anyone every hired an seo consultant?

[connell83]

i am considering hiring an seo consultant for my ecommerce site.

has anyone had any experience, costs etc?

I dont want to be ending up paying someone who knows little more than I do!

[YoRock!]

Are you planning on acting upon the advice yourself? Not sure if it's relevant to you, but personally I know a fair bit about SEO and internet marketing, but I hate it, and would rather pay someone to do it. So maybe not just see a consultant, but someone who does it all for you?

Either way, I would try to go with someone on recommendation.

[connell83]

thanks yorock,

yes im planning on hiring someone to do it for me, because i dont have time to do it simply. Some things i can do myself though. A lot of the on site things i can do, but not offsite.
How do you go aobut finding someone who is recommended and what costs do people normally pay? I know this is like saying how long is a peice of string but on average what have people paid?
I am aware people will recommend people who are actually themselves under an alias so how can I get around this.

[jBullet]

Hi connell, as part of my job I perform SEO for companies. We offer a couple of different ways to pay for SEO services on your website although I think it would be more professional to discuss these through PM. I have experience of performing the optimisation of the code and content on a website and of generating traffic to a website. I, as well as everyone at the company I work at, pride myself on talking in plain English to my clients and also educating them on what to expect from SEO for their particular website/business.

In my experience, other companies offering SEO charge in a wide variety of different ways as it depends on their business. We offer a couple of different ways to use our SEO services so, like I say, if you want to discuss, feel free to send me a PM.

I would also suggest asking to see someone's previous work when getting a quote for SEO work as this is an obvious way to see the level of knowledge that they have. You will also need to be aware that some methods people use to get websites up in the rankings can sometimes "cheat" the search rankings but, whilst these may work in the short term, they can get the website banned by the search engine in the long term. A big "cheat" employed in the past would be to place keywords on the website with the text colour being the same as the background colour. These are known as black hat techniques and any company that is/has used these should be avoided.

Hope that helps!

[Poppy Design]

Hello

How about Danielle at www.dotwhack.co.uk? I use her for some of my clients SEO - she is very reasonably priced, extremely effecient.

Joanne

[ThaiFoodOnline]

I think it's worth taking the time to invest in a book or two on SEO yourself - time permitting of course! Check out Amazon for the most recent ones - important to keep up to date with SEO, as it's an everchanging subject.

It has done wonders for my site, and now am permanently on the first page Google for all my relevant keywords. This all puts you more in control and easier for you to adapt things easily in the future if Google suddenly decides to "tweak" it's algorithms!

The only outside help I got was to get someone to write some articles for pr submission etc., as I don't do writing! ;)

[christo]

I dont want to be ending up paying someone who knows little more than I do!

As with any skillset there are many that know a little, there are many that have read a lot (and think they know a lot) and there are few that really know what they are doing.

Just to make matters worse Google changes [algorithms] regularly without letting anyone know how or why.

That being said there are a few bits of advice that will go a long way to getting you where you need to be, and more importantly keeping you there.

My no. 1 Top Tip is:
FIND SOMEONE INTERESTED IN YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS
To do decent SEO requires an understanding of your goals, how you achieve your goals and how your business ticks.

No. 2 Top Tip:
If you want to get value for money and drive your business understand what your SEO man/woman is talking about. It is important to your business. You should understand at some level the following areas of SEO to start with:

1. Make sure the fundamentals are in place first. If Google can't see your site then it's no good optimising the content. DOn't assume - I have found many sites are invisible because of bad build.

Fundamentals include:
Keywords: We all know what keywords are now (I hope) but understand good keyword positioning. This is called keyword prominence. e.g. keywords 'above the fold' are more important than below. Keywords in links (to other pages in your site with good SEO) are good...etc.
Keyword Phrases: As above but offer more precise targeting. Look for 'power combos'.
Keyword Research: Research is more important now than ever before. If you are the only supplier of mycoolwidgets then it could be easy, but if you supply printer ink then you have your work cut out for you. A good SEO will research up front and give you an idea of how your market niche looks and how hot the competition is .... and perhaps an idea of how you should attack it. There are lots of tools that now analyse Google logs and gives trends and figures on your top competition. You can even analyse the traffic to your competition's web sites!
Page Structure: This is the basics (but often ignored or incorrectly implemented!) - Assure you have addressed your page structure first. Without this the above is a waste of time. e.g.'s
i) Use site and page relevant keywords in your title tags. These ARE used by search engines.
ii) Fill in your metatags and in particular the ALT text as this is used by some engines (and ALT is used by Google).
iii) Ensure your robots.txt file is in place and excludes relevant files and includes files to be read. This is the first file Google looks at (and many others too!)
iv) Structure so that three clicks finds the users destination
v) Have a FAQ or equivalent
vi) place javascript (image rollovers etc) at the bottom of your source page and 'include' files wherever possible
v) have readable URL's (preferably with keywords if possible)
vi) use breadcrumbs (if appropriate) - again with keywords


2. Do put the function of your site first but build that function around good SEO sense. As I explain to my clients: You are building your site to be attractive and functional for your clients, to guide them to the result you seek in a way that is visible to Google. (i.e. a full flash site may be attractive but may be invisible to Google which = no search visibility which negates the former!)

3. For a business to succeed it must have a strategy (all be it a simple one in some cases). It is paramount that SEO reflects your strategy in its own strategic approach. Get your site structure right, then build the content and landing pages, then build your links and PPC campaigns. If you go the PPC route then optimise pages specifically for each PPC advert (or specific keyword phrase) and understand the reporting and fine tune on a regular (daily/weekly/monthly) basis.

3.1 Understand what your goals are. To drive traffic, to retain traffic, to make it easy for a user to take a desired action (to purchase/download etc.) and then track your 'conversions' to whatever your goals are.

TO SUM UP:

This is off the cuff as a taster. In my opinion YOU (or allocated member of team) should understand all the above (not necessarily how to do it, but what it is and how it effects you) and whoever you discuss your SEO with they should discuss all the above and more with you and suggest a strategy that suits your goals and desired approach (and budget!).

(Note: Most do not bother to understand these things and there is a noticeable difference in success rate between those that do and those that don't).

Some sources:
Checkout the latest offering from Shari Thurow (Search Engine Visibility) - its a great no fuss to the point book and gives you a meaningful understanding of SEO. Also checkout highrankings.com and maybe the newsletter by Jill Whalen (I think that's the spelling) from the same site to give you a drip drip of tips. There are many more good sources but this is one for simple down to earth SEO discussion. Just spending a few moments reading the newsletter will help keep you up on some simple tips if you don't want to delve deeper.

In short - you will get out of it what you put into it. If you put nothing in you will probably spend a lot of money and not get much. If you put a little effort in you will feel great when you see your conversions rising and your site in the number one spot.

Finally, regarding payment: if you can, arrange with your SEO supplier that payment is at at least in part reflective of the success of the work e.g. Based on %ge increase in hits (traffic) or conversions to sales/downloads etc. [suggested targets for which he/she will supply], but also recognise that a good SEO needs his rewards so don't be too tight! (in fact if he is too cheap be suspicious!)

Good Luck and Bon Voyage!:cool:

[bizman99]

Good post...

I would suggest one big thing when hiring a SEO consultant.

Don't hire someone who guarantees or promises you page 1, or position 1 for your key terms. No one can guarantee any specific position with SEO. You can obviously get results, and increases in traffic etc.. but just be wary of anyone who says they can.

Structure of site is so important. I have worked on many International websites, and organisations located in many countries, and getting indexed in local versions of google etc can be impossible if your site structure isn't setuop correctly so google sees your website as relevant to that market/country. So get basics right first.

[MartCactus]

Some good advice here.

As a web developer we often have to work with SEO who client has hired separately to do the SEO work on their site. Here's some tips

1) if you are working with a shopping cart, or other interactive site that dynamically generates pages then its often tough if not impossible to just do the changes the SEO recommends. We often have situation where SEO says "you must make these changes" and have no concept that the site dynamically generates virtual pages and we can't simply whack different titles or meta tags on each such page.

Also remember that you pay the SEO lots of money, he comes up with (sometimes pointless) changes and you then have to pay the web dev lots of money to make this (sometimes pointless) changes.

2) don't sign up to SEO work being done every month. We've some clients who do this.. they are often making changes without giving any time for previous month's ones to take effect

3) From our experience nearly all SEOs that our clients hired focussed almost entirely on the site content, whilst utterly ignoring the fact that the site had eg a PR of 2. They compared the site to a competitor and said "look he's above me in google, and need you to do more tweaking of code" without acknowledging that he was higher in google because his site was PR6.

4) Don't hire the chap because he cold called you and told you how fantastic he was. If he was that good at his job he wouldn't need to call you since you'd have found him in google right near the top for "SEO consultants" :)

5) Remember that SEOs (like web developers) don't have to pass an exam like a lawyer or doctor does. Many of them are bullsh!tters. They make changes for the sake of changes and much of the advice seems to be the sort of thing we did ourselves back in 1998 when ramming lots of keywords in the meta tags actually had an effect. Obviously they aren't all charlatans but many are

[AdvantageDigitalMedia]

We have looked at using an SEo Consultant but have come across the same issue time and time again; Mostly all of them do not want to actually gaurantee any of there work will actually benefit your site. In fact some of there practices can be detrimental...apply cautiona dn make sure you have a way out of the contract if there work is not satisfactory.

[DesignsOnline]

Take a look at www dot webproworld dot com
You will have the choice of either learning to do your own SEO, or employing one of many who advertise their services there...

What ever you do, dont go with someone who has sent you an email out of the blue.
Joe

[PointandStare]

Do it yourself - it's not hard:

How to get to number 1 on Google (http://pointandstare.com/project/how-to-get-to-number-1-on-google---orly)

[247 Top Seller]

We have an SEO team who would be happy to have a look at your site and give you a free SEO report so you can see what needs doing. There may be some quick fixes you can do yourself.

Alternatively we can manage your SEO on your behalf. We can give you a reference as to the quality of our work if you would like.

There is alot we can do and although I won't guarantee page 1 on Google you will definitely see an improvement.

Google 247 Top Seller to find our website and have a look at our services and solutions.

The free SEO report is available to anyone else who is interested in finding out how their site is performing just go to the site and let us know your site url. We will have the report back to you in a couple of days.