SEO Consultants do a fair amount of work to raise the rankings of a business across the search engines and have to manage many moving parts of a project in coordination. In conjunction with organising the project, they will also need to report back to the client and meet the expectations that they’ve agreed with the client.

SEO consultants need to be honest with their client’s and explain if a project is viable and not simply think of the money involved. Some SEO projects might not be feasible, and the client might want to rank in a highly competitive market.

In general, though, SEO consultants will micromanage content writers, guide web developers to support layout and designs of web pages, engage with other website owners to obtain links, prepare monthly reports for their clients, and deal with their client’s questions. In some cases, the SEO consultant may even spend time on-site with the client explaining how to structure their website pages and what to write about.

These are the jobs we would expect SEO consultants to be performing for their clients:

• Conducting initial Keyword Research for client’s websites
• Optimising each page of the client’s website so that each page is targeted to meet the user's search intent – you’ll want to ensure that your content is ideally aimed at the targeted user and client of the website owner.
• Benchmarking targeted Keywords against their competitors to ensure progress is made
• Conduct ongoing Technical SEO support. The clients will add more and more content to a website with non-optimised images and over-optimised text. It is the job of the SEO consultant to ensure all the content on the website adheres to ideal optimised standards. This generally means that there are no broken links, limited re-directions, no keyword cannibalisation issues, or blocked resources.
• Improving structured data, otherwise known as SCHEMA, across the website. SCHEMA is a language that the search engines understand to determine what websites are about, and it helps them categorise the relationship between the data.
• Optimising the client’s Google Business Profile if the SEO involves Local SEO consulting.
• Building Trust and Authority of the client’s domain, using PR and outreach.
• Ensure their client’s website is running as fast as possible – this is where the SEO consultant will be using the skills and knowledge of a website developer.
• Ensure that the client’s website has the correct keywords without any potential bloated content.
• Interlinking all the pages across the website to ensure search engine bots can travel within the minimum use of their crawl budgets and crawl all the website’s pages.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it's an indicator of the number of items an SEO consultant needs to consider for their clients.

SEO is a minefield of different players, from overseas cheap SEO agencies to high end local digital marketing companies. A business owner needs someone trustworthy, reliable, and able to deliver on their promises and help their business grow.

There will be some SEO consultants that will take shortcuts, this is the same money, but in doing so, in the long run, they will cost your business more money to fix these mistakes when they fail. Some of these techniques can be risking a Google penalty, which can cause a drop in rankings and traffic.

• Poor quality content on the website and through link building efforts. There is computer generated software that will ‘write’ your entire website content for you. This is known as ‘Spun Content’, the worst type of content to use. Your SEO consultant should be making sure all of your content is unique and passes the Grammarly test with quality. It also needs to be fulfilling the searchers intent.
• Keyword Stuffing – This was a very popular practice in the mid to late 2000s. SEO consultants had determined that if a targeted Keyword phrase had been mentioned extensively throughout an article, it was about that topic. However, the Google Panda update eliminated this technique overnight. No credible SEO expert should be using this technique.
• Hiding text is an outdated technique that means the target keyword has been used on the page but made the same colour as the background. The human visitor cannot see the text, but the bots can.
• Linking all client websites together, to use the domain authority from their client’s websites to gain push the rankings up from each other websites. We have seen this from a specific agency here – Not good practice.
• Withholding access from your website is the same agency that links all their client websites together. It is your website, your business. We do not do that.
• Using duplicated content throughout your website – every page needs to be unique; search engines will more likely want to index unique content useful for the end-user.
• Using other people’s content – this is plagiarism end of.
• Use automated software to build mass backlinks to your website. This technique was great in 2012…until Google Penguin came on the scene, then overnight websites tanked.
• Getting links from ‘spammy’ websites that get no traffic.
• Guaranteeing Rankings – this is another pet peeve of ours. Google clearly states that any agency conducting SEO cannot guarantee rankings for anything and are to be avoided. We have seen SEO companies here that have ‘Guaranteed Rankings’ in their meta titles, which implies:
  • They know the Google Algorithm and how it will change in the future – do they have a crystal ball?
  • They know what their competitors are doing and are sure that their competitors will not outrank them.
  • They know that their clients will not suffer negative SEO!
  • They are totally in control of what their clients are doing to their websites. (Clients have a habit of not listening and changing many factors which have caused rankings to drop!)

All the above negative techniques are used to ‘cut costs’ and ‘cut corners’ and might be used by lower-priced SEO consultants.