Internet Marketing: How to Hire and Manage an SEO Consultant

We often get asked, "How can I find a good SEO consultant?" as well as "How do I know whether they're doing a good job?" It can be difficult-- no government certifications exist for SEO consultants. A few of us at HubSpot sat down together and developed a guide and some questions to ask search engine marketing consultants that you are consider hiring.

7 Steps for Hiring a Good SEO Consultant

Determine your goal for hiring an SEO consultant - What do you hope to accomplish? Are you looking for more long tail keyword rankings? Are you looking to rank better on specific keywords? If you aren't specific and don't have realistic goals, it's hard to determine whether you're getting anywhere. It also makes it extremely easy for someone to take your money and run or just keep on asking you for money. You might also discover that you don't really need a SEO expert to accomplish these goals.
Learn a little bit about SEO yourself - You're hiring someone else to be the expert but some rudimentary knowledge will serve you well to evaluate and work with a good one. Read 1 or 2 blog articles and watch a webinar on SEO. Try to do a little SEO yourself. You don't have to spend all days on it to start building a good foundation and you can always hire someone-- you'll just be more informed!
Compare metrics - How many customers have they worked with? What did they achieve for their customers in improvement in keyword rankings, inbound links, and most importantly, organic traffic? How long did it take? The HubSpot Service Marketplace listing of providers for the On-Page SEO service minimally show the number of customers, Customer Happiness Index, and growth in Organic Traffic achieved by providers.
Audit their websites - Are the consultants pitching you SEO services well-optimized themselves? For a quick check, run their websites through Website Grader.
Ask for case studies and referrals - Run those websites through Website Grader and use free services like Compete to see if their traffic has increased.
Interview - How long have you been in business? What is your ideal client profile (what industry, company size, B2B/B3C, etc.)? How frequently do you communicate? By email, phone, in-person? Determine whether those answer fit your business and goals and watch out for the 7 Signs You Should Run Screaming From an SEO Consultant.
Ask for regular reporting - How do you report your results? What metrics do you track? Minimally, it should include growth in keyword rankings, inbound links and organic traffic.

You've Hired, Steps to Manage Your SEO Consultant

Provide helpful information to your consultant - Buyers of On-Page SEO service through the HubSpot Service Marketplace receive a 1-page guide on information to provide, best practices and managing the service. That way, you and your consultant start on the same page.
Monitor your consultants progress - Do this using the metrics and reporting mentioned above.
Monitor key metrics yourself - Many clients and consultants still focus on on keyword rankings and inbound links. You could monitor how both change over time with free and paid tools. Stitching together the data over time may take some work-- cutting and pasting, exporting and importing. For inbound links, distinguish between links to your website vs. links to your website that people actually click on.
Measure the bottom line - Tracking keyword rankings and inbound links can be a lot of work especially if you are stitching together free tools for the data. Plus, they are less and less effectiv e at indicating SEO success as SEO evolves. The real reason you care about ranking for keywords and getting links is to grow your organic traffic over time. For that, you can use free tools like Google Analytics to measure your traffic from organic search.

One final point. Whether you or someone else does your SEO work, you still have to have great content to optimize. You may pay someone to increasing rankings with keyword placement and inbound links, but if you don't have the content and conversion opportunities on your website once people land there, then you still fail to generate leads and customers.

Photo Credit: {Guerrilla Futur es | Jason Tester}