The top 5 questions for the SEO specialist you want to hire

The top 5 questions for the SEO specialist you want to hire

Normally a business that isn't in the SEO and marketing field will think of outsourcing the work to a credible SEO specialist.  This means you have to go out and find the right person, for the right price, in order to get your rankings boosted without breaking the bank or wasting money.  Finding the right SEO specialist for your company or personal website is actually a difficult thing to do since you're essentially building your own team and not hiring a company to do it for you.  If you were to hire a company to come in and do all of your SEO, you would not have to vet anyone in order to figure out what they can do, but that means you're going to be paying a premium for the services needed.

Bringing on a great SEO specialist will decrease the amount you have to spend on your employees to teach them how everything goes.  You won't have to train this person, which means they can get right to work as soon as they are employed.  The beauty of an SEO specialist, that you don't have to train, they can start right away and help build up your rankings the day they're hired

In this discussion, I'll be going over the top 5 questions you should be asking an SEO specialist if you plan on hiring them, and those questions are:


How long have you been doing SEO?
An SEO specialist should have been doing search engine optimization for at least a few years before they can consider themselves a "specialist".  There's no way to know if they have been actually doing the work for years, but honest people will let you know exactly how long they have been working at boosting rankings for themselves as well as clients.  A person doing SEO for 1 to 2 years isn't a deal breaker, just read how they're responding and what they actually know about the operations they'll be doing, and judge them based on that.  Passing on a new SEO person because they haven't been working on it for 10+ years means you're limiting yourself to only a few people who would be willing to work for you and you might be passing up some amazing people during your search.

I consider myself an SEO specialist because I've been in the field since 2003 and I've had literally 1,000s of clients.  Now, you wouldn't be able to hire me for the same price you could hire someone that has 3 to 5 years of experience.  So, you'll need to understand that your budget might not get you the most experienced person in the world, but you can usually get someone that knows a great deal of how the search engines work

How long will it take to rank on page 1 for my keywords?
When it comes to getting to page 1 rankings for your website and targeting a specific keyword, there's no set timeline that will say "Hey, you'll rank on page 1 on this day!".  If an SEO specialist says they can get you page 1 rankings in XX days, you should avoid using them, mainly because they're just trying to get you to hire them and that's never a good thing.  They're just trying to take your money and boost your hopes to get you to sign up.  If the SEO specialist you have in mind says something along the lines of "It could take 3 to 6 months to get page 1 rankings, but we don't work for the search engines so it's hard to give an exact date" you should trust them a bit more because they're being honest with you.

You can weed out a lot of bad SEO specialists by asking this question, because the bad ones will tell you everything you want to hear, and now you know how to weed them out  

Do you guarantee top rankings?
No SEO specialist will guarantee top rankings because we don't work for Google, which means we can't place you at the top and we don't hold all the puzzle pieces to the search ranking algorithm.  If we did know all of this, we wouldn't be selling our services for anything less than $500,000,000 a year lol

Any SEO specialist that guarantees top rankings should be avoided because they're just trying to get you to sign up with them or they're trying to use a common loophole used by less than credible means.  They could say "Yes!  we can get you top rankings for your keywords!" you need to ask them about specific keywords because they could get your ranked for something like "the super duper amazing keyword for your website" and it won't take long to get to #1 since no one is ranking for it.  They will also target your own business name, and get you to #1 since you're the only one likely targeting it.  If you give them a specific set of keywords, medium to difficult ones, they will back out of their guarantee and that means they should be avoided.  They should be avoided because they intended on using a loophole to get you to keep paying them, and it would hold up in court if you were to sue them.  So, relieve yourself of headaches early on and don't work with these types of "specialists".

What sort of process will you take to increase my rankings?
Most SEO specialists will go over what they plan on doing to boost your rankings because they know a basic process that will already work.  Of course, they will have to adjust everything for your own website as well as what you've already done in the past to boot your rankings.  If they tell you some plain explanation of what they will do, without telling you where they're going to post backlinks, that's pretty normal. 

You can't tell them where you want to get your links because a lot of times it isn't possible since you don't know what you're doing and how difficult it is to get amazing backlinks in a short amount of time.

If the SEO specialist shows you an exact plan, that was already designed before you contact them, you need to avoid these types of people.  Avoid them because they have likely done this same plan dozen, or even hundreds, of times for previous clients.  This means there are a lot of footprints out there, and exact duplicate campaigns for other websites, which the search engines will notice and your overall campaign won't be as strong as it could have been.

Do you write any content on my website?
Good SEO specialists might not write content for you for the agreed upon price, but great SEO specialists will have added that to the total already and had planned on doing it from the start.  Now, if you don't want them to write up content for you, you can just tell them and they will remove it from the total you would be paying.  If a specialist says they don't plan on writing up your content, there are likely a couple reasons that could bring them to that decision, such as:

1. They don't speak your native language and it's difficult for them to produce massive amounts of content for you.
2. They just don't want to, which shows their true passion for their work.
3. They aren't good at it, meaning you wouldn't want them to do it anyway.

Great SEO specialists will be able to write in your native language, or they will be able to get someone to do it, and that's what you want when you're looking for a specialist.


In conclusion
When you're looking for the best SEO specialist, you need to ask a bunch of questions prior to having them work on what you need to be done.  They should already know what to do when to do it, how they should do it, and they shouldn't ask for direction to get you top rankings.  They will likely write up their own content for your own website as well as 3rd party websites, which will set them apart from the average SEO specialists.  You need to understand that you won't be able to get a 15+ year experienced SEO specialist for the same price as someone that has been doing it for 3 to 5 years.  Be sure to ask all the right questions when looking for the perfect SEO specialist,


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Thanks!

Tommy Carey