First of all, I empathize with business owners because it is always confusing and frustrating to hire SEO expert or SEO consultant. You can spend a lot of time studying it and end up more confused than when you started. There is a lot of rubbish out there. If you do not know what SEO is about, please read my another article talking about how SEO works.
For example, there are a bunch of people writing about how to do SEO who have never actually ranked anything. There are a lot of bloggers out there who blog about SEO in order to make money with SEO. They are simply trying to make money with their blogs. In fact, the vast majority of people who put their hands up and say, “Yes, I’m great at SEO.” have spent maybe a couple of days (or possibly months) reading without actually taking the experience of testing it and doing the nitty-gritty of actually getting results and making money for a wide variety of websites.
The biggest secrets are not given away for free. New techniques are being invented all the time. There are also multiple angles that you can attack SEO from. So you might get multiple correct but different answers to your SEO questions. But there are a couple of things that, if you work through, you will understand SEO better and that will help you make a better decision on hiring a SEO expert or consultant to help you rank your website better on Google.
Do they have verifiable rankings?
One of the first things is try to find some person or SEO company that can actually show you results. It is a very important step before you hire SEO expert or consultant.
There are a lot of people out there who have not actually ranked anything and are trying to sell SEO. That is something you want to try and avoid. Ask for some example rankings if you can’t verify any yourself. They might not be able to show you their clients, but something, anything that shows they can manipulate Google’s search results. For example, I can always present the projects I have done showing some web pages that have already ranked on the first page.
What is the value of those rankings?
You also want to evaluate the value of those results. For example, they might show you a ranking of the brand name. You should automatically rank your brand name even if you do not do SEO. There are a lot of things that do not really get searched at all, but can still be valuable. A rank for one thing of very low value is not necessarily that great. Think, “Okay, is this something that is going to make somebody money?” before you are impressed by sample rankings.
Did you hire SEO expert who actually play a big part in making the rankings happen?
You also want to confirm that they played a big part in it. Some people will claim other people’s rankings. They will do one little thing on a website, and there is another person or team that did everything else, and they will claim those results. You want someone who actually understands the full process and who has led the process. They don’t necessarily have to do every task every time, but you want to hire SEO expert or SEO consultant or a company that has gone through and played a big part in making the site.
Experience matters in this, but I have known people who have done SEO for six months who are better than the vast majority of people out there. There is a guy I met on time who had been doing SEO for five or six years. He was terrible. He could not get his clients’ results at all because he just kind of kept doing the same cookie-cutter, canned things over and over again. He said, “Well, this is the best I can do. There is no more for me to learn,” because he really did not do any testing or analytical data analysis. Analysis and testing are critical to becoming good at SEO. That is something a lot of people do not do. They just do not test. They do not go out there and try their own stuff. You are never going to get good just reading about SEO.
When looking at rankings, think about if it is reasonable that it turned into traffic. Also did the traffic turn into leads and sales? Take it all the way through. Did this actually make somebody money?
Evaluating your current SEO team
If you have a current SEO team and you are trying to evaluate them, check for your SEO (“organic”) traffic. This is very easy to do. You can go to Google Analytics or any other traffic tracking software and look at how many visitors you got from the search engines. Look at the last ninety days and compare it to the previous time periods. It is not complicated. Did you get more in the previous ninety days than the ninety days before that? And if it did, great… If not, then are we on the right path? Is there something else to explain this? Maybe the market that you are in is cyclical. Maybe you just hit a low point when people are not searching as often, but your rankings are actually good.
How much traffic is enough to mean that your SEO team is doing a good job? This really depends on the products and services you sell, how much search volume is out there, how early you are in the process, how much growth potential there is, what your budget has been, and many other factors. There is so much more. If your phone is ringing a lot more than it did before, that is generally a good thing. So you kind of need to dig in deeper and really do a business analysis on it.
Are they an SEO newbie?
There are a tons of beginners out there who are trying to sell SEO. As long as they are open with that, and about how much experience they have, there is nothing wrong with that, but there are a ton of programs out there that teach people how to sell SEO. They do not teach them how to do SEO.
I joined one a long time ago and all they did was say, “If you need to do SEO, here is a third party to outsource it to.” The 3rd party SEO service wasn’t really that good. Also, the fact that it was so disconnected meant there was a lot lost in translation. Even if the person who was selling it was good at it and they were outsourcing to those people, there was a lot that did not get communicated. It was inefficient. Even if it was efficient, the SEO still would not have been that great.
IT is not SEO
This is something very confusing to people. Hiring IT professional is different to hire SEO expert. They do not even know they are confused, and it is something I really need to clarify. IT is not SEO. IT people in a lot of fields often know just a few simple things that you could go read in a couple of hours on articles somewhere else about SEO. It is not necessarily wrong, but it is only a very small piece of the puzzle and a very small truth.
IT Companies are often afraid to say they do not understand SEO at a high level. Also, they do not know what do not know. Information Technology is such as vast field, and there are so many different disciplines. It is like saying the scientist understands everything about science. No. A biologist does not know much about physics usually.
IT is typically an expense. It is an expense that you pay for. You just have to. You have to have computers. You have to have internet, etc. SEO is marketing, which is very different. SEO is even a different business model than other internet marketing disciplines. Pay-per-click, for example, with Google Ads, is different. The actions you do on each one are completely different. There is really very little overlap in the skills needed for SEO and PPC despite the fact that they target nearly identical markets.
Web Design is not SEO
Web designers are probably the worst offenders in terms of thinking they can do SEO. Web designers often sell themselves as good at SEO. They learn a couple of basic things and they say, “I will do SEO for you.” No. Not true. First of all, web design is a completely different business model than SEO.
Web designers typically do know know SEO. It is not the same thing. This is really, really important, and a lot of people get it wrong.
Hosting is not SEO
Hosting companies, a lot of time, try to sell SEO. Most of the time, it is outsourced, but even then, some people think their hosting company has a say in their SEO. Not really. This is really not true. The vast majority of SEO has nothing to do with your hosting.
I spend all day every day working at SEO for 4+ years. I have ranked for thousands of keywords. There is still more for me to learn, and that I can improve on. Even the best person I ever met at SEO can still improve on SEO. So do not think that someone who spent ten hours studying in the last month, or the last year, is going to give you good SEO results, as you are just not going to get it, period. There are going to be opportunities left on the table.
Is the SEO just outsourced to a 3rd party?
You want to make sure that your SEO is not outsourced. About 60% of companies just sell the SEO, take the SEO, and hand it off to a different organization. That happens all the time, and it is not what you want. You want to ask somebody if they are the ones that actually do it, and get them to explain how their fulfillment is structured.
This does not mean that I do every little task and every little thing. I have long term contractors that I have trained on exactly what I want to do and the plan is always mine. I direct all the pieces so that is not really outsourcing SEO. What I’m talking about is companies selling the SEO then giving the whole project off to someone else.
The companies that white-labeled SEO for SEO agencies as a business model tend to provide very canned, normal SEO that does not get great results. The value of low quality SEO, and even medium quality SEO, is basically nothing. The value of high quality SEO is through the roof because all of the clicks go to the top three results.
The difference between number five and number one, number one gets ten times the amount of traffic. By the time you get the bottom page, unless it is something that gets searched a lot, there is basically no value to your business.
What is the plan of attack?
There are a lot of ways you can attack SEO. Ask this and get some of the details. It does not mean you have to understand it all, and it does not mean you have to get down to every little detail, but where are they taking you? How are they going to get you there? There are lots of ways they can do this.
Connect full process to money in your pocket
The important thing here is to connect the dots from the SEO expert, SEO consultant or SEO company’s activities to the money in your pocket. This can be multi-step process. We are going to build this thing here and target it in this way. These are the opportunities that you get. If someone is just outsourcing SEO or they have a really basic plan, they are not going to have much detail here. They are not going to have something that really makes sense. They are not going to really understand how to evaluate and how to attack your best opportunities.
I will be honest, it is not easy to calculate the whole flow of visitors to money in your pocket, even for me, because there is a lot of misinformation and ambiguity out there.
I want to bust a big myth. Google has a tool called the Google Keyword Planner that tells you, “Hey,, Sydney plumbers get searched this much.” This tool is highly flawed. It is nowhere near perfect. In fact, my estimate is that it only shows about one-third or less of the total search volume out there. There is tons of stuff that show zero that is actually getting searched and is valuable. You cannot always calculate this exactly.
What’s the plan?
The plan is just so huge and you need to understand what to include in your SEO plan. A lot of people, they spend just a few minutes on this. They do a little bit of research, they pick top ten search phrases, and they go on that. That is what everybody else does, and everybody else is doing the mediocre SEO going for the same search phrase.
If you want to get from New York City to L.A. and a consultant gives you a map from New York City to Miami, no matter how fast you drive, you won’t get to L.A., right? There are many , many road maps in SEO. Each company has its own unique set of opportunities. They need to be able to take those opportunities. They need to be able to take those opportunities and understand your market. Not necessarily as well as you, but pretty good, and dig down into the search results. It is not just about going to the Google Keyword Planner and pulling out the top ten things that get searched. You really have to go to the Google Keyword Planner and use other tools such as your brain and Google itself. See what other ways your market might be approaching you.
You need to be able to identify all your unique opportunities. This is something that is huge. Again, if you do not have the experience of knowing all the different ways that SEO can work out, it is going to be very difficult for a company or consultant to be able to analyze your opportunities. If they do not understand all of the opportunities available to you, how are they going to create the best plan for you? Really, what you want is the plan that gives you the best ROI, the best chance of growing your website into a very valuable business asset that drives leads on an automated basis for years to come.
Again, if a SEO consultant or a company does not have the right experiences, especially if they outsource SEO, they are not going to put the pieces together of, “This is what I did with this plan and then this is the results of it.” All they did is create a basic plan and do maybe a tiny bit of research, then pass it on to someone else. They do not really know what happens. They do not know the details of what was done, so they have trouble understanding how to attack the opportunities.
The best people on SEO I have ever seen always have a few unique ways to them. I have proprietary WordPress plugins that work wonders for certain market. It enables them to get really fast, really good, high quality traffic. I have a few unique techniques as well. There are a couple of things I understand differently than most people because I have tested my own concepts. I do not teach these concepts to other people. Just because two consultants come up with two different plans does not necessarily mean that one of them does not know what they are talking about. This is important to understand.
Do not be run-of-the-mill. Seriously, ninety-nine plus percent of businesses have the same exact freaking plan. Do not be one of those businesses. Do not just go, “Okay. So I am a dentist in Melbourne. I am going to put Melbourne dentist in the keyword tool. I am going to pick the top ten, top five, top twenty things that get searched, and I am going to go after those.” No. That is part of the plan, but it is only a small part of the analysis. You are leaving so much opportunity on the table.
Go back to what I told you about how the Google Keyword Planner only shows about one-third at most of the total search volume out there. Think about that for a second. You are leaving two-thirds of your market on the table. In fact, ninety-nine percent of businesses are leaving that two-thirds market on the table. A very, very small percentage, maybe five percent at most, probably more like one-to-three percent of the total people out there who do SEO understand this two-thirds market. Everyone else is going after that same small percentage of the total traffic.
Where’s the value?
You have to be able to understand where the value is that they are providing. I see tons of services out there that are just complete fluff. They have ten things listed and there is only one, maybe two, that actually provide a little bit of value. The rest of it is just to make it seen more valuable; just to add numbers in your head. “They do this, this, and this.” either a, it provides zero value to your business, or b, you can get a very low cost or even free alternative tool or service that does it for you to where you don’t really need them to do that.
If you are getting charged anything less than $400-$500 a month, beware! There are a lot of companies that do basically no value services for $200-$300. I see that all the time. They are just using you like a tool that provides no value. Maybe it analyzes a couple of things, but it is just something you can get for free out there anyways. Really, where is the value?
I have seen too many companies. They are just throwing$700 a month down the drain. Just down the drain. I hate it. I hate the waste. I recommend you try to analyze that and ask them, “Where is the value, really?” This goes back to connecting the dots. What are the things there that actually make me rank? What are the things that actually put money in your pocket?
Infinite Minutia
There is infinite minutia. There is an infinite amount of things that you can do that technically help your SEO but are not really providing any value. I was talking to one of the best people I have ever met at SEO. He says there are three On-Page SEO factors that amount to ninety five percent of how Google determines what your site is relevant for. More on these 3 On-Page factors here.
There are many reports out there where you put your website in it and they grade you. They will give you this long list of actions items. There are only a few on there that really matter. A lot of times, the things that really matter are not on there. It is funny how that works.
A lot of times, they will sell irrelevant activity. It is just activity. If I am running in circles, I am not making progress. Just because they are doing things does not mean they are providing value. As an example, one of my mentors, you world rather him work for your business for two days than you want to hire seo consultant who does not really know about their SEO for two years. He would get far more value, honestly. One day would give you far more value. That is how powerful someone who is really good at SEO can be, and that is how many little minutia, tiny, worthless, or extremely, extremely one-billionth of value activities that are out there.
The Pareto principle applies here. I am not sure if they describe this in the official Pareto principle, but it is the 80-20 rule where 80% of your results come form 20% of your employees. The 80-20 numbers are not set numbers. I think in this case, it is more like 99%-1%. The concept is the same; the vast majority of the value that is provided to your businesses is done by just a few different sets of activities. If they are trying to sell you a bunch of fluff activities, run the other way.
Pricing
The last one is the pricing for an SEO consultant. This is really complicated, and even good SEO consultants sometimes have trouble with this. Let me explain how I do it. It is a flat upfront fee with a flat recurring rate. A lot of times, I get asked, “How many hours per week or per month are you using this?” That question is perfectly normal and I completely understand. It really just shows how little you understand how an SEO business is run.
The vast majority of the activities I do are research and development. I spend a lot more time doing research, testing stuff, learning, talking to my mentors, and getting information from people who are really good at what they do, than I do actually doing SEO for the clients. Not only that, but there are a lot of resources I have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars building that I use across my clients. I am constantly training. How many hours am I spending on it? Well, if you count all of the research an development, then it is a lot. I have a technique where I need to spend a lot of money. Sometimes I need to spend a lot of time. Sometimes I train a team member how to do a detailed task and I give it to him. The actual hours that I spend are not typically relevant. Again, you would rather have one day of really awesome SEO person versus two or five years of someone who really does not know what they are doing. Ultimately, you shouldn’t judge me by activity, but by results!
Powerful off-page SEO is not going to be cheap, and it is going to be a recurring expense. This is normal. If they are just charging a one-time flat fee and that is it, it is probably not something that is going to make you a lot of money unless your competition is very low.
How much should SEO cost? It really depends on your market Generally speaking, if someone is offering you less than $1,000 a month for any package and your market is competitive, then they are probably not pricing right or are not very good.
I want to go back to the hourly question, which is very common. There are a lot of businesses and a lot of people base their lives on hourly pricing. If someone charges you hourly, then I guarantee you that they really do not know what they are doing about SEO.
Usually, if someone is doing hourly, all they are doing is some basic on-page SEO. Maybe they are building content for you, which is not SEO (it is content marekting). Content marketing and SEO can be intertwined, but they are not the same thing.
There are just too many expenses and resources across clients for me to do hourly. The SEO business is very cash flow intensive.
There are some things that people try to charge recurring for that really don’t make sense. For example, on-page SEO needs a lot of work up front and then little to no work going forward. Technically, you need to update it every once in a while and maybe just take a look at it, but it is not something where you should pay $200 a month for on-page SEO. I see a lot of people doing that. I have talked to people who work at these companies. They do on-page SEO once at the beginning. Then every three months, they kind of just take a quick look at it. They spend five minutes and charge two hundred bucks a month. That is common. Again this goes back to low value, low prices providing basically no money in your pocket.
With these ideas and tips, you should be able to weed out the vast majority of poor performing SEO Consultants and Companies. I truly hope that this article can help you hire SEO expert or SEO consultant successfully. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
