As a business-owner you dream of seeing your website on the first position on the first page of search engines of Google, Yahoo, Bing and AOL. But alas! It’s just a dream! When will that come in reality? You have superb products and services; you have provided excellent information on your web pages; in short, you have done everything to attract visitors. And still, there is no traffic! Obviously, you have to hire a search engine optimization expert for the job, like SEO UK or SEO Glasgow. But how can you find out their competence level? Here are some questions you can ask to your potential SEO professional.
1. Existing and Past Clients
You can ask the list of the existing and past clients of the SEO so that you can verify whether the provider is really efficient. If the SEO is in this field for a long time, s/he will be able to give such a list immediately. You can also try to find out from the clients what type of SEO campaigns did the specialist run and what was the impact. Well, all the clients may not be able to give that detailed feedback. But you can at least find out the impact of the SEO’s work on the website’s ranking.
2. Strategies
The SEO should inform you about the strategies s/he will implement to improve your website’s ranking and if s/he is not doing that, experts warn to stay away from him/her. Also ensure if the proposal of the SEO includes your website’s initial technical review to clear out any problems which could possibly lower your ranking, like error pages or broken links. S/He should also provide “on page” optimization, an activity to make your site as search engine pro as possible. This involves the URL and internal linkage of your website, together with development of web page titles, tags and headings.
You should also ask about “off page” strategies like your content on others’ websites, usually via blogs, press releases or social media platforms.
3. Search Engine Webmaster’s Guidelines
The SEO should strictly adhere to the guidelines set by the webmaster of the search engine. You should ensure about this. These guidelines typically prohibit some common SEO shortcuts, e.g. automatic generation of spam content or inserting bogus text and links. If the SEO is not following these guidelines, your website may be penalized by the search engine. And you should not only do this about Google’s guidelines, but also for Bing and Yahoo.
4. Claim of Insider Relationship
If the SEO is claiming that s/he has an insider relationship with one or more of the search engines on the basis of which s/he can bring your website soon on the first position, understand that the claim is totally false. Remember that it is only the search engines themselves that can control your ranking and nobody else.
5. Communication
It is important that the SEO keeps in touch with you for providing a periodical status of his/her work and its results. Enquire about the mode of communication s/he will prefer, i.e. personal talk, phone, skype, mail etc.
Your ultimate expectation from your SEO consultant should be improvement in your ranking in the search engines. But you should also see to it that it is being achieved in an ethical way, so as to avoid any undesired consequences in future. Therefore, you should ask these questions while choosing the SEO expert.
