Questions on Hiring SEO Expert

[hulahoop]

It has been a few years ago since I touched anything SEO.
Here I am again looking to hire an expert to help with my new site.

I have seen all types of offerings although I haven't yet enquire in depth on what is offered.

I see some services that cost literally $35 a month to $250 a month for optimizing 5 keywords to some at $10k.

Any idea how to get the best expert as I need someone that is exceptional. I guess the $10k would be the best bet but then again I have hired some self claimed pretty exceptional developers not to mention exorbitant and they really were not worth the price.

Guess all of you here are in the industry so I hope to have some comments on this. Hope I am posting it in the right part forum.

My most important requirement is that it be all ethical even if results are slow but long term and quality is the aim.

[bhartzer]

Like many industries, you get what you pay for. I wouldn't expect to get a lot out of spending $35 to $250 a month. But, it really depends on the keywords and how much competition there is.

Since you have an established site, you're best bet is not to jump into an agreement with someone or some SEO company to optimize a certain number of keywords. I recommend that you hire an experienced SEO to look at your website as a whole, assess its current status, and your overall goals for the site.

Hiring an experienced SEO consultant to provide you with an SEO Audit of your site and provide overall recommendations based on your goals would be the first thing I would do. That might cost you a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on the complexity of your site.

Then, once you know what needs to be fixed on the site, what your overall goals are for the site, and what needs to be done in order to meet and exceed your goals for traffic and revenue from the site.

What is done monthly and what is going to be required as far as how much you're going to need to spend each month should be determined based on your particular website's needs--and not based on how much someone charges to "optimize 5 keywords".

In fact, if someone tells you that they'll charge $XX amount to optimize a certain number of keywords and they don't offer to provide you with an analysis of your site's needs and goals, I would not deal with them. They're not interested in your ROI, just interested generating a certain number of links to your site for a certain amount of money--and once you stop paying that monthly fee your rankings will go away.

[wheel]

Low price is a guarantee of low end results. High price is not a guarantee of high end results. I've heard lots of stories of high priced SEO companies not getting the job done.

Get some referrals and recommendations. See if they've got real results for sites in comparatively competitive industries. Go to pubcon and mingle, meet them in person.

[mikeavery11]

Cheap price is not perfect for such an important and valuable work as SEO. You may find better and best experienced person from freelancing sites, such as odesk, freelancer or scriptlance or hiretheworld.

[viggen]

...doing SEO work myself for clients, i can tell you from my perspective what to look for.

First agree on the current status. That means, anything from your situation in the serps, your ranking, your conversation rate on the landing pages that do rank.

Than agree on the end result. (there is nothing more frustrating than to have two opinions if the job is done or not).

And finally agree on the steps and the time frame that leads to the end result of your agreement.

Those three steps are of course just the frame work and every job has its own details that needs to fit, but just make sure you know where you stand, where you want to go and how to do that...

cheers and good luck
viggen

[halang2x]

I agree with mikeavery11. There are many SEO experts at freelancing sites. When I went to odesk I saw a whole lot of jobseekers and most of them are looking for an SEO client. For that amount of money you can get an SEO expert, it also depends on your agreement with him/her. Im promoting my website and I actually hired an SEO expert from odesk. So far so good. Check out my site and see for yourself.

Here it is: <snip>

Well anyway good luck.

[edited by: bill at 5:34 am (utc) on Oct 18, 2011]
[edit reason] Please see our TOS about linking to your own sites [/edit]

[zabalex]

Hi,
Hiring the right SEO Professional is one of the toughest task if you have no knowledge of SEO yourself. In this case you can only look at the previous results of the company and the client's feedback. Also most of the feedback might be just self generated but the directly contacting the clients can give you some idea about the company or person's work.

As you said you have an established website, you should hire a dedicated person or team for the entire website and not just for some certain number of keywords. Also it is not necessary to go for a big company a small unestablished company can also do the right job for you to establish himself and the cost will definitely be less than what big names can offer. Just ask them to provide you the analysis report of your website, the thing need to be done, the time to accomplish the job, some references of clients to talk to, their experience and cost.

regards
zabalex

[canadafred]

I think what the original poster seeks an ethical SEO expert, an exceptional "white hat" search engine optimiser. Those are the ones that concentrate their efforts almost exclusively to working the on-site/on-page optimisable components, paying particular attention to your actual web page content.

I guess a simple way to tell if you have found an ethical SEO (search engine optimiser) expert is that: they rank webpages well (in competitive keyphrase environments), they haven't link building aspirations, they are fluent in HTML and they can generally write well.

[wheel]

they haven't link building aspirations

Dude, you seem to be seling a particular brand of crazy with this idea that links don't matter.

Even Google disagrees with you on that.

[canadafred]

Indeed, Google suggests to manipulate it.

[anallawalla]

Dude, you seem to be seling a particular brand of crazy with this idea that links don't matter.

I read the comment differently. The good SEOs talk about increased, targeted traffic or conversions. They may mention links in a longer conversation, but not in an elevator pitch. I consult to SEO agencies and having worked in one, I can say that even in a presentation of their abilities, the matter of links is one slide at best.

Yes, *we* know how important they are.

To a novice customer, pitching links is risky. If done badly, the customer might think they can do the links themselves and the SEO sale might be lost.

[yasir liaqar]

I am agreed with bhartzer because the experience is the key to success. Experienced seo consultant will definitely help you to achieve your goals on a longer run. The seo practice should be as good as that will not let your rankings drop.