Advice and guidance on how to hire an SEO company, agency or consultant

This is Maile Ohye and she works with Google Search. She provides great advice to help you hire a useful SEO and prevent hiring a bad SEO one who you might pay a lot of money without positive results or even worse one who implements shady practices on your website that result in a reduction in search rankings.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation – some SEO seems like black magic, having worked with Google search for over a decade, she has learned that first, it’s not black magic and second if you want long-term success here aren’t any quick magical tricks that an SEO will provide so that your site ranks number one.

it’s important to note that an SEO potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website, so successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward so that it ranks appropriately in the spot where an unbiased potential customer would expect your site to be seen.

A successful SEO also looks to improve the entire searcher experience from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting a customer. A good SEO will recommend best practices for a search friendly site from basic things like descriptive page titles for a blog or small business to more complex things like language markup for a multilingual global site. To ensure
that you’re serving your online customers a good experience, especially for those coming from a search engine, and that your site is helpful whether they’re using a desktop computer or mobile phone.

In most cases, the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see the potential benefit.

Her strongest advice when working with an SEO is to request if they corroborate their recommendation with a documented statement from Google either in a Help Center article video or Google a response in a forum that supports both, 1, the SEO description of the issue that needs to be improved to help with ranking and 2, the approach they prescribed to accomplishing this tasks.

Requesting these two bits of information will help prevent hiring a poor SEO who might otherwise convince you to do useless things like add more words to the keyword meta tag or buy links. If you search for google advice on this topic you’d see blog posts and videos from Google that clearly explain that adding keywords to the meta tag wouldn’t help. Furthermore, while Google uses links for page rank, our documentation highlights that we strongly advise against the approach of buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank.

One basic rule is that in a majority of cases doing what’s good for SEO is also doing what’s good for your online customer’s, things like having a mobile-friendly website good navigation and building a great brand. Additionally, if you’re a more established brand with complicated legacy systems then good search friendly best practices likely involved paying-off some of your site’s technical debt
such as updating your infrastructure so that your website is agile and able to implement features faster in the long-term.

If you own a small local business you can probably do the initial work yourself check Google’s 30-minute video series on how to build an online presence for your local business.

Credit: Google Search (formerly Google Webmasters)

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