Search engines have become a staple of human life since Google developed a search engine rankings system that returned relevant keyword results to internet users. While more search engine traffic was new to business owners, the Google search engine optimization service space became a booming marketing opportunity. Both for the business owner and the SEO consultant who took them on as clients.
As time went on, the value of Google SEO strategies to business brought with it more than opportunities for increased traffic, leads, and sales. It also brought a new breed of "SEO consultant" whose model typically involved low prices in exchange for high promises.
We've all seen the offers of $29 SEO services or $249 SEO campaigns.
More often than not, these so-called SEO expert freelancers and SEO agencies provide little in the way of effective digital marketing services.
Leaving SEO service clients with a bit of keyword research, a link here and there on free directory websites (often referred to as "citations"), and perhaps a pretty audit provided on a PDF from some free or cheap SEO audit tool they found online.
We've also seen $20,000 SEO strategy project offerings from an SEO Agency for high competition keyword term digital marketing strategy plans on the other side of the spectrum.
But how is a business owner supposed to know if a search engine optimization freelancer or an agency can deliver on organic traffic promises?
That's where an SEO Consultant comes in.
It's easy to understand why business owners have a hard time distinguishing between these two very different job titles. Even marketing experts and marketing companies can't get the distinction right.
As a digital marketing agency, the staff at Digitaleer, from the owner to the marketing team, understand that these are two different positions.
Potential clients should think of these two roles based on the work that they perform. SEO Specialists are tacticians. SEO Consultants are strategic planners and advisers.
Let's do this, let's create a situation that most business owners may find themselves in to better illustrate the differences.
An SEO Specialist will tactically approach this project by doing some of the following:
- Follow site optimization guideline SOP
- Running a site technical audit
- Fixing technical issues on the website
- Optimizing the on-page for improvement in content performance
- Latent semantic analysis of content
- Make sure your website is smartphone friendly
- Addition of unique schema markup language to optimize for the semantic web
- Diagram and interlinking of pages
- Link Building
- Reporting
While it looks simplistic, there is a lot of data analysis, coding, research, and writing within all of those steps. Some SEO Specialists specialize in only certain aspects of those processes, like link building, for example.
The point is, these service providers are doing things for clients; however, they are often doing them based on generic SOP's that don't typically take a unique business perspective.
An SEO Consultant will strategically approach this project (big picture, how does this fit into my overall marketing plan) by doing some of the following:
- Monitor the SEO Specialist team to identify potential long-term issues. Some include duplicate content, link spamming, improper coding at a large scale.
- Tests tactics and develops strategies to employ the most effective ones
- Advises on the effects of Google algorithm updates (like Google Panda, Google Hummingbird, and Google Penguin) and actions to minimize their impact in the long term
- Works with business owners to connect the dots to better understand how a search marketing campaign boosts a larger complete marketing plan. For example, how high-quality content drives email marketing, drives social marketing channels, drives direct traffic, which drives organic SEO.
- Works with the SEO team to identify long term goals
- Makes conversion rate optimization recommendations for your landing pages
- Works with content teams to identify new traffic opportunities every month
- Identifies primary responsibilities for both SEO professionals and business owners
- Helps owners identify KPIs in their monthly reporting, so the correct online visibility data is used to make future business decisions.
- Helps determine if information technology and artificial intelligence can improve your strategic planning for a competitive advantage
If you've gotten this far, you're probably looking for an SEO Specialist or already have one. Now you know you need the help of an SEO Consultant to work with you to verify that what is happening on behalf of your business is the right way to go.
First, here is a testimonial proving that SEO Consulting can help when applied by you or your team.
As a follow-up to our discussions the last two Fridays on the NEWS content, I want to thank you for helping us out. At your recommendation, we have worked on costs. We've got the costs down by juggling the mix of freelancers based on those who have less expensive rates. We also are juggling the combination of in-house vs. freelancers. The net of it is, we have a reduction in the cost of NEWS production of over $700 per month.
Second, we have worked on ideas for improving traffic. We just need an average of 50 page views per month per article to get to an acceptable number.
As you recommended, we are going to start some NEWS roundups, vs. everything being articles dedicated to a single topic. One of our freelancers used to put those together for a newspaper using the AP Wire, so she is going to do those daily for a good rate of around $45 each. We will still do some dedicated articles, but a lesser amount. And do several of the roundups per week, which should increase interest in the articles.
We are also going to explore doing a podcast/YouTube news-reading a few times a week. It may take us a few weeks to get started on that until I feel we can continue it and not sputter out after the first couple of attempts.
We also will explore the UTM tracking, but I am going to have to do some training of the team on that. There were some "deer in the headlights" responses on that at first. But I showed them the Chrome extensions, so we'll explore that over the next couple of weeks.
The upshot is, I think we have some plans that can get us to 240 page views on average per month for the NEWS articles.
At this point, if we meet our goals on the NEWS content, implementing your recommendations:
We should make a profit of $23 per article vs. a loss of $10 per article (as originally forecasted).
The delta is $33 per article. Multiplied by 480 articles = $15,840 / year
Net-net, I think that implementing your recommendations could make a positive difference of $15,840 over a year. Resulting in a small profit on the NEWS content of $11,000/year. That's well worth a few hours of consulting time!!! I wanted to report back on that and thank you very much for helping with it. Now, we have to execute this, but we've got a solid plan on that little piece of the business.
Anita Campbell
Small Business Trends
So, what do you get when you buy some time with our SEO Consultant Clint Butler? Well, that's really up to you since, as we said, everyone should be building projects that are unique. That said, here are some ideas:
- One hour consultation time
- Reviews of site audits to clear up the techno talk, so you understand it
- Help you review reports
- Best practice methods to beat authority websites in your market
- Analyze web analytics data with you to help you figure out your KPI's
- Analyze data to help you capture revenue you're missing out on (like the case above).
- Review your SEO reporting from a 3rd party perspective
- Review your Google Business Profile plan
- Review your targeted advertising with Pay-Per-Click like Google Ads
- Review your budget to ensure you're getting the highest return on marketing investment
- Review a backlink your provider gave you to head off spammy links
- Review your blog content strategy, content creation calendar, publishing schedule
- Review your e-commerce site structure
- Review your customer relationship management system
- Security risk management
- Explore affiliate marketing opportunities
- Analyze the success of digital to in-store retail sales
- Help you create a learning platform for new staff knowledge. education, and skill to increase your recruitment return on investment
- Analyze your search engine traffic to make sure your keyword research is targeting the right keywords at the proper keyword density and topic cluster
- Get a third-party perspective on client websites user experience
- Someone to bounce your crazy ideas off of
- Tips to monetize your current traffic better
- Discuss possible implications of a new law
- Help your leadership team employ your marketing and SEO companies better
- Discuss possible mergers and acquisitions to help your overall business goals
- Tips on web design and conversion marketing
- Group calls with your in-house organic SEO consultant, public relations, or growth marketing manager
- Access to over ten years of SEO experience coupled with three Masters degrees in Internet Marketing, Business Intelligence, and Public Relations
- And so much more.
