. However, this doesn’t mean that SEO success will be any less.
Should all website owners understand a basic level of SEO?
An understanding of SEO isn’t needed to work with an SEO agency. All website owners should however understand that content is the most important thing for SEO. The more content you can write for your website, the better the website will rank, irrespective of other factors such as technical SEO.
Is it best to use an SEO consultant through an agency?
This depends on the person and what they are looking for. Both have advantages and disadvantages. See our article which discusses SEO freelancers in more detail.
Is SEO a never-ending process or a one-off service?
SEO is a never-ending process for the big successful businesses out there, so it should be the same for the smaller companies too. If you have a live and growing website, you should be consistently carrying out SEO.
How much influence can I have on my website decisions under an SEO consultant?
It is up to the website owner to set out what the commercial goals are and any non-negotiables. The SEO consultant can then set out a strategy based on these goals. Without this, the strategic direction might go down a route which isn’t suited to your business goals. A good SEO consultant will always be in regular contact with updates and insights.
