How To Choose Professional SEO Consultant At A Reasonable Price - Hints From Semalt

Private consulting is often an alternative branch of SEO development. Professionals who choose horizontal growth, i.e. extending specialization instead of climbing the career ladder, often reach the ranks of consultants.

Indeed, improving the qualifications of internal teams and the emergence of training programs leads to an increase in the level of qualification of internal employees to the level of average specialists of SEO companies.

These specialists are able to properly perceive the information received from the consultant and correctly implement the recommendations on the sites. The growth in the number of consulting companies in the field of Internet marketing is due to the growth of the market itself.

Therefore, many companies will be able to switch to 100% consulting services. Thus, companies that are only engaged in consulting and do not perform SEO work will no longer pose a threat to full-fledged SEO companies, as they will not take away customers from them.

It should be noted that an independent evaluation of an SEO company's work will be useful for all interested parties and this will lead to further growth in the consulting services market.

Moreover, Semalt is the ideal SEO service that you will need. With the best SEO tool: SEO Personal Dashboard, we support all businesses by ensuring good positioning and sales in a short period of time.

In the context of this article, you will find out everything you need to know about SEO consulting services.

The reasons why you should seek SEO consulting

For different types of clients interested in SEO consulting, there are different types of motivation for contacting a consulting company. Some of them are different, while others overlap.

Here are, the reasons why it is important to seek SEO consulting:

For internal teams or individual specialists: strategic planning, expert advice, problem-solving, training in the consulting process.
For SEO companies and freelancers: an alternative viewpoint, expert recommendations, increased confidence in the work, training in the consulting process.
For business owners: an alternative point of view (an objective assessment of the situation), an independent assessment of the quality of the work, an increase in the level of confidence in the work, the specifics of the company (the obligation to create internal teams).

How much does SEO consulting cost?

In SEO consulting, the simplest and most transparent scheme for calculating the cost is the expensive approach: the price is formed by the cost of one hour of work of a specialist multiplied by the number of fixed hours of work on a project.

What you should pay attention to in this case:

The cost of an hour of a business consultant already includes the profitability.
With high profitability, a little overtime can be allowed.
Additional working hours may be added to the fixed amount and paid in addition, both by private consultants and by SEO consulting companies.

However, Semalt is within your reach, to help you get visible on the first page of Google with its best DSD SEO tool.

What you should pay a consultant for?

There are many reasons why you should pay an SEO consultant. Here are, the overriding ones:

Strategic planning

This is a highly skilled job. A professional third-party consultant can plan many more options for your site's development and will evaluate the current state of optimization, links, content much better than an ordinary optimizer.

In fact, a properly constructed website development strategy will have a greater impact on the overall success of the project and its bottom line. Therefore, it would be better to entrust this task to a consultant with enough experience and knowledge.

Analytics

Although ordinary employees are quite capable of performing analytical tasks after qualified training, they usually do not have enough experience to be able to see weak signals in statistics, thanks to which the consultant can easily recognize the problem on the site.

In addition, a consultant can help you define more specific tasks for the analysis: what to analyze specifically, how to do it, for what purpose and what results it will bring.

Expert Audit

As with other tasks requiring maximum experience and qualifications, in an audit, many elements of verification can be based on the peer review of the auditor.

Thus, by assigning the role of the auditor to the SEO consultant, you can maximize efficiency.

Recommendations

This element is the main job of a consultant you pay to consult on an ongoing basis.

Indeed, strategic planning and auditing are one-time services, although they can and, perhaps, should be repeated regularly. In addition, the recommendations are the knowledge that the consultant can share with you throughout the consultation period.

By analyzing and correcting the work already done, giving recommendations on tactical decisions and simply sharing their experience on certain issues; the consultant is able to greatly increase the effectiveness of the SEO team.

Answers to questions

Don't overlook the opportunity to ask the consultant questions. Since you pay him / her for consultations, at the same time you can improve the qualifications of your employees by receiving professional answers to the most urgent questions.

But you should remember that everything should be reasonable because before answering the questions, the consultant spends time, which is intended to improve the efficiency of work on your project!

Things you do NOT need to pay a consultant for

There are several other things for which you do not necessarily need the help of a consultant. Among others we can mention these:

Optimization

No matter what the subject of optimization is: textual information, media content or site code, this work requires a lot of time and low skills. After completing basic optimization courses, almost anyone can, to one degree or another, be engaged in website optimization.

Under no circumstances should you pay a consultant for direct site optimization, as this is the most unnecessary way to spend one's expensive time. However, more effective use of one's time will be a consultation on template page optimization.

This approach will allow to perform high-quality optimization and train the contractor for future work. Also, using a good SEO tool such as the SEO Personal Dashboard will make your site effective for a better future.

Buying links

Buying links is part of the work that can and should be automated. It is in the automation of this process that the consultant can help you. At the same time, all the unskilled work should be done by less expensive specialists to save the budget.

Technical improvements

Whatever the improvements are, the consultant's time is worth spending only on finding problems. Thus, programmers, optimizers, layout designers and other highly specialized specialists should eliminate these problems.

3 main scenarios for working in SEO consulting

Consulting in accordance with the strategic plan for developing a site is the most preferred form of work. This scenario assumes the same performer download and prepaid consultation time.

This reflects the client's professional approach to working with the project. That is, the likelihood of such projects succeeding is much higher than average.

Mixed work scenario

With this approach, the consultant provides more information than the performers can implement, and in the time freed up, the consultant can engage in analysis or answer questions.

This can happen when the implementers implement the recommendations faster than expected.

In this case, it is worth discussing increased consulting hours and revising the work schedule in the project promotion strategy. If the work with your project is proceeding according to this scenario, it's fine and you have nothing to worry about.

Question and answer format

This working format is acceptable, but it is less effective than the previous option. Indeed, if the work is done only in this format, the consultations will most likely be ineffective for the entire project.

However, if your goal is to increase the competency of the interpreters and, to a lesser extent, to monitor the progress of the project, then this work format is also acceptable.

But it will be less effective in terms of achieving good project results. In such a format, the work can be taken on if it is cost-effective. In this case, the interpreters are trained and the work proceeds with far fewer errors.

Initiation of "random" tasks by a consultant

This is the most inefficient scenario for working with a site. This is not an indicator of the quality of consulting, but the result of indifference to the fate of the project on the part of the client.

Indeed, if the contractor, on the client's side does not do anything, does not have time to implement changes, does not respond to the recommendations of the consultant; then the latter must spend time looking for "some" problems and describe how to solve them.

It should be noted that with such an attitude towards the site, "some" problems can be found quite often.

Expectations and guarantees

Expectations related to the work on a project are a very subjective concept, but with the right approach, you can get a full-fledged effect of the consultancy, just by contacting an SEO service such as Semalt. For this, you need to meet a number of conditions:

Proper goal setting

First of all, you need to determine exactly what result you want to achieve. Indeed, it is necessary to agree on clear KPIs with the consultant and to define tasks to achieve them.

The key is to make sure that your understanding of the objective and the consultant's understanding are the same because if the objective can be interpreted in different ways, your expectations will probably not coincide with the result that the consultant will strive to give to your site.

Quick implementation of recommendations

If the consultant's recommendations are not implemented by the client-side implementer, then the work shifts to a "question-and-answer" format and "random" task initiation by the consultant.

As a result, the efficiency of the work is significantly reduced and the chance of achieving the defined KPIs is low.

High-quality project management on the client's side

In fact, it is the degree of quality management of the interpreting team and their right motivation. The most important part is the active participation of the client in the project work.

The consultant will give good recommendations, but if there is no one to implement them on the site, there is no desire to think and try to propose something new based on the information received.

Thus, the work on the project will proceed slowly. Very often, it is the client's indifference to the fate of the project that leads to its gradual fading away and the work's ending.

Conclusion

In summary, understanding the principles of work and the correct use of SEO consulting recommendations will allow you to significantly save Internet marketing budgets and increase the effectiveness of your site.

In addition, SEO consulting will also be more acceptable to those who do not trust SEO companies and are used to controlling everything by themselves.

If you are in need of hiring a consultant, for more efficiency and reliability, please refer to Semalt's services.