SEO Consultant Ireland

How to handle the SEO jobs?

Irish companies are still not 100% sure if to have the SEO outsourced to the specialist SEO Company, or to hire SEO staff directly, and have them work onsite. The constant barrage from the SPAM email offers from mostly Far East SEO companies and their low pricing and the high contract rates of the local Irish SEO companies and professionals mate things even worse! To outsource to an unknown company on the other side of the world, or to hire a local provider – who will in most cases charge you twice more?

The reason it is so hard to hire a SEO staff or engage a SEO company is that there is relatively little understanding on what SEO really is. It is not uncommon to hear the completely opposite opinions and definitions on what the SEO is. Some people bring in the pay per click (PPC) in it, some talk about on site and off site SEO, some talk about link building (now, how do you build a link?). The social media, made things even more complex lately.

So how do you hire someone not knowing nothing neither on what the task on hand is, nor the results that are to be achieved? You are quite likely to fail. If you stick to it, you are quite likely to fail a few times as well.

The same is true if you hire internally or a external SEO vendor.

Do it yourself SEO jobs are the natural result of this situation. You either try to do it yourself if you are a small company, or you ask the existing staff you have to learn and do the SEO tasks for you. That is even more often a recipe for the disaster. You are asking of your staff to do a SEO job that they have not been trained for and have no experience in it. Jet somehow you expect them to succeed?

Hiring for SEO jobs is tough.

The best peace of the advice is to get a the best SEO professional you can get – to help you and do the job interviews for you. Regardless if you are hiring an external SEO company, or a onsite SEO vendor, or the person to do SEO inhouse on your payroll. You are far likely to get the right one to do your SEO jobs than trying to asses the candidates yourself (presuming you are not a SEO specialist yourself!).

Choosing a SEO company is a big decision. Why? A SEO Company can improve your site ranking, do nothing or even do damage to your site and reputation.

Questions to as the SEO Company:
Examples of your previous SEO work (success stories)?
What kind of measurable results to expect, and in what timeframe?
What are the exact and total costs?

A number of Marketing Institutes and Marketing Schools will also have courses that will give you the general knowledge to be able to find hte SEO Company that will be the best match for your needs.

There are also companies that giving presentation that will train you on how to choose a SEO Company. Here is the promotional vide from John on Outsourcing SEO Projects. It is a good start in searching for your SEO Company:

Yes there is a cheap SEO. Actually there is plenty of cheap SEO around. The question is what are your exact needs and expectations – will the cheap SEO do for you?

Let’s start from the beginning. Most of the smaller companies try to do SEO themselves. Somewhere between the marketing and the IT, there is this SEO task, bounced frequently in between. Like a hot potato. No one is really sure what to do, and has absolutely no time for it. So after the initial internal effort that did not result in the desired changes in your ranking here are two avenues:

a) Keep SEO in house
b) Hire a SEO company

We all want cheap SEO so the obvious choice is to keep your SEO tasks in house. You will need:
SEO Training – do not expect to have a SEO knowledge in the company that never did any SEO.
SEO Tools – As you would buy tools for any other tasks, you will need a budget for a list of tools. IBP, WebCEO, iSnare, and similar will each help you do a task.
Links Purchase – Yahoo at $299 is where you start and Best of the web and similar is where you continue spending.

That was a cheap SEO option. Now add the time you or your staff will spend on it, and get the real cost, of our all of the sudden not so cheap SEO!

Outsource your SEO – bring in the professionals

It might seem expensive at first, but anyone who have tried to do SEO internally will understand that outsourced SEO is actually a truly cheap SEO.

Most of the SEO provides fall into the following three groups:

Marketing Agencies (€10,000 per month)
Their marketing experience is usually the biggest, but might not really be related to online marketing at all. Double check their online experience and if they actually have SEO staff internally or are just outsourcing the SEO tasks to external freelancers. Their price range cuts off start-ups and small companies.

SEO Companies (€1,000 to €10,000 per month)
Those are usually companies who had an extremely good SEO guru, who trained a team around him. They will in general do more for you than the big companies, since the founder / owner is still doing SEO or at least training SEO internal staff. There is a pride involved, and those companies will show off with the high rankings of your (clients) site (free PR!).

SEO Professionals (€500 to €1,500 per month)
Mostly students and ex web developers in that price range of cheap SEO. Do not rule them out since some of them will generate good results. The general rule is that the smaller your SEO provider is the more will you have to ask about the relevant experience and RESULTS in similar or same geographical markets and industries.

Ask for results, ask for references and ask for their plan of action.

When you compare the cost of in house SEO and outsourced SEO – what one would you call The Cheap SEO?

Any Business Plan has to include a Marketing Plan of some sort. For the Internet based businesses our Marketing Plan will most likely be one of the main sections. When it comes to writing the Online Marketing Budget, the whole list of problems start. Why is that?

Pay Per Click Budget

Online Marketing people will like budgeting for the PPC. Why? Simply because the cost of the PPC is predictable. And the whole PPC business is accountable (if you build in the Click Fraud in your formula somewhere). There is a cost per click, and volumes, and targets and markets… lots of figures you can work with – something an accountant will love.

SEO Budget

Where is where serious question marks are raised under the accountants head! What is the budget required for the search engine optimisation? What is the units, deliverables, and values of each? With SEO it’s all far less specified and defined than with the PPC. And SEO also consists of so many areas that it might be defined very differently by various vendors. The needs for the SEO are very different by every client.

I want to be #1 in Google!

In most cases marketing people with little online experience will have serious issues when defining the Budget for the SEO in their Marketing Plan. They will ask the SEO Experts, and base their SEO Budget on the quotes from the SEO Vendors. Most likely their definition of their SEO Marketing Goals will be – We want to be #1 in Google for …! In other words, they will tell the SEO Companies nothing really relevant that is needed to create a plan of actions and analyze the market and keywords in question to be able to establish the real amount of the work required – hence the cost of it. Ballpark figures and even figures completely imagined are therefore quite common in SEO. People ordering SEO Service do not understand what part of their Marketing Plan do they HAVE to disclose for the SEO Company to give back the realistic estimate.

What’s the cost of SEO?

Marketing people with no online marketing experience usually call the SEO Companies and simply ask – What’s the cost of SEO? The tendency is to disclose as little as possible of their real needs. With a bit of shopping around – hey choose the Best SEO Offer. Not asking themselves much why do the SEO offers differ so much and why does one vendor charge sometimes 100 times more than the other. Not 100% more, 100 times more!

The reason is that the one ordering the SEO service needs to understand the exact deliverables of the SEO web site optimisation. Understanding the tasks involved in the web site optimization work also greatly helps. Understanding the whole process and timelines – well that defines the Perfect Client for SEO!

Unfortunately that is almost never the case.

Those who understand SEO tend to find time to do it all themselves.

Wordtracker:

People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.

Sounds simple this Keyword Analysis, doesn’t it?

But in the reality this is it. You need to use the words you want to be found for on your own web site. Google is the Indexing Service in its essence. It reads web pages and answers the users searches based on the search phrases. Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is the same.

So what is and how to do Keywords Analysis?

Keyword Analysis is the process of finding the keywords you should use on your site. There are number of tools that can help you expand your original list. The list can actually start from the one word. For example let’s say that this site is about ‘SEO’. The aim is that people who are looking for SEO in the search engines find this site. The most obvious way to do it is to use the keyword SEO a lot around a site. But not everyone will just type SEO in the search engine. People might type a search phrase like ‘SEO Ireland’, or ‘SEO Dublin’. Someone else will type ‘Best SEO’ or ‘SEO Company’. Someone will type ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. There are numerous ways one cal search for the topic, or something in particular about that topic. This is where Keyword Analysis comes in. Use the tools to suggest you the lists of keywords related to yours. Then put the synonyms in the tools and request suggestions for those as well. Include in your list of keywords ALL the ones related to your original term.

Keywords Analysis will give a list of thousand or more keywords. If you repeat the steps above multiple times, you will end up with a number of thousands. It is good. But what is the value of each keyword?

The value of a keyword is defined by the number of web sites competing for it (the less the better since it is more likely your site can get on top) and the volume of the searches performed for it. The more searches are made each day for that keyword the more traffic the keyword brings to the top ranked sites. Use this Keyword Value calculation to determine what are the most important keywords and take a special attention to those. Those are the keywords you will want to use a lot on your site, and most likely create a separate page dedicated to each one of them. That page will be used as a Landing Page for the search traffic for that keyword.

You are as likely to choose a wrong SEO Company as to hire a wrong SEO employee. If you know about SEO you will choose the right one, if you do not, ask for help externally.

Inhouse SEO

Imagine that you manage to hire and really hire the 100% best candidate as you SEO guy. And he/she is the best in what he does, in his little niche of SEO. For this example he is the best ‘Link Ninja’. He generates the inbound links from the huge number of sites with minimal budget (you didn’t think links are free did you?).

12 months pass by, and he is up for review. What are his goals for the next 12 months that you are going to base his performance bonus? To achieve 20% more inbound links than last year? And a year after again the same?!

The salary growth is not really exceed 10 to 15% ,… so your PERFECT Link Ninja has absolutely no career path. The only possible one is to stop him generating links but managing junior team members in doing that or managing a vendor SEO company in link building. Since he is the 100% best Link Ninja, he is not going to be happy with anyone’s performance – inferior to his. This results in him not doing the job he is good at – link building, but having to manage inferior link builders. This will give him the feeling his staff is mediocre and that his employer does not invest enough in the SEO Link Building Team.

Here is the point where you lose your Link Ninja – most likely to your competitor – who will use his experience in your industry…

Outsourced SEO

The percentage of SEO contract being renewed after an educated review is really very, very small. This is the result that since a SEO is so nice little item every web design company just adds to their list of services, and can be priced as much as the development of the whole web site, it is too tempting not to offer it. Anyone can call themselves a SEO Expert, and you need to know a great deal about the SEO itself to be able to choose a good one.

So how well will the Outsourced SEO work for you? The answer is really in the question itself. The more you know about the SEO, the better SEO company will you choose. Since you have decided to outsource the SEO, it is most likely you understand you do not have the skills to do it yourself. ON the other hand you need to know SEO really well to find a really good SEO company. A bit like a Catch 22 here isn’t it?

Imagine an accountancy practice hiring a .NET developer to develop an internal application. Will they interview him themselves? And ask for the code samples so that they can analyse them? The same applies with the SEO consultants. It is pointless to choose a SEO company yourself if you know nothing about the SEO yourself. If you do, you will determine what SEO company to work with based on the sales skills of their salesman! And that is in absolutely no relation to the quality of the SEO service you will receive.

So to Outsource SEO or not to Outsource SEO?

One way or the other, get someone who knows about SEO to help you interview the job candidates or potential service provider. You will save a lot of money on the long run. You can find a SEO Consultant for hire here.

While talking to the Search Engine Optimisiation (SEO) providers, here are the few tips that will help you find the SEO company that is right for you. And your web site.

RED FALGS while choosing the SEO SERVIES! The following is the list of things to avoid at all costs in order of importance.

1. Getting involved with a SEO company based on the nice email you just got in your mailbox, that has a report about your site linked and a nice thumbnail screenshot of your front page is going to get you as much good to your business as getting involved with any other SPAM email your get every day.
2. We can rank you on top for the single word phrase of your choice. – when a SEO service company offers you something that sounds just too good, it probably is – just too good to be true. Do not expect to get on top of the search for any commonly used English word. Web sites that get that high have a team of SEO gurus working in house and managing a number of external SEO service providers.
3. Guaranteeing anything in SEO is just childish. It is rally easy to invest in the marketing with a tangible and measurable results. Unfortunately you cannot ‘Purchase SEO by Units’. Traditional marketing formulas do not work here. It is not back page of the Sunday Times, or the supplement in the magazine printed in X colors, on X pages in X copies. When a SEO service provider gives you guarantees of their future achievement, that is a almost certain guarantee you will not renew their contract!
4. Your SEO company is not going to tell you what are they going to do? Run away! It would be nice to just outsource your SEO Service to a vendor and forget about it, wouldn’t it? There are several layers if issues there. First is that your newly acquired traffic might simply disappear when you stop paying. Second is that you might even be penalised by Google for the actions of your SEO Service provider, and your site banned from the Google index for a long time.

SEO Service is many different tasks, and not all web sites necessarily need all of them. Also different SEO companies offer a different SEO services that in some cases do not overlap even marginally. Every SEO company will try to sell you the service they have on offer. Find a SEO company that sells the SEO service you want and need.

Do not talk to the sales people. As with any vendor, you need to talk to the people who will do the work for you or their management. Not the sales people. The sales guy you might spend an hour talking to might have been selling cars yesterday, and learned what SEO stands for yesterday.