Search engine optimisation (SEO) consultants provide specialist support to any business with an online presence. They advise on strategies to boost digital success and visibility, while using a range of techniques to encourage major search engines like Google to rank a client’s site more highly. Equally, they help drive targeted traffic to a website.
The ultimate aim is to enhance income from online queries and purchases. But SEO is a long-term commitment.
Getting the best results yourself can be a challenge if you don’t have the right skills and resources in-house. That’s why many business owners hire search engine optimisation agencies and consultants, leaving them to focus on what they do best – running their organisations.
On and off-page SEO
In essence, SEO consultants’ activities concentrate on two key areas – on and off-page search engine optimisation. The former means optimising particular web pages so they rank more highly with the main search engines and encourage more relevant traffic from them.
It’s not just about the content, such as text, video and images, but also each page’s HTML source code and elements, including:
- Title tags
- Meta description tags
- Keyword density
- Latent semantic indexing
For its part, off-page SEO is about techniques to boost the position of a website within the search engine results rankings.
It’s likely to include:
- Link building
- Content marketing – or creating and sharing online material from blogs, social media posts to videos to enhance interest in the client’s services or products, thus driving highly relevant traffic to the site.
- Site health checks
Typical SEO Timelines
It’s important to stress at this point that no SEO consultant worth their salt would promise miracles of an overnight fix. SEO is an ongoing process demanding a consistent approach. Implementing the various techniques takes time, while, equally, Google takes time to identify, crawl and index individual pages.
So, it can take up to 3-6 months or even a year before you really see valuable results. Much will depend on your website’s history, the competition you face, the resources you’ve allocated and the particular strategies adopted.
But here’s the timeline you can potentially expect:
Month 1
Once you’ve identified the SEO consultants you want to work for you, they will complete their research and carry out a full website audit and do some competitor and keyword planning before they do anything else.
Month 2
Depending on various factors, your SEO consultant may be able to start work on these aspects before month 2, but typical activities at this stage include modifying your website as necessary in light of the design, and ensuring a responsive design that works well on both desktop and mobile devices. Early stages of meta-alterations will also take place.
Month 3
The experts will narrow down the results of earlier research to shortlist keywords they want to target. Content creation can also happen now as well as the finalisation of new meta data.
Month 4
By now, your SEO campaign should be yielding results in terms of more traffic and search engine rankings. However, the team will still be working and making adjustments as required, for example with backlinking.
Month 5
The results should be continuing, and it’s also a good time for bringing in further content updates and internal/external linking, and using tools such as Google Analytics to see how things are going to date.
Month 6
You should be seeing real results by this point. Again, your consultants will continue to do testing, so now is not the time to lose momentum. One test, for example, the average engagement time of users on particular pages and the top landing pages that users first navigate to.
How SEO Consultants can help
At Simply Search, we’ll tailor the right strategies for your business as we help you navigate the complexities of SEO. With our consulting services, you can expect to see a significant return on investment, and to have the right tools to make informed decisions resulting in long-term success.
Get in touch today to learn more about how we could help to ensure that you achieve your SEO goals. We also offer comprehensive and free website reviews for organisations who want to find out more about their site in relation to SEO.