When should you hire an SEO consultant?

If you’re looking for a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant, just stick your head out the window and throw a rock. Chances are, there’ll be one standing just a few feet away, probably chatting with a social media consultant. Good for you for even thinking about it, though, because so much of SEO remains a mystery for most small business owners. Even in a large, IT-oriented metropolitan area like the Dallas/Fort Worth region, SEO is still a relatively new and confusing industry for those who haven’t been immersed in it.

It needn’t be, though. Simply put, as Wikipedia so elegantly and succinctly puts it, “search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’ or “algorithm”) search results.” For many businesses, the web represents a tremendous opportunity to find their market online without having to invest in lengthy ad campaigns in traditional channels such as television and radio, the results of which are often uncertain and unproven. Business owners love that the web theoretically offers a “level playing field” by offering such a rich array of inexpensive and often free options to promote oneself to the billions of folks trolling the Internet.

By now, though, many have come to understand that web marketing no longer is about slapping up a hasty web site and waiting for the money to come rolling in. In 2008, Google had already indexed 1 trillion web pages, so you can just imagine the staggering number of web pages now cluttering up the Internet two years later. Now, with the maturation of the web as a bona fide marketing opportunity, businesses must be willing to do more than the basics in order to attract the attention of their prospective customers.

That’s where the SEO consultant comes in. SEO consultants worth their salt will be able to check your site and that of your competitors and figure out how to optimize all the elements on your website in order to boost its rankings. Everyday I see business pages — even pages of relatively large firms, and yes, even SEO firms — that lack even the most fundamental requirements of good SEO. Missing or inappropriate title tags, a plethora of Flash, lack of keywords, and a basketful of dead links — these are enemies of the Google bot, and any SEO consultant will be able to improve your rankings just by cleaning those up, without ever touching a word of your content.

The really good ones, though, will do a comprehensive site analysis and competitor study in order to fully understand what tools in the ever-expanding arsenal she should use in order to drag you up to the top spot on Google for your industry or target keywords. Especially for hypercompetitive keywords such as real estate, attorneys, and others, they’ll do more than just fix your tags and insert alt tags to your images. She might recommend adding a blog, launching a social media or email marketing campaign, offering podcasts, distributing press releases, exploring social bookmarking sites — basically anything that will add value to your site and entice web visitors to keep coming back to you again and again.

So when is it a good time to hire an SEO consultant? Ideally, they’ll be most handy and most effective if you bring them in as you’re developing your website for the first time, or when you’re undergoing a redesign. Too many businesses spend thousands of dollars launching a beautiful, fancy website, only to find out from their SEO consultant that their gorgeous site is so seach engine-un-friendly that it’s actually adversely affecting its “stickiness.” They then must decide if they want to keep their expensive site and just make do, or start over and spend more money developing a new one.

By bringing in an SEO consultant at the beginning of a site design or re-design, the consultant can make suggestions on everything from how a layout can affect navigation to the best content management system that meets the needs of the client. They can make sure that an analytics program is installed from the very beginning — you’d be surprised at the number of web developers out there who neglect to include this critical tool — and that the site is easy to update with new content or other changes, without the client having to keep going back to the developer.

It’s never a bad idea to hire an SEO consultant even if you’ve already set up your site, of course. They can still make suggestions, and it may not even be that expensive to implement them. Even doing something as simple as reversing the order of your title tags can make a noticeable difference in your traffic results.

However, if you have the singular opportunity to get someone in when you’re in transition, you’ll be able to best leverage her expertise and suggestions to create the most optimized site for your needs. You’d be surprised at what a difference her expertise can make in driving traffic to your site.

Photo: “Livros de Redes Sociais, SEO e Web 2.0,” by marciookabe on Flickr.com.

Tagged as: SEO, website design