What to look for when hiring for SEO

We’ve been hearing for years that SEO is dead, social is everything … but really, it’s not. Just recently, Google itself had to hire an SEO consultant and they’ve brought out a video to teach companies how to hire their own. I think this confirms my view that SEO is alive and a valuable addition to any serious website. There’s good SEO and bad SEO, so it pays to follow some basic rules when looking to hire an SEO firm or consultant for your business.

It takes time

Google says it takes time for good SEO to work. Even if you only make changes on 10% of your site, there are all those other pages for the bots to crawl before you get the full effect. According to them, it will take from four months to a year before you see the full effect of a good SEO change.

Initial improvements

While the full effect is slow, you can see great initial improvements if you repair easily identifiable problems your site has. Doing things like removing noindex tags, getting rid of robots.txt or even switching to faster hosting can have an immediate effect, giving you a win in the rankings.

Get an audit

Google says it’s a good idea to pay for a technical audit for your site, and to get two, if possible. This thorough overview of your site will reveal all the problems you need to deal with in order to optimise it. The auditors should show you each problem, describe the impact it’s having on your site and its rankings, and offer a solution. Once you implement all the fixes, it takes time, but you’ll see results.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au. 

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.