What You Can Do Before You Hire An SEO Consultant
Before you hire an SEO Consultant there are a few simple things you can do to help them work hard and efficient for you. Most SEO techniques are way over the average person’s head, but taking care of the simple things yourself allows your consultant to focus on the hard stuff, and not waste time and money on simple tasks that every business owner or public figure should have.
The first thing to do is start your social media presence. Social media has taken the world by storm; it works great, and is usually free!
Start with the big dog, Facebook. Fb will allow you to create a free profile for any person, place, business, public figure, or product. Sign up, upload pictures of you, your customers, your product etc. Then get your friends, customers and co-workers to like your page. Make sure that you post coupons, deals and content related to your industry on your fb page on a daily basis. People will like and “like” you more if you are posting interesting things and pictures. This is usually the first thing your SEO Consultant will do for you.
The other big social media giant is of course twitter. Twitter is more for a person that a business, but you can use twitter to tweet your great deals and product information to your followers.
Foresquare is a really great tool for your customers to use to be able to “check in” to your location. Using this social media tool you can allow your best customers to become the “mayor” of your business, and enjoy extra special
treatment. Word passes quickly about your great deals and gets you greater exposure.
When you have profile on all these important sites, you link them back you your website, and that is how you can increase your social proof. The more social media website that you have linked, (and are utilizing) the better.
The other things that you can do to help your SEO guru are to write blog posts and articles. Your consultant will write some articles about your industry for back linking purposes (kinda like I am doing right now) these articles contain information, but not exactly the meat and potatoes of the industry.
What you can do to help you consultant is write the really good content, the stuff that only industry experts know. You want to write really incredible blogs with your voice, your touch and with your knowledge of the industry. Before you are ready to hire the consultant, start writing articles from 100-1000 words, and just save them in a file.
When you are ready to hire on the SEO team, you know have loads of great content, and web presence, social media outlets, and they have a solid base to start. It will save you some money in the end, and more importantly, free up their time to work on the more important and confusing aspects of the industry.