If you want to improve your digital marketing approach, improving your website’s SEO is one of the easiest ways to do it. This will give your website higher rankings in online searches, helping your business stand out alongside competitors and peers to help attract more viewers and clients. This is where an SEO strategist can help!
It can be incredibly hard to improve your website’s ranking if you aren’t an expert in digital marketing, social media, or SEO. Many business owners might want to hire a specialist to do this for them. Thankfully, there is a wide field of SEO strategists that can help you improve your online presence effectively and efficiently.
If you think you might need an SEO strategist to help your business grow, these are just a few things you should know before you start looking for an SEO expert.
What Is SEO?
For business owners who are especially new to digital marketing, SEO is short for search engine optimization. This essentially means that a web page features traits that can get picked up by websites like Google or Bing. These usually include specific keywords and phrases that people often put into search bars, making them seem more like reliable and worthwhile resources for those looking for a certain service, or a unique piece of information.
What Do SEO Strategists Do?
The algorithms behind search engines are immensely complicated, and between their frequent changes and all the other companies competing for clicks, it can be difficult to keep track of trends and develop a focused strategy. This is what SEO strategists do, as they’re familiar enough with SEO systems to keep track of your website’s traffic and build plans to increase it further to help attract more viewers.
From here, an SEO strategist will write and edit the content of your website to ensure it has a sufficient amount of SEO-guided language without sacrificing its readability or accessibility. An SEO expert also tends to do a lot of research about businesses that are similar to yours so they can use the strategies working for them to keep your business at an equal amount of success and visibility.
Things To Look for In SEO Strategists
This might seem like a relatively simple task, but there are a lot of unique skills that you should usually look for in an SEO team or SEO manager. Some can come with digital marketing agencies like Canopy Media, but there are also independent strategists who may have their own unique approach, and their approaches to SEO can differ greatly based on their skills and experience.
Either way, it’s important to find an SEO consultant or strategist that can handle your business’ needs and help your business grow in the way that you want. Whether it’s your first time looking for one or you just want to find one that can offer you slightly more support, these are just a few of the key traits to look for when trying to find an SEO strategist.
Planning Skills
Having a strategist with planning skills might seem obvious, but it’s important to mention that SEO strategy involves as much long-term planning as any other type of marketing. Improving SEO can be a long process that involves experimentation and implementation, and creating new content or editing older content can take quite a large amount of time.
SEO strategists need to be able to make clear plans that they can follow, as well as plans that your business can fit into without too much trouble. They should be able to move your SEO strategy gradually enough to help your website shift organically, rather than quickly transforming your website into something that is either non-functional or unsuccessful.
Communication Skills
Improving your SEO is hardly the only thing that an SEO strategist should be doing. They should be collaborating and communicating with you through their entire process, trying to help you build and develop your website to be more successful while not interrupting your business or taking up an unnecessary amount of your time.
This often means that a good SEO strategist will be able to communicate with you clearly and easily. This can include their ability to tell you what they wish to work on and how they plan to achieve it, but even just hearing out your concerns and questions so that they can answer anything you’re unsure on can be effective. Even if you don’t know much about SEO or digital marketing, your SEO strategist should be able to actively work with you so that you know whether you’re succeeding.
Research Skills
SEO strategists can sometimes specialize in a particular type of business, but many experts and agencies will tend to float around between various clients who provide all kinds of services. This means they need to be able to learn everything they can about how your business functions, what your ideal customers or clients are, and how they can improve your website’s SEO without disrupting your business.
Learning and researching this information is vital for an SEO strategist, as SEO is far more complicated than just putting a few keywords across your web pages. They need to understand how to utilize their SEO knowledge for your specific business and potential viewers, rather than using a strategy from prior clients that might not be compatible with your company.
Adaptability
It’s also important that your SEO strategist is flexible, especially since changes to online algorithms and searching styles can massively affect how they should be implementing SEO. This is where it’s helpful to keep an eye on current trends, as well as knowing some of the behind-the-scenes systems that they’re optimizing your website through, since it can help them more easily change your plan if it might not be successful.
This also means having backup plans if their first SEO strategy is unsuccessful, as there is still much experimentation and uncertainty that some of the best SEO strategists can still encounter. So long as they’re willing to keep figuring out what was unsuccessful, and properly assess why their successful strategies worked, they should be able to push your business into a higher SEO rating.
Detailed Knowledge
Easily the most important thing with an SEO specialist or strategist is that they know what they’re talking about and have some form of education. This can come from all kinds of schools and prior agencies, but with how complex and new SEO is in the world of marketing, there are also plenty of people who are self-taught that have spent a lot of their personal time learning these systems.
One of the best ways to be sure of this is to talk with multiple SEO strategists, rather than just fixating on one and not verifying their predictions or plans with anyone else. This is why it helps to work with digital marketing agencies with multiple specialists, rather than just a single independent strategist, as you can be more sure that their information is always going to be solid.
Experience
Even though it definitely helps for SEO strategists to have proven success with prior clients, experience alone is not always proof that they will be superior to other strategists. If they’ve worked solely on large teams, they may not have as great of an idea how to help you on their own, and some who work independently might not be able to handle projects as large as yours.
Nonetheless, it’s important to make sure where their background and education is, as it definitely helps an SEO strategist to have worked with other clients and similar fields as your business. If they’re unfamiliar with your field of work, or are especially new to it, you may want to get a second opinion from a different strategist to make sure you have one that can satisfy the needs of your business and website.
Do You Need an SEO Strategist?
No matter the type of service your business provides, potential consumers and clients are more likely to use the internet to look for services similar to yours. As a result, having an SEO strategist can be a benefit to any type of business looking to grow, and it can make your digital marketing ventures far more reliable and successful.
How you go about finding one is up to you, but hopefully these tips are able to help you find the one that can satisfy the online needs of your business best. Whether you prefer to work with SEO specialists from digital marketing agencies like Canopy Media, or wish to find your own independent SEO strategist, these experts should be able to provide you with an efficient form of marketing that no other marketing strategist can.
