What Does An SEO Consultant Actually Do? Duties and Responsibilities
If you’ve been researching digital marketing options for your business, you will undoubtedly have been hearing a lot about SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and you’ve probably seen lots of claims about how effective SEO can help you increase your search rankings.
But you might be wondering what professional search engine optimisation services actually entail. So, let’s take a look at what our SEO consultants at Carden Digital do for our clients. You might also find this article useful if your are wondering how to become an SEO consultant and want to know what sort of tasks you’ll need to do day-to-day in the role.
What Are The Goals Of SEO?
Before understanding what an SEO consultant does, it’s important to understand their goals. The following are the three main goals of every SEO campaign.
Increase Google rankings
For any keyword that you are targeting, the aim is to increase your web site’s ranking for that term on search engines like Google. Ranking #1 for your chosen keywords is ideal, but not always realistic. The most important thing is to rank between #1-#10. Google generally displays 10 results per page, so ranking in the top ten gets your website in front of as many people as possible. A higher Google rank almost always leads to more traffic.
Improve Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to website traffic which is generated by search and not via PPC ads or referrals from other websites. Improving your Google search rank should increase your traffic. If your business has a physical location, like a shop, you might also be looking to increase footfall to your premises – which involves optimising your online presence for services like Google Maps and well as search engines.
What Tasks Is An SEO Consultant Is Responsible For?
Technical SEO Website Audit
The first step in our SEO process. This involves scanning your site using tools which can discover broken links, missing alt tags, duplicate content and other technical errors. These errors on your website can be confusing for Google’s search bots to understand and can lead to your website being penalised in the search rankings.
A list of all the technical errors on the website will be compiled into a report. Our web developers can then get to work fixing these errors.
User Experience Website Audit
User experience is a major ranking factor which Google uses to rank websites but can also be one of the more difficult aspects to evaluate objectively – especially if you built the site yourself. To help, our experts go through your website by eye. This is to get a better idea of how a regular user interacts with it. This can often uncover design or navigation issues which may not be obvious to the original web designers.
For example, page titles, headings and hyperlink text need to be clear for new user, so they know exactly what information they are reading or where they are going when they click a link.
Keyword Analysis
Through a combination of automated tools and online research we compile a list of target keywords for your website. This will include single keywords and ‘long tail’ search phrases such as questions about your company and industry which are commonly searched. All these keywords are backed up with search volume data.
Improving On-Page Content
With a list of target keywords to inform their strategy, our content writers will get to work, improving your on-page content (the text on your website). They will make sure that each page has an adequate amount of content and that it mentions your target keywords and related terms while still being informative and useful for a human to read as well as Google’s search bots.
Regular Content Updates
Google often favours websites which regularly update their content. To this end, our content writers can regularly update your website with new content. One of the best ways to do this would be to write a regular blog post or company news update for your website.
Blogs are a fantastic way of targeting keywords and search queries gathered during the research stage which may not be easy to address on your main web pages. This blog you are reading right now is an example of this, targeting the search phrase “What Does An SEO Consultant Actually Do?.”
Position Tracking
The process of search engine optimisation is not complete overnight. Changes can take weeks or even months to start showing their full impact on search rankings. To make things easier, we check your website’s search rankings for all your keywords and track any changes to the rankings each week.
These results will be provided to you as a monthly report compiled by our SEO team. It details recent changes made to your website, the impact of previous changes on your current search rankings, and projections for future success based on the work currently being undertaken.
Assessing Google Search Updates
Google updates its search algorithms constantly. This includes minor updates, which sometimes occur multiple times a day, and major, named updates which happen a few times a year. These named updates can have a large effect on different search ranking factors. As a result, some sites can see their ranking dramatically improve while others can see a major drop in their search ranking (normally followed by an equivalent drop in traffic).
After each of these updates, it is important to assess what effect it has had and how you need to respond. Google gives only vague guidance as to what has changed in each algorithm, so it requires experience and expertise to evaluate the changes and how to respond to them.
What Skills Should An SEO Consultant Have?
SEO Experience
Some degree of SEO experience is preferable. This doesn’t have to be in a professional capacity though. Running your own blog or optimising online product listings are examples of things our professional SEO consultants have done in the personal lives before joining our team.
Problem Solving
Sometimes, a website’s search ranking starts slipping and it’s immediately obvious why. But more often than not, it requires a bit of deduction to understand the reason. A good SEO consultant will have the ability to look at various data point and determine the best course of action. Problem solving, logic, and the ability to approach tasks in a methodical and results-focused way are all vital skills.
Ability To Train Others
Sharing knowledge is important, that’s why we always look for SEO specialists who are just as good with people as they are with a computer. Being able to explain SEO basics to other team members is a vital part of the role as it cuts down on workload. For instance, as an SEO expert, explaining the basics of SEO to a content writer and web designer before they start building a website is better than presenting them with a list of updates they need to do AFTER they’ve already built a website.
Need Help With SEO For Your Business’s Website?
These are just some of the ways that our SEO consultants help our clients to improve their websites’ search rankings. SEO is a constantly changing landscape, and the techniques and optimal strategies change with it. To ensure that you are getting the most up to date information, speak to our team today.
