You're planning to hire an SEO, but you've heard that it's easy to get burned. What should you expect from a reputable SEO? Or perhaps you're thinking about starting your own SEO business, and you want to make sure you do well by your clients. What should you be doing? Keep reading.
As you might expect, this topic comes up from time to time on our SEO Chat forums. The most recent time it came up, less than two weeks ago, a number of our members who do SEO professionally weighed in on what they do for their clients. While certain practices in general turned out to be very common, clearly no one took a “cookie cutter” approach to SEO.
Ideally, the exchange between client and SEO is mutually educational, as the client learns at least some of what is involved to make their website do what they want, and the SEO learns something about the client's business. Both parties need to be able to respect and understand each other for this relationship to work.
With any luck, this should be evident at the first meeting. If you're a client, expect the SEO to ask lots of questions. If you're the SEO, though you'll be spending time asking questions and taking notes, be prepared to spend some time educating the client in what you do. When a client understands what you're doing and why, they'll probably cooperate more. That's pretty important if, for example, content is a concern for the site (as it often is).
After the first meeting (if not before), the SEO will have analyzed the client's website, and created the first report. What is in that report? Well, before you can move forward, you need to know where you've been, so it will probably start, as one of our members notes, with a benchmark rank report that shows positions of all keywords on multiple major search engines, and current traffic. If you don't have some kind of analytics already set up on your site, that will be recommended (and the SEO will need access to it). But that's just the beginning.
An SEO will need to look at the on-page and off-page optimization of your site. So he or she will look at what is already there and make recommendations for individual pages concerning title tags, content, links, keywords, etc. As the client, you might get a few unexpected recommendations.
For example, as the SEO gets a better handle on your niche, he or she will probably get a better idea of what keywords you might be able to rank for. They'll often recommend trying for a larger list of keywords than you might have initially intended. Such a list can help attract long tail traffic, which converts better.
For example, say you're a dentist and have been trying to rank for the word “dentist” plus your location. You may be missing out on a lot of visitors that are ready to pay for your services. Have you tried to rank for, say, “dental implants,” if you perform that service? Or “root canals”? Or a long list of other dental procedures? Anyone doing a search on those specific terms knows exactly what they need, so you can show them the advantages of getting that service from you (and not one of your competitors).
Speaking of competitors, as the client it helps if you know who your competitors are, so your SEO can examine their websites and get a feel for what you'll need to do to beat them. The SEO will also use this information to help him or her determine what keywords you'll be able to rank for, and that will attract reasonable traffic.
Search Optimization 
/ 3 
