SEO Expert

Hire an SEO Expert to Increase Your Organic Traffic

An SEO Expert Worthy of the Name

There’s one simple test for determining whether someone has a side hustle in SEO or is really an SEO expert: go to Google and put their claim to the test. If they claim to offer SEO services and can’t manage to rank for the top SEO keywords, do you think that they can help you to rank too?

Go ahead – Google “SEO Consultant” right now. You’ll find I'm on the top first-page results.

That’s also true if you Google “SEO Expert” , "SEO Specialist", "Freelance SEO Consultant" or "Google SEO Consultant" and hundreds of other similar search terms.

It’s my job to make your web pages appear on the first page of the Search Engine results pages, just where you deserve to be!

Below I take a comprehensive look at what you should be looking for in an SEO expert along with the SEO services that I offer. Its important to know the potential pitfalls in employing an SEO consultant before you make that critical choice.

If you'd like discuss your project with me one to one then I provide a free, friendly telephone consultation service for this purpose. Simply get in touch to arrange.

What to look for in an SEO Expert

There are many so called SEO experts on the Internet, but the problem is choosing the best one that will reach your expectations. So when you're looking for a freelance SEO consultant or technical SEO, what factors should you take into consideration?

Years of Experience

It doesn't take a lot to create an 'SEO agency' overnight and call yourself an SEO expert or an SEO consultancy. What sets the best SEO consultants apart from the rest is their experience. A trained SEO expert will have closely followed the Google algorithmn changes over the years and will be an authority on what works and what does not regarding technical SEO.

Furthermore, all websites and businesses are different and what works for one business may not work for another. Having years of practise in SEO and exposure to many different types of customers, platforms and systems will ensure that a time-served SEO specialist is qualified to work on a long term SEO plan for your company. In addition, the SEO consultants can use the very same blueprints that they have used to improve rankings for countless other small businesses to get you onto Google's pole position and increase your search traffic.

An Understanding of All Aspects of SEO

Any thought leader in SEO, with years of practise of search marketing on the world wide web, will tell you that, at a basic level, search engine optimisation consists of three main elements:

1. Technical SEO consultancy (website and server optimisations to help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively).
2. On-page optimisation (also known as onsite SEO it includes improvements to the content on your webpages).
3. Off-page optimisation (also known as offsite SEO this includes generating traffic to your site by link building, social networks, PR, local SEO and other methods).

At the very least, you need a freelance SEO consultant who will approach their strategy from all three angles to ensure success.

But, as always, the devil is in the detail. The three areas above are pretty broad and it is only by drilling down into the specifics of what SEO is really about that you'll appreciate what it really takes for an SEO consultant to be an authority in search engine optimisation.

When choosing SEO consultancy services to devise your SEO game plan and provide you with business growth, you really need to use SEO consultancy services that have the following skills, best practices, knowledge and SEO industry experience:

• A technical SEO with the ability to understand the technical limitations of a client's website at a detailed level and articulate this to developers so that any problems can be addressed. Having spent years as a senior web developer, I know how important this stage is.

• An SEO consultant with an excellent understanding of search intent (or user intent) and how this feeds into both keyword research and content creation.

• An SEO agency with the competency to analyse and recommend commercial and transactional keywords which attract and convert for your target customer.

• SEO companies with experience in undertaking effective competitive analysis to determine what your competitors are doing and how to dominate them.

• An SEO consultancy with knowledge of how to craft unique, precise, authoratitive content to meet both the target audience and Google's needs.

• SEO consultants with knowledge of how to create quality white hat links through outreach, networking and social media that grow brands and help drive organic traffic to your site.

• SEO consultancy services with exposure to more indepth facets of SEO that you may not need but are there in case you request them, such as website migration, international targetting and speed optimisation.

• An expert SEO with evidence of boosting a website's authority, whether for Google's E-A-T characteristics, Google My Business or overall domain authority.

This list is not exhaustive and continues to evolve on a regular basis. Advances in technology, changes in ranking factors, user experience, content marketing, customer expectations and algorithm changes all feed into this ever shifting landscape. Welcome to the intricate world of search engine optimization!

A Proven Track Record of Success

Anyone can "talk the talk" but can they "walk the walk"? Just saying that they're an SEO expert, or SEO consultant, and putting logos of customers that they have worked with on their website isn't evidence of their qualifications.

So how do you sift through the claims and get real proof that they are what they purport to be?

Case Studies

Look for case studies of the SEO professional's work on their website. If the case studies are not detailed enough, contact them and ask for further clarity. This will help you to judge their involvement with the optimisation efforts and to accertain whether they were instrumental in making the improvements to their client's rankings. Data to consider here include traffic increases, return on marketing investment and overall revenue hikes.

Testimonials

A satisfied customer is the best type of advertisement for an expert SEO consultant service. The best way for an SEO specialist or freelance SEO expert to show their prowess is by displaying client testimonials to their mastery on their website. Bear in mind that the SEO agency will only put positive client testimonials on their webpages and won't tell you about the bad experiences.

Reviews

Many SEO industry experts and marketing agencies get their reviews from Google My Business and other appraisal websites. This is another good source of information and you can find both positive and negative perceptions on these platforms.

Speak to Clients

I would recommend anyone who is spending serious money with a UK SEO specialist or any SEO professionals to speak to at least three of their fairly current customers to discuss how the SEO consultant helped them succeed. Here you can speak to business owners directly about the personal service they received, the professional attitude of your potential partner and the tangible SEO results gained from the relationship.

Clients may not provide specific analytics but should be able to at least tell you if they saw a positive impact on their search ranking, especially in conversions and in gaining an audience, as a direct result of the efforts of the SEO company or SEO consultant.

Marketing Knowledge

As a Head of Marketing for one of the UK's largest private companies, I know how important this aspect of SEO marketing is. Once the technical foundations for the website have been laid, key phrases have been selected and the content has been built, the property needs to be marketed to attract the target audience.

And the principles of internet marketing are the same with the SEO industry as with any other online marketing discipline. They involve understanding the psychology of the human race, the culture of the target audience, the social media landscape, web analytics, web design and web development, viral marketing, content, product and placement.

Once the product (your optimised website) is ready then the placement of links around the internet, pointing to your product, begins. SEO is similar to a popularity contest, the more knowledgeable and authoritative sites that point to your site the higher you will rise in the SERPs.

Ensuring the freelance SEO consultant you engage is highly literate in the discipline of online marketing will guarantee a more rounded approach to search engine optimisation which will ultimately result in continuous tangible growth for your business.

Focus on Your Business Requirements

The best SEO freelancer or consultant will take the time to learn anything and everything about your business and sector. This will help them determine what your business goals are and how we will achieve the results you require to grow your business.

Top SEO experts will also focus in on your specific business objectives so its important to have them in mind before employing the services of an SEO expert.

Do you want them to increase raw traffic to your website? Increase ecommerce site sales? Convert visitors to paying customers? Do you want them to contribute to conversion rate optimisation or will you take care of that?

Any top search engine optimization consultant will bring in targetted traffic but the best SEO experts will ensure that they meet your business objectives too.

Familiarity with Cutting Edge Tools

A top SEO expert will use technical SEO industry tools to enable them to achieve success with your website. These tools will almost certainly include auditing software like PageSpeed Insights (to identify the health of your website through SEO audits) and analytics software (such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console) to identify progress in the SERPs. More advanced tools used by SEO specialists may include content auditing software, AI tools, Saas for content creation and link analysis.

If they are a software developer (like myself) or have their own development teams, then they may have their own tools which set their SEO work apart from the competition. The top SEO experts will not reveal all the tools they use as they are part of their competitive edge.

The SEO Services that I Offer

Great quality digital marketing services backed by excellent customer service can be hard to find. As an independent SEO specialist, I provide the full range of SEO consultant services, including:

SEO Consultancy

With my SEO consultancy service, you get an SEO expert who understands how the whole SEO process works, uses best practices and puts together a strategy for your unique business requirements. This will include addressing any incorrect technical elements on your site, researching and planning a content strategy to improve your traffic growth, and creating a bespoke link building strategy that will boost your brand visibility and authority.

Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit of your website will be the starting point of your SEO strategy. The detailed technical SEO scrutiny contained in the audit will show how give SEO advice to rank your site higher and convert more traffic to customers for your business. This technical analysis will highlight the problem areas of your site and provide workable instructions for how to fix the problems. This piece of research is suitable for businesses looking to invest in scalable SEO growth, designed for the long-term success of your company.

Keyword Research

Keyword research and keyword selection is a key aspect of any successful SEO strategy, as any SEO consultant will tell you. Every keyword a buyer enters into Google has an intention behind it. I'll help you find what keyword phrases make your audience tick. I use a data driven approach to quantify what people are looking for. Armed with the search volume, keyword difficulties and trend data from this investigation, you wil have the information you need to ensure your overarching SEO strategy has the desired commercial impact.

Competitor Analysis

If you lack visibility on Google or other search engines, the chances are that you're losing business to your competitors. Undertaking effective competitor analysis, as part of my search engine optimisation services, helps you understand how your competitors are performing and, most importantly, how they are doing it. I'll look at what keywords they're targetting, where their backlinks are coming from and how they are ranking. This groundwork will put you in a great position to stay a step ahead of the competition and put your business at the top of the search engine results.

Content Audit

A clear understanding of the quality and relevance of your site content will let you decide what are your key assets to work with. Removing poor content or irrelevant pages can work wonders to improve impressions on other pages of the website and improving target webpages will dramatically increase your online visibility. My content audit will provide you with explicit recommendations on what content to improve, create, and remove in order to engage with your key audiences.

Content Writing

Content is one of the most important factors that defines the success of your SEO campaign and content development is one of the key SEO tasks. The more educational and valuable your content is deemed to be, the higher in search results you will appear. My SEO content writing service will provide your business with high-quality content with a focus on target keywords; great for your users and search engines too.

Backlink Service

I use a cutting edge link building strategy to facilitate traffic growth and significantly improve your search engine rankings. Working with influences and bloggers in your industry to develop premium-quality content gives you highly relevant backlinks to supercharge your SEO efforts. Every website I work with is properly assessed and all content is reviewed to ensure we are working within Google's best practise guidelines. I consistently earn high authority links for my clients using a diverse range of white hat link building methods.

Website Migration

The main purpose of a site migration is to provide a new and improved site that will gain more traffic and drive more business. Consequently, SEO needs to be taken into account when planning and executing your website migration. I have years of experience migrating websites and will ensure that SEO is embedded into the process from the very start.

Google Penalty Removal

If a less experienced SEO agency has landed your site with a manual penalty due to shady tactics, it can be a very long and expensive journey to try and get back into Google, and other search engines, good graces. If this has happened to you, I will initiate a thorough link audit, removal and recovery process to ensure that you will rank highly on search engine results pages again. Working with an SEO expert like myself will ensure that no black hat techniques are used in your digital marketing and that you will not encounter any Google penalties.

Local SEO

Local search optimisation is all about communicating to search engines the local relevance of your web pages and website in general. I have developed unique local search services that are designed specifically to take full advantage of local Google search enquires. Without local services, your business could miss out on some of your most qualified traffic, and in turn, miss out on sales.

SEO Training Services

If you want to develop SEO expertise inhouse, as an alternative to hire an SEO consultant, then my SEO training services are a good idea. I can work with your SEO team to transfer my SEO knowledge to them, allowing them to develop best practise SEO skills.

During this SEO training, they will learn how to perform SEO audits for website optimisation, learn about the important search engines ranking factors, understand how to optimise a blog post and make sure they develop their SEO experience to enable them to craft their own SEO strategies.

With my SEO training service, they will learn SEO tips that you won't find online.

Why you should invest in SEO

SEO is widely considered a staple of any long-term marketing strategy. It is a valuable tool for building relationships with prospects, brand awareness and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field.

If you want to compete against your competitors, SEO is essential. During the years that I've been an SEO specialist, I have seen numerous brands build profitable businesses off the back of organic traffic alone with no reliance on paid advertising or social media.

Search engine optimization bridges a gap between how consumers see public businesses and how businesses see their consumers.

Digital marketing through the process of search engine optimisation blends in all the stages of the marketing funnel. It starts with the awareness stage when the potential customer hears about your brand. This continues when your product or service generates interest and desire. And finally, the prospect takes action and becomes a customer.

Although SEO takes time and effort, it really is a gift that keeps on giving.

Higher Return on Investment

Unlike feeding social networks or pay per click campaigns, once your website is optimised there is little to no cost involved for its upkeep. SEO has a longterm value, while PPC has a shorter lifetime value.

Undoubtedly writing high-quality content requires an initial investment in either time or money but once you've paid your dues in this area, that's it.

While SEO does require an upfront resource investment like all forms of digital marketing, search engine rankings, once earned, have long-term duration. This isn't a marketing cost; this is a true business investment. SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today.

There is no ongoing cost to attract traffic to your website apart from updating the content on your pages where necessary. Therefore your number one spot on the search results is basically free of charge thereafter.

You can earn traffic to your website with minimal ongoing costs. Sales will increase without having to increase proportionally your promotional costs.

Since companies cannot pay for organic rankings, SEO allows your business to compete with more prominent companies and helps level the playing field.

Highly Qualified Traffic

One of the most important functions of SEO is increasing visibility, which means making it easier for prospects to find you when they search for something you have to offer.

Unlike outbound strategies, you don't reach out to people and convince them to visit your site. You can pull traffic to your business instead; that's the beauty of inbound marketing.

Listings appear based on the keywords people search for. Your website traffic consists of an audience that is interested and highly relevant to your niche.

Being on the first page of search engines for your targeted keywords can have a huge positive effect on your business.

Increased Credibility and Trust

A key benefit of SEO that many companies overlook is how it improves your credibility among consumers. SEO helps you build brand awareness with your audience.

Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines is always going to work in a brands favour. SEO success secures a share of voice on the search engine results pages, and this is an integral component of your brand and creating brand trust.

Strong SEO rankings will help you dramatically increase your touch points with potential buyers.

High-quality SEO will always find a means of discovering and leveraging new opportunities for brands to, not just be discovered, but to shine.

With SEO, you can craft a definitive, standout brand voice that will help you connect with the user demographic you have in mind.

Fast, User Friendly Websites

One of the biggest benefits of SEO is that it enhances the user experience and helps you leave a lasting impression on the right audience.

Designing and developing optimised websites in line with Google's guidelines ensures that your user experience will be first rate.

User experience and SEO are strongly intertwined. All the time and efort you put into generating great content and optimising your site with on-page SEO improves the usability of your site tremendously.

Focusing on the speed and usability of your site creates a seamless and positive customer experience. This leads to higher engagement rates on your site that will further boost your rankings. Done correctly, by a trusted expert, SEO will help you encounter increased conversions, more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your business.

Global Reach

With so many companies interacting with customers from around the globe, it's more important than ever to make your web pages visible no matter where visitors are coming from.

SEO has a global reach and can even provide dynamic translation and localisation that can bring in new and unexpected customers from all corners of the world.

Done corrrectly, International SEO helps target your Chinese customers on Baidu, your Russian audience on Yandex and your Korean audience on Naver.

Imminently Measurable

A massive perk of digital marketing and SEO in particular is that you can monitor the success of your campaigns and strategies in near real time.

It is possible to track nearly every aspect of your SEO strategy, including traffic, increases in rankings, and conversions. Every element of your campaign can be measured, evaluated and corrected.

With Google Analytics and a host of other SEO industry analytics tools, you can measure your pageviews, conversions, and traffic sources.

An Investment in Your Business

The enduring effectiveness of SEO is what continues to generate ROI for companies like yours and your competitors. With SEO, there is a good correlation between investment and revenue.

When more people visit your site, get familiar with your business, and order from you, then you have more people likely to come back again and tell their friends about you.

With an expert SEO strategy, the authority of your site continues to grow as you effectively weave search engine optimisation into your sites DNA,

Moreover, if you are in the market to sell your business, many buyers will find strong SEO rankings as a valuable intangible asset.

Frequently Asked Questions about SEO

How can I become an SEO expert?

There is so much information on the internet regarding becoming an SEO expert that it can be really confusing understanding where to start. You could start by reading many of the blogs out there about SEO. Maybe you learn best by video in which case you could take a Udemy course or subscribe to an SEO expert's Youtube Channel. Many a freelance SEO cpmsultant is very active on Twitter and you can learn a lot from them too. Online and offline SEO conferences are also a great way to find out what is happening in the SEO community.

My advice would be to create your own website, optimise it yourself, create great content and start building backlinks to it. I have always learned best by doing, and if you're a kinaesthetic learner too, this will be the most optimum approach for you. You will probably make mistakes learning the SEO basics and it will take time but you will learn a lot about SEO by taking part in the process rather than watching or reading about it.

Suggestions for areas of search engine optimisation to get involved in include:

• Reverse engineering the code that another web designer has created.
• Increase the site speed of your website.
• Use an Excel spreadsheet to manipulate big data sets.
• Install and manage a range of different CMS platforms like Wordpress.
• Write or contribute to SEO blogs.
• Attend an SEO conference.
• Look at adverts for SEO jobs to see what skills are required.
• Develop your marketing skills by gaining an understanding of common SEO marketing agency terms such as title tags, bounce rates, search intent and user behaviour.

These are all SEO tasks that any SEO professional has had to do in their time. Learning by doing is the way all the best SEO experts have developed their SEO mastery.

What certification do you need to become an SEO expert?

You don't need any certification to become an SEO expert. Furthermore, there are no SEO industry qualifications for a technical SEO, an SEO account manager, a freelance SEO consultant or any professional SEO roles. You may see Google certified badges on an SEO expert's website but this is usually for spending advertising money with Google or taking a Google Analytics course. Nothing at all specific to search engine optimisation per se.

The only evidence of skill and know-how in SEO are high ranking web pages, increased revenues and happy customers. Not certificates.

How long does it take to become an SEO expert?

I would say somewhere between 5 and 10 years. During that time, you would need to become proficient at web development, techical SEO, keyword research, content audits, content creation, blog post outreach, link building, conversion rate optimisation, link penalty removal, penalty recovery, website migrations, international SEO and much, much more.

As I mentioned earlier, whilst all of this can be learned from the websites of experts in the SEO industry, it also needs to be put into practise for your own sites and your customers to show that you have the background, judgement, involvement, evidence and insight to become an SEO expert.

How much does an SEO expert charge?

There are no universal SEO industry standards by which you can fix a rate card for SEO consultancy. Consequently, there are many different pricing models for search engine optimisation in the SEO industry.

These include:

• hourly rates
• monthly retainers
• fixed price contracts
• project based pricing
• profit share
• bonuses paid on hitting certain benchmarks

A less experienced freelance SEO consultant will have low charges to build a customer base whilst more experienced experts will charge more as their results are proven. Larger SEO agencies will charge more than smaller SEO agencies or SEO freelancers.

For a retainer, I have seen prices range from £100 per month to £10,000 per month depending on the business sector, the number of keywords targetted and the size of the site. Hourly rates for SEO experts range from £50 t0 £500 per hour.

Where should I look for an SEO expert?

The obvious choice would be Google. Just search for "SEO expert" and see who comes up.

A lot of SEO industry professionals use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook groups, forums, Slack, Reddit and other social networks to discuss such topics as search engines algorithmm updates, their own continuous professional development and to answer questions that others may have about SEO. These places can be good to pick people's brains and to ask for recommendations.

I would advise against using Fiverr and Upwork to locate an SEO expert. This is only due to my own personal experience of taking on client's who have used these low cost services only to be stung by Google penalties. With SEO you really do get what you pay for.

Frequently Asked Questions about my SEO Services

The following questions are useful to ask any SEO expert that you are looking to employ. I have answered them in regards to my service:

Can you guarantee number 1 rankings?

Only Search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo can control how high or low websites appear in their search results. No SEO expert can guarantee this. Therefore the answer here is no.

That being said, all of my customers have number 1 rankings and I have thousands of my client's keywords ranking on page 1 of Google.

How long will it take you to rank my website on page 1?

As any SEO professional will tell you, the time it takes to start ranking on Google depends on many things, including the age of your domain, your competition, the quality of your website and the reach of your content.

If you have an established domain, your website is highly optimised, you have a low level of competition, your competitors have poor content and a low quality backlink profile then ranking on page one for your target keywords can take 1-3 months.

However, any technical SEO expert will tell you that most clients are not in this fortunate position. Therefore the majority of websites will take 3-6 months to rank on page 1 with some taking 6 months to a year.

The thing to bear in mind here is that you are investing in the future of your business and the wait is well worth it.

Do you follow Google's webmaster guidelines?

Yes I do; I always follow best practices and constantly develop my SEO skills. Any SEO professional not following Google's recommendations will not rank highly for long on any of the organic searches.

Anyone using keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky redirects, negative link building, scraped content or any other nefarious SEO tactic deserves to lose their place in the Google index.

My customers are enjoying prolonged periods at the top of the Google rankings due to my adherance to these standards. Furthermore, neither myself or any of my client's have experienced a Google penalty due to underhand tactics being employed.

In the past, I have taken on clients whose websites have had manual actions from Google. This was due to their previous SEO expert not adhering to the webmaster guidelines. I worked with the business owner to get these penalties removed and their websites were able to move back up the Google rankings.

Can you provide a list of your clients?

Yes I can. As the founder of one of the UK's leading SEO companies, my clients include global businesses, e-commerce stores, entertainment companies, artisans, manufacturers, designers, PR companies and tradesmen, amongst many others.

They are all happy to talk to you and share their SEO success stories.

Are you experienced in local SEO?

I am. I've helped many businesses that operate locally or have multiple stores foster their local presence online and increase their ranking capability.

I have a number of software tools and techniques at my disposal to develop your local presence and show Google search that yours is the business to serve local people when they require your products or services.

Are you experienced in International SEO?

Yes. I've worked with a number of business owners across Europe. My international SEO service encompasses a range of techniques that will improve your international search visibility and rankings on search engines in other countries.

Any good SEO professional will tell you that a site can’t simply be translated and expected to rank well in a different country. I will go through all the options with you carefully and apply them based on the specific needs of your busines

How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns?

Because SEO is infinitely measurable and the SEO industry is awash with SEO tools, it has never been easier to track your SEO results.

The main metrics that I concentrate on to determine the success of SEO campaigns are as follows:

1. Google ranking of your main converting keywords.
2. Increase in organic search traffic.
3. Organic impressions.
4. Organic click through rate

The build up of your domain's authority is also an important metric, as is the quality of your backlink profile. Depending on your business objectives, we can put together key performance indicators that reflect your business strategy and I will work to achieve these.

It is important to connect the dots between your objectives and the SEO strategy with our mutually agreed KPIs.

How will we communicate and how often?

During the first few month's of the SEO campaign, communication is on a regular basis to ensure your site is correctly optimised and the onsite content is ready to promote via content marketing.

Depending on your availability, I make myself available by phone, video conference or email whenever you need to talk to me.

All of the key metrics identified above will be tracked on a daily basis and available to you whenever you choose to view them.

I conduct constant audits to ensure that your business is always performing and to uncover any new opportunities that may arise. Monthly reports are also provided, depending on your unique requirements.

What happens when we part ways?

When you have no more use of my services, you will maintain ownership of all optimised content that I have provided and none of it will be removed or modified. All the link building efforts that have been built up over the time that we've been together will remain in place too.

As I do not ask you to sign a contract, there are no fees for early contract termination and you can walk away whenever you want.

What are your fees and payment terms?

I charge a monthly retainer based on the number of keywords that you want to target. The minimum cost is £500 and that is for up to 5 keywords. The cost per keyword after that is £100.

Invoices are raised on a monthly basis and are payable within 3 days.

Standing out from the crowd has never been harder.

The competition for the top spot on Google is fiercer than ever.

If you want to work with a UK SEO expert that has proven technical SEO knowledge, follows Google guidelines, is effective and ethical then please get in touch.

I look forward to working with you.