Maybe you’re looking to handle the SEO for your website in-house, but none of your current employees (including you) have any real background in SEO. Since you may not have the available budget to commit to hiring an SEO agency full-time, you decide to start with an SEO consultant and see what you can learn. If that’s the course of action you decide to take, then you need to make sure you are prepared for your SEO consultation. Chances are you’ll be getting a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time. Most of it is going to be new to you. Since you’ll be applying what you learn from you SEO consultant to your website, it pays to be prepared for the meeting.
Here are a few tips for ensuring your get the most out of your SEO consultation.
Know what you want
Your SEO consultant is going to do everything in his or her power to give you the tools to succeed with your SEO. But they can’t point you in the right direction if you don’t know where you want to go. What are your goals? Do you want to increase traffic and conversion? Are you looking to increase the presence of some of your internal pages or just focus on the homepage? (Search engines rank individual pages, not websites as a whole). Your SEO consultant can’t tell you what your goals are. Their job is to help you achieve them.
Be prepared to ask AND answer questions
In order to get a clear picture of where your site is and where you want to take it, your SEO consultant might spend part of the meeting digging into your current marketing strategy. What are you currently doing online to promote your brand? How involved is your company with social media? What are your competitors doing? The better you can answer their questions, the more your SEO consultant will be able to help
Don’t be afraid to ask your own questions! Ask the SEO consultant about anything you don’t understand. You have hired them to teach you, so don’t walk away feeling like you missed the point. You’re going to be handling the SEO for your own site, so you need to feel prepared.
Keep the attendees to a minimum
While it would be great if the SEO consultant could teach everyone at your company, this meeting is really meant to be you and them. Maybe you bring in one employee who will be handling part of the SEO strategy and execution, but if you want to have your web designer, IT guy, marketing director and sales reps there, it’s probably a better idea to sign everyone up for an SEO training session. Let the consultation be between you and the expert.
