To recruit an SEO expert, you must take into account a few essential points:
- Choose someone with the necessary technical expertise in SEO
- Find someone who knows your job or who will be interested in it
- Find a candidate profile or a methodical, curious, educational and resilient consultant
Optimizing your natural referencing has become essential to obtain web visibility. SEO is integral to your business and marketing strategy and will allow you to find new customers. It is, therefore, necessary to be accompanied by an expert. Whether you opt for an internal or external solution, for a freelance consultant or an SEO manager, here are some tips that will be useful to you.
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Why hire an SEO expert?
You have understood that your online visibility is essential to your commercial success! You understood everything. Today, purchases are decided or made mainly online, and your company must be highly visible on the internet to gain market share.
If you think that you will become unbeatable in natural referencing by reading 5 tutorials on the internet, you are wrong. As in all trades, acquiring technical expertise takes time and requires training and experience. This last point is even more important in SEO.
Indeed, this profession requires a permanent test approach, almost daily monitoring and a significant capacity for adaptation. Even if you certainly have the skills, you will need more time and availability to become qualified as an SEO expert in your field. Recruiting the right person will give you a strategic and technical vision of your web presence.
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Should I Hire an SEO Expert, Use a Freelance Consultant, or use an SEO Agency?
It depends; each scenario will have advantages and disadvantages.
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If you hire:
SEO actions take time to get results. You must produce quality content and highlight it through optimized support (your websites). Hiring an expert will allow you to have more time/manpower available at a fixed cost. In addition, hiring an employee will allow him to be immersed in your company and, therefore, to better understand its activity and challenges. Industry knowledge is essential when creating content or implementing a digital strategy.
Despite this, the risk of making a mistake is more significant because you will need help to appreciate the real competence of an SEO expert during the trial period. As I tell you, you must be patient; it will take at least 6 months to obtain results. Finally, you will need help finding top profiles, as they increasingly prefer the freedom offered by freelance status to that of salaried employment.
Benefits of hiring:
- More time/man
- Better immersion and knowledge of your business sector
- More significant interaction with internal teams
- Fixed price
Disadvantages of hiring:
- Risk of being wrong
- Difficulty recruiting a top profile
- Reserved for large and medium-sized companies
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If you choose to hire a freelance SEO consultant
Hiring an independent SEO consultant has many advantages. The flexibility of the contract, for example, will make it easier for you to test your service provider and change if it is not suitable. Going through a platform like Malt will also allow you to consult potential service providers’ opinions, which is essential. You will also need to evaluate them at the end of their work, so they will be incentivized to produce quality work and obtain results if they want to work again with you or with other clients. You will also find some of the best SEO Services Newcastle available.
On the other hand, their knowledge of your company may be more profound than that of an employee because your freelance SEO Expert will have little interaction with your team. The long-term costs may be lower but much less regular than with an employee. Finally, it will be challenging to choose your expert as the offer is plethoric and disparate in terms of quality. For each request, you will receive dozens of radically different proposals in terms of content and price.
Advantages of the freelance consultant:
- Relationship flexibility
- Higher demand for quality thanks to reviews
- Easier management
- Access to top experts
Disadvantages of the freelance consultant:
- Cost less controlled
- Difficulty making a choice
- Plentiful offer of disparate quality
- Less knowledge of your business
- Lower time/man available
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If you choose to work with an SEO agency
Using a web agency has advantages. The first is the resource agencies have in-house that will allow you to implement a comprehensive digital strategy.
They often have experts in SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) who will allow you to work globally. By using an SEO agency, you can check, often directly on the site, the testimonials of many customers. The finest agencies have access to calls for tenders and to prestigious clients, sometimes of international stature. This gives them a great experience.
Tip: Must try SEO Services Richmond for professional SEO services.
On the other hand, their tariff requirements will often be higher than those of an independent consultant (yes, they have local social charges and support services to pay).
In addition, if you are a “small account”, you risk that your follow-up will be entrusted to an intern or a beginner, as agencies can sometimes priorities their “large accounts”.
Advantages of an agency:
- Transversality of skills
- Major account experience
- Quality assurance for top agencies
Disadvantages of a web agency:
- High cost
- Risk of not being “pampered.”
- Services less flexible and adaptable
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What are the skills and qualities of a good SEO expert?
Hard Skills:
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Technical expertise
Before recruiting an SEO Expert, check that he or she has general skills in the field of Web marketing and specificities specific to SEO. He must master at least 1 or 2 CMS, know how to use (almost) all Google tools, and have obtained certification in Google Analytics.
He must at least master the technical notions essential to the profession (caching, broken links, markup, Meta descriptions, sitemap, site and page architecture, links creation, keywords monitoring, traffic analysis, use of the search console…
A Digital Marketing diploma is not mandatory but is a plus.
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Good editorial quality
The SEO expert you will recruit must also know how to write and, above all, how to structure a text coherently and understandably. Content writing is an essential part of an SEO job.
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Skills in Marketing and Web marketing
The person chosen is, above all, a Marketer. He is not just a technician; he must understand the challenges of your digital strategy and be a source of proposals for its improvement.
He/she must understand, analyze and induce your visitors’ behaviour to transform them into customers. He/she must both have a good analysis of your market to generate traffic and, ideally, have some neuroscience knowledge to guide the prospect towards conversion.
A degree or significant experience in Marketing or Sales is therefore necessary.
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Speak a minimum of English
SEO resources are often in the beautiful language of Shakespeare.
Soft Skills:
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Resilience
A good SEO consultant must be resilient because SEO is not an exact science (except for Google). Your expert will, therefore, only sometimes obtain the results deserved in relation to his actions or investment (if this is the case, not always within the time he hopes for). He will therefore have to show patience and resilience. He will also deal with VERY demanding internal or external clients, who often need to gain more SEO knowledge. He will also have to work on “sometimes not very healthy” site databases and adapt to them. He will be pressured to take the criticism with force and conviction.
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Method / Organization
An SEO process is a permanent test process. Your expert will have to experiment to try to understand which are the right activity levers to meet the requirements of the algorithms. If he wants to perform, he must set up quasi-scientific routines and procedures to draw the correct conclusions from his hypotheses.
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Curiosity
SEO is constantly evolving; if you want to perform and stay up to date, you must continuously monitor the sector. In addition, the person selected must be interested in your company, your products, your services and the specificities of your market.
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Geek Spirit
We are on a domain of the web all the same. The SEO expert will spend a large part of his week in front of a computer, on digital tools or social networks, a little Geek anyway, right?
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Strategy
The SEO expert you are going to hire should be a strategist.
As an actual Project Manager, his/her mission, if he/she accepts it, will be: “Optimizing your Positioning on Search Engines. »
He or she will choose the right keywords to target the right personae. He or she will conduct an Audit and a Benchmark and determine the best Marketing strategy to increase your conversion rate and outperform your competitors.
Finally, the recruited SEO expert must be able to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment) of your actions.
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General knowledge
Our chosen one is cultured; he/she is capable of great adaptation, can find semantic and thematic variations to the questions asked, and put an intelligent editorial line in place. To interest people, you need culture!
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Pedagogy
It is hazardous in SEO to provide a service without knowing how to clearly explain what you are doing to a third party. Otherwise, you generate a feeling of frustration that will be unfavorable to you. The SEO expert will therefore have to explain to you very clearly and in a popular and intelligible way, what he does, why and how he puts it in place and what are the expected and obtained results.
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