SEO Consultant Ireland

With the SEO staff there is always a dilemma, if to put them in the IT or the Marketing department. Unfortunately that is the one that does not really have the right answer. SEO should not really be neither with the IT nor Marketing. SEO staff need to be in between those two, probably reporting to the same management level where you IT (or Development if you are in IT company) and Marketing are reporting.

Why is SEO ’so important’?
Well the SEO staff have a job to make sure that the IT and Marketing excel in what they do without clashing into each other’s territory.

What makes a good SEO professional?

The term Team Player describes well what a SEO staff need to be good at. Unfortunately this is completely incompatible with one of the most important skills required for the perfect SEO person and it is entrepreneurship. SEO is changing and evolving rapidly. The SEO person needs to be a serious ‘forward thinker’. Again, being a visionary and the analytical is again extremely rare in the same person. Statistical Analysis is the base and the start of any SEO. There is a high level of leadership skills required to get the web developers and marketing staff involved constructively into the common project, and make them byte in to it. Vendor management skills, and negotiation skills in general is certainly required to manage the external SEO and PPC vendors, partners and consultants.

Let’s just list the skills described above in a simple list:

Team Player vs. Entrepreneur (Soloist, Leader)
Statistical Analysis (Detail Oriented) vs. Creative Forward Thinker
Negotiator vs. Charismatic
Management Experience
Results Driven (doesn’t it sound so much like ‘Black Hat’)
….

The more you define your SEO staff requirements the more complex it gets. It actually gets to the utopia stage, since there as a so many so conflicting skills required. Perhaps hiring the SEO staff in house doesn’t sound as that good idea anymore?

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.

SEO Consultant first in Google Chrome!

It took about 6 months from the web site launch to get it to the first position in Google for ‘pages in Ireland’.

“Growing up”, Google learned to understand the abbreviations. Today it knows that ‘SEO’ stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. You can see it in the search engine results pages where Google highlights the keyword you have made a search for in the text description it displays about your site. So if you make a search for ‘SEO’, it will highlight the text ‘Search Engine Optimization’ as well.

What is to be noted here is that this is actually wrong. Why? Because this is a search results page of the Google.ie, so it should have the Irish spelling here. Note that there is also a text there ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ – the way we spell it here in Ireland. The Google.ie didn’t highlight that, meaning it didn’t understand that this means SEO as well.

Someone should teach Google.ie the Irish spelling of the English words…

Until then, watch your META Description Tags. If you want Google to understand you and display and highlight appropriately, you need to spell the full meanings of the abbreviations the American way. Otherwise Google will not recognise them, and will not display / highlight them properly in the search engine results pages.

Some three months ago I wrote the post about the speed of Google – defining a test on how long does Google really take to place a new web site high (first page) for the relevant search phrases. We all know that Google will fairly quickly display a web site high in the search engine results pages (SERP) after it initially finds the page – for the search phrase that is exactly the same as the domain name of the web page. But getting listed for the other keywords is something that Google really does not rush to do quickly. Exceptions are of course pages PING’ed directly to Google, or submitted via the XML Sitemaps. But both of those tend to have a short ‘life span’ high in the SERP.

So three months after the publishing of this site SeoConsultant.ie – the Google Webmaster Console is showing its rankings in the SERP:

Note that all those results are still obtained with the ‘Pages from Ireland’ option selected for those search phrases.

A new domain registered and submitted to Google will show in the search engine results pages (SERP) in 22 hours.

This is the answer to the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie?

The first milestone was to got the SEO Consultant web stite (SEOConsultant.ie) listed in the Google’s search engine results pages. It took 22 hours.

The next milestone is to get the SEO Consultant web site listed on the First page results in Google.

After the first indexing the domain SEO Consultant domain is ranked number one and two for the domain name ‘’seoconsultant’.
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seoconsultant

It is also ranked in the first page on the 7th place for the keyphrase ‘seo consultant’
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant

For the same phrase ‘seo consultant’ when a option ‘pages from Ireland’ is selected the SEO Consultant web page is ranked number one:
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

The conclusion of this fist part of the test it that it takes Google about 22 hours to include the domain in its index from the submission time. The next goal of the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie? is to see the length of time required to list the domain on the first page for the part of the domain name – the word, or the abbreviation to be more precise – ‘SEO’.

A web site or a blog actually from just another SEO Consultant in Ireland? Like there isn’t enough SEO Consultants?! Well there are many search engine optimization consultants and companies providing search engine optimization services today in Ireland. Perhaps even too many. So why another SEO consultant?!

Here are the reasons why:

1. I like search engine optimization!
2. I asked every search engine optimization consultant or specialist if I could outsource my search engine optimization needs to him/her. None of them showed interest.
3. I was told by many search engine optimization consultants that I have done some impressive results in search engine optimization.
4. A number of existing and potential new clients asked for the search engine optimization service.
5. The general awareness of the SEO in the Irish market is forming up.
6. There is no clear market leader within the existing companies providing the SEO
   services.