January 27th, 2012
So you’ve just hired an SEO/SEM expert. What can you expect his or her first steps to be?
- Add Google Webmaster tools – A good SEO expert will use these tools to determine if your site has any trouble being searched by Google, not to mention how much traffic you’re getting. These tools will also indicate how fast the site is running, which is crucial for improving performance. For good measure, Bing has a set of Webmaster tools that work well as a cross-reference.
- Perform A Site Check – Next the SEO expert will check how many pages Google is indexing and look for problems like: duplicate titles, missing titles, missing meta descriptions, duplicate descriptions, lack of keywords, etc.
- Analyze Competitive Keywords – Your SEM / SEO professional will make sure your web content contains competitive keywords that people are searching in your niche, which will improve your search engine ranking ten-fold.
- Compare To The Competition – Most SEO professionals also analyze your top competitors’ sites to see what they’re doing that you’re not. Sometimes having this objective eye is worth the cost alone.
Seeing a big shift in your SEO ranking might happen right away if you had an easy, but fundamental, problem obstructing your access to the search engine bots. On the other hand, you might just be in a super-saturated market and it could take several weeks or months to claw your way to the front of the pack. Therefore, it’s important that you give an SEO expert a good six months before you put him or her on the chopping block.
