Over the years, search engine optimization has become immensely popular and a necessity. Today, every business, no matter how big or small aims to rank their websites on the first pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. The majority of people turn to search engines to find answers to various questions, so it is vital that they are able to reach your website as quickly as possible. However, this process of ranking on the first pages of search engines involves a lot of rules and algorithms. And it is difficult to understand and stay on top of all these on your own. This is where an SEO consultant comes into the picture.
In this post, we will take a look at who is an SEO consultant and what are their main roles and responsibilities.
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SEO Consultant – Definition
An SEO consultant is basically an SEO expert who is responsible for planning, implementing, and executing a detailed and well-planned SEO strategy. The primary aim of this strategy which covers on-page as well as off-page aspects, is to boost and maintain the organic traffic for your website. Whether you have an in-house SEO consultant or a freelancer, one of their key goals is to improve the website’s ranking on search engines like Yahoo, Google, etc.
As mentioned earlier, SEO consultants are in high demand by everyone – be it a startup or large Fortune 500 companies. SEO consultants can offer their services to a wide range of niches – from real estate to healthcare to finance. Though some companies hire SEO professionals as in-house, full-time SEO consultants, there are many who offer their services as freelancers either independently or through a registered SEO agency.
Some of the top SEO services include:
- Local SEO
- International SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- SEO Audits
- Link Building
Though hiring an SEO consultant may be expensive, it is definitely worth the investment when you see the positive gains. Here are some of the ways how hiring an SEO consultant can impact your business:
- Every business has several competitive keywords, and an SEO consultant can help your business rank on the first page of search engines for these keywords.
- Boost your website’s organic traffic.
- SEO consultants can help in building a strong online presence for your business, which in turn provides more credibility to your website.
- You can use the skills and services of an SEO consultant to build customer loyalty and offer a positive user experience.
All these will end up boosting your brand awareness, customer engagement, and conversion rates. As is evident from the above points, it is not sufficient just to have a well-tailored SEO campaign. Instead, you also need a skilled and professional SEO consultant to execute the campaign successfully.
SEO Consultant – Roles and Responsibilities
Below are some of the key roles and responsibilities of an SEO consultant.
- Understanding the Business Niche – It is vital for an SEO consultant to have a thorough understanding of the business, its nice, key goals, objectives, etc. The SEO consultant can work with key stakeholders to gain all the information which will help them to outline their goals and align them with the company’s goals and objectives. Having a thorough understanding of the business niche will help the consultant strategize and prepare the SEO strategy and devise ways to implement it successfully.
- Keyword Research – It goes without saying that one of the key responsibilities of an SEO consultant is to conduct extensive keyword research. This ideally includes finding out various search terms or queries that their targeted audience might use on search engines. The consultant can make use of various SEO tools to find the most relevant and profitable keywords. Some of the metrics that are considered while shortlisting the keywords are:
- Search volume
- Keyword difficulty
- Domain authority/Rating
- Collaborate in Preparing the Content Strategy – The SEO consultant is also responsible for collaborating with the content marketing strategist. With the shortlisted keywords, the consultant and the content marketing strategist need to prepare their detailed content strategy. This strategy includes:
- Suggesting new blog content ideas for the website.
- Preparing the content calendar to ensure the timely creation of content.
- Assigning people for guest posts.
Once the content is created, the SEO consultant needs to ensure that the content is keyword optimized and is also created as per the search intent.
- On-Page SEO – On-Page SEO means optimizing your website to ensure that the website visitors have a positive user experience. This is where an SEO consultant’s technical skills are out to use. The SEO consultant is responsible for:
- Making sure that the source code is optimized for mobile as well as desktop and that the code is not broken.
- Find out if there are any issues affecting the site speed or the individual landing pages’ speed, and fix them.
- Check whether all the pages are mapped to the correct keywords.
- Check for indexing issues on the website and fix them.
- Check for security issues and implement SSL certificate.
- Track and stay on top of website performance by setting up Google Analytics and Search Console.
- Link-Building Strategy – An SEO consultant is responsible for developing and executing a link-building strategy, which means creating high-quality backlinks. Whether your business is part of a competitive niche or not, it is very important to ensure that you are allocating sufficient resources to creating backlinks. This is because quality backlinks are considered one of the key ranking factors by search engines. Some of the ways in which an SEO consultant may employ link-building tactics are:
- Citations
- Broken link building
- Guest posts
- Unlinked brand mentions
- Content outreach
- Content repurposing and syndication
- Team Collaboration – When it comes to SEO consultants, team collaboration plays a huge role in their success. This is because it is humanly impossible for one single person to do everything from scratch – strategy creation, execution, reporting, and analysis, etc. Hence, SEO consultants must develop and maintain a good working relationship with other team members like PR professionals, web developers, designers, content marketers, stakeholders, etc.
- Performance Reporting and Analysis – Another crucial responsibility of an SEO consultant is analyzing the SEO performance and reporting it to the stakeholders. The stakeholders may be interested in knowing about:
- Keyword rankings
- Bounce rate
- Click-through rate
- Organic search traffic
- Do-follow links
- Organic conversion rate
Conclusion
Startups usually opt for a full-time in-house SEO expert, and in some companies, depending on the size of the business, they may have a small team of SEO. Large-sized companies prefer having in-house SEO specialists as well as freelancers who may be hired to work on just specific projects. Irrespective of whether you have a full-time consultant or a freelancer, you must ensure that you are hiring someone who has the right skill set and experience. The world of content marketing is really huge, so we recommend you check out some useful software on SaaSworthy that can help in boosting your business.
