Who is an SEO Consultant?

The digital world is a fast-paced space, and specialized support is needed in almost every minor area to excel in having a digital presence. As a marketer, you might have experienced putting in extra effort to meet the SEO qualifications on your own but found your competitor’s listing at the top of the search results. It could be because they might have a specialized team working solely on SEO or have hired an in-house SEO Consultant. 

As a business owner, you will need to understand that paid research, Email, social media marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are practical digital marketing pillars. Thus, many companies are actively employing individuals for the role of ‘SEO Consultant’ to improve their traffic and conversion rates and appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

However, the three questions that instantaneously come up in most of our minds are,

• Who is an SEO Consultant?
• What are their Roles and Responsibilities?
• How do they make a difference in the marketing of the company? Or, Do we need an SEO Consultant? 

In this article, we answer each of these questions and study in detail all the relatable factors to help you find out if you need an SEO Consultant for your firm or business. 

Who is an SEO Consultant?

Millions of individuals look upon Search engines for answers almost every day, and an SEO Consultant, as the name suggests, is an expert in Search Engine Optimization. They are experts in devising, implementing, and executing SEO strategies for your company. They work towards improving and ranking maintenance of your company’s engine results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others through on-page and off-page facets. 

Like marketing agencies, SEO Consultants provide their services as Freelancers or contractual. Website owners and businesses with an online presence pay these consultants to get advice and guidance on generating organic traffic, increasing search appearances, reaching a large percentage of the target audience, and thus enhancing profits. 

From small to large scale companies like Fortune 500 use the services of an SEO Consultant like Jonas Muthoni. They are well versed in every aspect, even the ones you may be unaware of. They implement strategies and techniques differently while working in various niches, from Accounting and real estate to Medical and mental care. 

What are the roles and responsibilities of an SEO Consultant? 

Now the crucial question many ask if what is it that an SEO expert does differently or brings to the team compared to any employee working over SEO in-house? The answer to this could be a large extended one, but we will try to simplify it and categorize it into 7 broad headings. Although, all of the roles and responsibilities are entitled to the core commitment of enhancing organic search results ranking to improve client visibility.

1. Understanding Business Niche and Needs:

An SEO expert’s first thing is naturally to study the business niche, functioning, strategic needs, and market ranking. They are expected to closely work with the company’s key stakeholders such as the Director, CEO, COO, and others to understand the business goals and objectives. 

They then develop strategic objectives that align with the company’s interests and provide the board with the roadmap to achieving them. Its core responsibility is to formalize SEO tactics that promise high-yielding results. 

2. Conducting Extensive Keyword Research:

The primary job responsibility of an SEO Consultant is to perform in-depth keyword research. It involves looking for terms, phrases or queries highly searched by your target audiences on different search engines like Yahoo or Google. To do so, they use various SEO tools like Moz, Ahref, SEMrush, etc., to shortlist the most profitable and relevant keywords. Many metrics are to be kept in mind while shorting keywords like Keyword Difficulty, Search Volume, and Domain ratings.

3. Providing Content Strategy Assistance:

Once the list of keywords is prepared, the SEO expert should assist the content marketing strategist to create a detailed content strategy. It includes Company’s blog content ideas, Creating a consistent content calendar schedule, and guest post resource allocation. 

The marketing goals must be realistic, measurable, and achievable. 

4. Performing On-Page SEO:

The technical expertise of an SEO Consultant is of great help when executing on-page SEO. It involves using technical SEO for webpage optimization, ensuring a smooth user experience. In simple words, for all other techniques to work, your website needs to be given attention first. Meaning SEO tasks are performed on the website to make it search engine friendly. However, it includes and is not limited to:

• Source code checks ensure the website works efficiently for desktop and mobile use,
• Site loading speed for individual pages,
• Mapping all website pages with appropriate keywords,
• Eliminating website indexing issues,
• Latent semantic indexing,
• Ensure utmost security and implement SSL certificate. 

5. Developing and Executing a Link-building Strategy:

An SEO specialist will take care of building high-quality backlinks, meaning your other website will have outbound links that direct back to your webpage. To do so, the tactics your consultant will use include:

• Broken link building
• Citation and Guest posting
• Content syndication and repurposing
• Unlinked brand mentions
• Content outreaching

However, tactics are chosen based on company niche and resources. 

6. Collaborating with team members:

Digital Marketing and SEO entail various activities. It can be overwhelming and inefficient for one person to do it all. It sounds unrealistic from strategy creation, content creation, execution, and reports. Hence, an SEO Consultant needs to coordinate with content marketers, graphic designers, web developers, social media managers, technical teams, PR professionals, and key stakeholders. It is their responsibility to ensure smooth and efficient workflow. 

7. Performance Analyzation and Reporting:

Lastly, the consultant is responsible for gauging the performance in numbers and giving the results of the accumulated team efforts to the key stakeholder at the end of each campaign or time period. The metrics will include:

• Bounce and click-through rates
• Organic search traffic 
• Keyword rankings
• Organic conversion rates
• Follow links

Do you need an SEO Consultant?

Now that you know who they are and what they do, it is crucial to determine if you need to hire an in-house SEO Consultant. The experience and know-how that an expert brings to the table help increase the success of your brand’s SEO strategies compared to an in-house team member. 

They create the best inbound marketing methodology for your firm and provide you with the latest marketing updates and algorithm changes. Beginners cannot match their efforts because of their intimate knowledge of the area and undivided concern to increase your online profits. 

Having said it all, SEO Consultant knows to do a lot more than you or an in-house team member. What they do is a lot more, and all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. And to sum it up, they optimize every digital marketing channel to boost your company’s online visibility.

Also, check the best SEO books that you can refer to.