What High-Impact SEO Consulting Looks Like
– Today we're going to talk about how to be a high-impact SEO consultant, and if you have an SEO
consultant, how to identify whether or not the recommendations actually are high-impact as well. So I've been doing SEO
consulting for over 10 years. Started SEO consultant Siege Media as an SEO-focused content marketing agency with that consulting arm
that's now over a hundred plus people, 50 plus clients,
some of the best brands that we're very lucky to
have in the world, so…
Hopefully we know a thing
or two about SEO consulting that we can share with you
to help you grow your own consulting practice or identify whether or not you have a
great SEO consultant as well. (upbeat music) (upbeat music fades) If doing better SEO on
either side of the equation is something that's
important to you make sure to jam that notification
bell, hit subscribe, and we'll keep you up to date with more videos just like this. So the first thing that I think every SEO consultant should
do is have a focus on making an impact rather
than just fixing 404s. So as someone who's kind of
seen work for multiple SEO consultants over the years, there is a kind of, like,
thought process of some SEOs where they more so fix best practices rather than actually make
an impact for the business.
And what I mean by that is,
technically if you go to some random page on a website and you fix broken 404s, technically that might
be SEO best practice. Similarly, adding meta
description for pages 5,000 to 1,000 or 10,000 in
your overall traffic list, technically SEO best practice, but that's not actually what moves the needle for that business. When you're thinking about
paying someone and also prioritizing their expertise against that, a few things should be happening. One, the equation should
be relative, so… if you're paying them X money, hopefully the ROI is very clear, why. Very often that's not going to be the case if you're doing things like fixing 404s or meta descriptions. On the other side of the equation, what you want to do is actually focus on pages that make
an impact, so sometimes you want to go deeper on things
that really move the needle rather than those overall best practices, and that's kind of where a more
business mindset as an SEO, as compared to "I'm doing
everything I learned in an SEO one-on-one beginner's playbook"
is the difference between a high-impact consultant
and one that eventually is no longer employed or hired as a contractor for that business.
The second piece would be
focusing on proactive rather than reactive recommendations. So I think consistently
good SEO consulting will be bringing the
client recommendations rather than waiting for
them from the client. Bad SEO work I've seen is they'll field a lot of
requests from the client, and when they do get those
requests never push back on them. The client expects you to be the expert rather than vice-versa,
so you want to be bringing those thought processes to them rather than vice-versa,
because if you're not, that shows you're more of a commodity. You're more like an SEO analyst who's doing the nuts and bolts grunt work rather than bringing
strategy to the table, which should be the goal
of every single strategist.
Additionally, proactivity means you're bringing ideas and
thought processes to them in front of changes, in
front of algorithm updates rather than after them. In an ideal world, algorithm updates, even if it hit your client
it's not any kind of shocker cause any kind of thing you've mentioned that could be an issue for them in their traffic in the future
has already been brought up. That's what good SEO consulting is. It's where the puck is
going, it's being thoughtful in terms of qualitative
things in the future, and if you feel things are all good and you're making micro changes on 404s and they still see a 50%
hit in their traffic, you've probably failed
your job as SEO consultant, and aren't truly being proactive rather than reactive in those changes.
Some additional ways you can
be really high-impact on a consistent basis as an SEO consultant, that's part of the go-to playbook, is really looking at the
keywords that site is ranking for in the six to 30 range and making iterative changes against that sorted by search volume or
traffic value or CPC, et cetera. So what I mean by this is if
you dive in Ahrefs and filter by these rankings, this is
effectively low hanging fruit that's also high impact. So if you can make those subtle changes that will get someone from six to three or page two to page one
and rinse and repeat the UX changes the internal linking, external linking, all of that kind of add
up to those changes.
You're always making
high-impact rather than being focused on the smaller, less
impactful pieces of the website that kind of add up over time. And in that same framework, one of the things that
can come up and make sense is focusing on bigger site-wide changes. So those will surface page-level changes, but as part of that, another
thing you can look at are the wider changes
that impact many pages. So instead of suggesting
four pieces of content or four keywords to include on a page, you can instead go deeper on a set of pages or page templates.
So say you're ranking
for Texas car insurance and every state's car insurance. You could suggest a template
change that will impact 50 rather than simply one page as a whole. So if you're thinking about
that and holistic changes that one change can make a wider impact, you'll be more impactful as
an SEO consultant overall. Another piece that is
increasingly important is thinking about UX.
These changes, I think
are more and more part of the SEO consultant's playbook, especially as more and more sites get to best practice or at least okay at technical best practice. So really the SEO consultants
job is become iterative in terms of being more
UX-focused on a day-to-day basis, and that's something that's
less likely to get fixed immediately with the CMSs that exist and kind of brings some
decent best practice out of the gate within their installs that make that piece of
the equation for an SEO many times less high-impact. So if you're thinking
about UX and making changes consistently, you're more
likely to make changes that will create wins for the client. So our instruction and our
thought process as SEOs, especially for sites that
aren't millions of pages, is to focus more on UX and those
site-wide template changes. And because of that, you'll
make bigger impacts overall. Other things I love with SEO
is backing up recommendations.
Overall, there are a lot
of great places to get recommendations from, whether it's Moz Search Engine Land, Search
Engine Journal, et cetera, many other great consultants on the web. These places are great
third-party consultation for evidence that your
recommendation makes sense. So hopefully as an agency,
you could also grow and point to other case
studies that you've had. This is helpful for making arguments to make big site-wide changes that no client really should just make at surface level trust of you. So referencing a third-party
website or a case study, every recommendation you make, with every recommendation you make, will be more likely to actually create instructive
change for that company. In addition, on top of that,
you can also make arguments in terms of change in
traffic value increase. So that's another recommendation as well, as if you're trying to
create a heavy lift, you should make that argument in terms of bottom line
impact for that company.
Instead of just saying "change
these 404s" you could say, "make this change on this
calculator to move it further above the fold,
lower the time to value. We believe this will
incrementally increase the traffic value for this page by a
hundred thousand per month." Obviously the argument of
spending 2,000 to make that change is very easy to make
when you're putting in those terms or words and using evidence of other people ranking well
that do those same things, or are there changes you've made that have made those same impacts will help kind of push
that through and make the change that you want for
those search results. And finally, as SEOs, I think you should focus
on the bottom funnel. We're a content marketing agency, so we definitely have an
SEO consulting department that helps with a lot of these things, but for the SEO side of the equation, I think thinking about
those bottom funnel pages are most likely to have high impact and make you more valuable overall.
Content marketing side of the
equation is super important for leading people down the funnel, but if you have finite time and as I think a part of
that holistic strategy, we think of our content
marketing team is top and middle and our SEO team is bottom, site-wide and content marketing
is single-page setups. And that's kind of that
complimentary setup that creates a high-impact SEO consultant, and it helps you perform
better for your clients.
And on the reverse side,
my advice for people that have hired SEO consultants
that are listening to this is that you should look at
them and ask yourselves, are you sending them a lot
of things to dig into and do? or are they being reactive
rather than proactive? Does it feel like the kind
of changes they're making are SEO best practice playbook, or are they really business-minded? If they're business-minded and proactive and also impressing you with the frequency and speed that they're communicating and how they communicate with you more likely that you actually
have a great consultant and someone that's going
to lift that traffic month over month, year over year, so…
Hopefully you like this video. I would love to hear what
you think SEO consulting in a high-performing way looks like. Please drop that in the comments, give us a thumbs up and
hit that notification bell and thanks for watching. (upbeat music).
