Most SEO ‘consultants’ are dodgy as hell – they’ll take your money and do you damage. But if you’ve already gone down that dark hole, consider the following:
1. SEO (search engine optimisation) is driven by solid content, not the sprinkling of keywords. One does not ‘do’ SEO, one creates volumes of great market aligned content. Is your consultant helping you with content creation? Would your SEO guy know the first thing about the informational needs of your target audiences? Probably not.
2. SEO is not about optimising your website for the 50 most popular keywords. Read ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson if you want insight to the thinking process of the remaining 98% of any given market segment.
3. SEO is not a set-and-forget thing. Quality content creation and online publishing is an ongoing business imperative (no-one said this would be easy, but then again if it were easy everyone would be doing it well).
4. SEO trickery is dangerous. Contrived back-links, repetitive anchor-text, keyword density formulas and other mumbo-jumbo will be sooner or later be caught out in a search engine algorithm update and your website will be slapped back to the last century.
5. SEO ‘maintenance plans’ are a RORT. Maintaining what!?
6. SEO without conversion reporting is meaningless. Who cares how many people arrived to your website via organic search – for most of us that’s only a mean to some business end. See if you can find a SEO consultant who will take payment based on measurable conversion performance (good luck).
7. Many so-called SEO consultants have the worst websites – crap copy, cheesy stock images, unsubstantiated claims – they’re not very good marketers. And you want to let them loose on your business…?
Great post!