How to hire an SEO

hi I'm Maile Ohye and I work with Google search I like to share 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 optimization – some SEO seems like black magic having worked with Google search for over a decade what I've learned is that first it's not black magic and second if you want long-term success there 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 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 SEO is ensure that you're serving your online customers a good experience especially 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 potential benefit my 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 one the SEO description of the issue that needs to be improved to help with ranking and to 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 by links because if you search for google advice on this topic you'd see blog posts and videos from

us 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 customers 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 out our 30-minute video series on how to

build an online presence for your local business now if you still believe you want to hire an SEO here's a general process one conduct a two way interview with your potential SEO check that they seem generally interested in you and your business to check their references three act

four and you'll probably have to pay for a technical and search audit 4 decide if you want to hire let's break this down and start with step 1 conduct a two-way interview in the interview here are some things to look for a good SEO doesn't focus only on

search engine ranking but how they can help your business so they should ask questions like what makes your business content and/or service unique and therefore valuable to customers they want to know this information to make sure it's highlighted on your website for your current and potential new audience

– what does your common customer look like and how do they currently find your website 3 how does your business make money and how can search help for what other channels are you using offline advertising social networks 5 who are your competitors what do they do well online

and potentially offline if the SEO doesn't seem interested in learning about your business from a holistic standpoint look elsewhere it's difficult to do good SEO without knowing about a business's goals their customers and other existing marketing efforts SEO should complement your existing work the second step in hiring

an SEO is to check references if your potential SEO provides prior clients be sure to check their references you want to hear from past clients that the SEO was able to provide useful guidance and worked effectively with their developers designers UX researchers and our marketers a good SEO

should feel like someone you can work with learn from experiment with and who generally cares about you and your business not just getting your site the highest rank as ultimately those techniques rarely last long if they work at all they'll want to educate you and your staff on

how search engines work so that SEO becomes part of your general business operations step 3 is to request a technical and search audit if you trust your SEO candidate give them restricted view not full or right access to your Google search console data and even your analytics data

before they actually modify anything on your website have them conduct a technical and search audit to give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO if you're a larger business you can hire multiple SEO to run audits and prioritize improvements see what each

has to say and then determine who you could work with the best in the audit the SEO should prioritize improvements with a structure like one the issue to the suggested improvement 3 an estimate on the overall investment in other words the time energy or money it would take

for your developers to implement the improvement and for Google search as well as searchers and customers to recognize the improvement the SEO will need to talk with your developers to better understand what technical constraints may exist for the estimated positive business impact the impact might be a ranking

improvement that will lead to more visitors and conversions or perhaps the positive impact comes from a back-end change that cleans up your site and helps your brand be more agile in the future five a plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation or perhaps how to

experiment and fail fast should the results not meet expectations that covers the structure of the technical and search audit now let's talk about each of these audits individually in the technical audit your SEO should be able to review your site for issues related to internal linking crawl ability

URL parameters server connectivity and response codes to name some if they mention that your site has duplicate content problems that need to be corrected make sure they show you the specific URLs that are competing for the same query or that they explained it should be cleaned up for

long term site health not initial growth I mention this because lots of duplicate content exists on web sites and often it's not a pressing problem in this search audit your potential SEO will likely break down your search queries into categories like branded and unbranded terms branded terms are

those with your business or website's name like a search for Gmail is a branded term while the search for email is an unbranded or general keyword an SEO should make sure that for branded queries such as Gmail your website is providing a great experience that allows customers who

know your brand or website to easily find exactly what they need and potentially convert they might recommend improvements that help the entire searcher experience from what the searcher sees in search results to when they click on a result and use your website for unbranded queries an SEO can

help you better make sense of the online competitive landscape they can tell you things like here are the types of queries it would make sense for your business to rank but here's what your competition is done and why I think they rank where they do for instance perhaps

your competition has great reviews really shareable content or they run a highly reputable site an SEO will provide recommendations for how to improve rankings for these queries and the entire searcher experience they'll introduce ideas like update obsolete content they might say your site is suffering because some of

your well ranking content is obsolete has poor navigation a useless page title or isn't mobile-friendly let's improve these pages and see if more website visitors convert and purchase or if they can micro convert meaning that perhaps they subscribe or share content improve internal linking your SEO might say

your site is suffering because some of your best articles are too far from the homepage and users would have a hard time finding it we can better internally link to your content to feature it more prominently generate buzz the SEO might say you have great content but not

enough people know we can try to get more user interaction and generate buzz perhaps through social media or business relationships this will help us attract more potential customers and perhaps garner natural links to your site learn from the competition your SEO might explain here's what your competitors do

well can you reach parity with this and potentially surpass them in utilities or can you better show customers your business's unique value again a good SEO will try to prioritize what ideas can bring your business the most improvement for the least investment and what improvements may take more

time but help growth in the long term once they talk with you and other members of your team such as developers or marketers they'll help your business forge a path ahead the last thing I want to mention is that when I talk with SEO s one of the

biggest holdups to improving away site isn't there recommendation but it's the business making time to implement their ideas if you're not ready to commit to making SEO improvements while getting an SEO audit may be helpful make sure that your entire organization is on board else your SEO improvements

may be non-existent regardless of who you hire so that wraps it up thanks for watching and best of luck to you and your business