SEO is a big hardball market today, with numerous companies all competing with each other in order to get their businesses on the top of Google rankings. There is actually a lot of work that goes into SEO, and while there are numerous people out there who can claim to be “SEO experts”, some of them downright can’t prove it, and others simply can prove it but are actually scamming businesses to make a quick buck off of them.

That’s why we’re developing this list of things you need to know when looking to find an SEO expert. By using some of the tips (and more if you do more research), you can actually keep your company out of high water in order to maintain clarity, improve return on investment, and save money in the long run, even though it can be pretty expensive (we’ll explain in a bit).

Make Sure You Have a Marketing Plan

When it comes to hiring the best of the best, like Golden Gate SEO, or other digital marketing agencies, you want to make sure that the first thing they will do for you is to develop a solid marketing plan that can help SEO and improve your business’s online reputation. Not only that, but there are numerous marketing plans to choose from. You’ll need to do what is called on-site SEO, and off-page SEO (also known as off-site SEO).

What is On-Site SEO?

On-site or on-page SEO is a practice in which the code and structural integrity of your actual website’s files are analyzed and optimized for the best performance. This means there are extensive tests on speed, mobile friendliness, what kind of broken links you may have, and more. Another thing it can cover is image optimization. Some websites have .png images for flat background images which have slower load times than the average .jpg images (which is normally all you need for a website since websites don’t load images in HD graphics).

User Experience Modeling

The way your site is navigated by other users also makes a humongous difference to growing traffic, and increasing things like subscribers, as well as consumers of whatever it is that you are offering. If your website is easy to use, and easy to navigate, with numerous features on it that help the user find what they’re looking for, then you have a high success rate of users being able to return, and even spread the word.

Off-site SEO

When you think of off-site, or off-page as some experts like to call it, you’re talking about all of the popularity of your website, as well as social media pages, and company as a whole in the online world. Your online presence depends on many things such as backlinks, ads displayed on other websites, and more.

Conclusion

When you’re going to hire someone, be sure to ask plenty of questions, such as asking what exactly they will do, what they consider success to be (this answer should be answered so that everything they talk about, they are talking about you in mind), how long does this all take, and more, do you handle mobile techniques, and more. Don’t hesitate to answer any question, and remember, if they tell you the price is super cheap, then you probably want to pass, as this is a sure sign of someone wanting to make a quick dollar.