"I Think This Guy Is One Of The Best Search Engine Optimization Consultants I've Ever Used."
This is what you want to be saying to your staff after hiring an SEO manager. But what does an SEO consultant actually do? Throw runes? Examine the entrails of birds? Bribe people?
No.
A good consultant looks at:
• Your site;
• Keywords in your niche;
• Other sites in your niche that are top in Google for these keywords;
• How these sites got top in the search engines;
• How your site can beat these sites;
• Then applies this knowledge to your site.
In short: in what ways is your site not like a successful site? Then changing these.
You can also use social media, videos, even certain online classified ads. Whatever is going to get more paying customers to your site. Anyone can set up the online equivalent of a two-headed calf and get gawpers. Such people are a waste of bandwidth. After all the tweaking, traffic reports, meetings and slices of baloney the ultimate, the only 'metric' is net profit.
How Do You Choose?
There are thousands of self-proclaimed SEO experts. Confidentialty means that they should not disclose all of their clients, but one or two market leaders would be OK. A case study is useful. Confidence that they can get you on the front page for competitive keywords would be good. Confidence that they can get you targetted traffic from prospective buyers would be better.