An SEO consultant is a search engine optimization expert who works outside of normal contract work.
For example, they may be self-employed and work with their clients or an existing group but not as employees.
They may be responsible for a variety of tasks ranging from holding and closing contract negotiations, as well as SEO.
And while there are some advantages to having different functions and the freedom to spend only on the projects you want, SEO consulting also has its drawbacks.
This column will help you understand what to expect before choosing a professional SEO consultant.
Contents
Are SEO Consultants Employed Or Freelance?
U.K., the answer is more complicated. The term “SEO consultant” can also describe the job title of a working SEO that does not necessarily reflect the hierarchy or administrative responsibilities.
Such as “SEO Expert” or “SEO Consultant.”
This could also be how self-employed people with side mobility and full-time jobs present themselves.
However, it also means an independent contractor like the U.S.
Projects vs. Multiple Clients
An SEO consultant may choose to work with their clients and the only person working in SEO.
They may also choose to take contracts within their existing team, such as adding additional support to the business SEO team.
Running Your Own Business
The main difference between being a professional SEO consultant and any other type of SEO is that you will work on your business.
As an independent contractor, you manage your contracts, fulfillment, and financial obligations / taxes.
Essential Skills
What are the key skills you need to become a successful SEO consultant beyond being a good SEO professional?
Below is an overview of the basic skills of developing an independent SEO contractor, other than on-page, technical, and off-site SEO.
Budget Management
It may be used to manage your role budget budget to ensure customer hours are met or to verify the profit and loss of your department.
However, additional, unexpected costs may increase when working as an independent.
This means you need to manage your budget quickly, or there will not be enough money left over at the end of each month to take home a paycheck.
There may be ad-hoc costs, such as initial legal advice, and ongoing costs such as having an accountant.
With every marketing guarantee, cost of hosting and website development, these are beautiful tools that we all love to use. You will pay them in full.
If there are no deep pockets of an institution or brand behind you, all your business expenses will come from the money you managed to earn as a consultant.
Time Management
While every job requires a time management degree, becoming an SEO consultant means turning multiple boards at once.
There is also a lack of structure, support, and tools to play a role.
As a result, time management is a more important skill than ever.
There will be non-moving business times as legal and financial requirements and calls from stakeholders that other team members cannot cover your absence.
Delivering your invoices on time can be the most important part of your career as a consultant.
The amount of admin you need to get time for will increase. You will need to sort the receipts and update the budgeting software.
You will need to submit your financial details to create your payroll. Then there are emails and meetings.
However while you have a working SEO, expect more as a consultant.
To be successful, you will need to be very good at planning your time.
Pitching And Closing
From marketing your skills to controlling and connecting with a new client, you will need to be able to manage the entire cycle of success in a new job.
There will be no business development team to support you, so you may need to prove your skills satisfactorily.
Even if you are a business SEO, I can tell you from first hand experience that some of your business leaders will come from your site even if you first come up with an “SEO consultant” in your area.
You will also need to be an expert in marketing yourself in other ways.
This means getting as much customer leads as possible through social media, events, and word of mouth.
Not only do you need to get out of potential customer leaders, but you will also need to change them effectively. That means working on the playgrounds, negotiating fees, and checking out stops.
Contract Negotiations
While you may have a standard contract form, expect future customers to go through a sharp tooth comb.
This can also increase your price proposal and service level agreement.
Part of being an SEO contractor is the need to negotiate contracts.
There may be a certain level of compromise, especially if you want to work with small businesses with a limited budget.
When looking at the long term over the next six to 12 months of your contract, you will need to be able to predict how these concessions will affect your profitability and quality of life.
A customer may want to work on your proposed hours for less money, which lowers your average level.
They may also expect you to respond to emails outside of your suggested working hours.
While it may seem interesting to agree on these modified terms to secure revenue, but in the long run, they may not benefit your business growth.
Understanding Of Financial And Legal Responsibilities
Being an SEO consultant means being your boss, owning your business, and the interest and freedom it brings.
However, it also means that you are solely responsible for ensuring that you comply fully with the law.
This means understanding the business rules that apply to you in your state or country, but also, if you have customers in other parts of the world, understanding how their rules affect you.
For example, the European GDPR (General Data Protection Act) governs the control of personal data.
Even if you are not in Europe, you may still be subject to these rules if your customers are.
How you store information about your customers will need to comply with these rules.
As a consultant it means no one above you is taking this responsibility.
It’s you. You may be able to get advice from solicitors or accountants to help you make informed decisions, but the disadvantages are all yours if they are poorly advised.
Stakeholder Management
Another important skill is managing good stakeholders.
This includes up-to-date communication, invoicing payments, and checking customer expectations.
As a consultant, your stakeholders are not just your customers.
They are your accountants, solicitors, suppliers, and other consultants you work with.
In large business, these stakeholders tend to communicate with different team members; department of finance, general manager, marketing team, and account managers.
As an independent, you are the only contact.
The needs of the client and the needs of your accountant are very different, but both will require priority.
Learning how to manage more stakeholders than you have learned will greatly improve your success as an SEO consultant.
Fitting In With Teams Quickly
You will not be given a long climb as an SEO consultant.
You must show value to your customers from day one. This can be a difficult skill to develop.
There will be hope that you can immediately return the investment, although you will need to learn about their processes, processes, products, and industries.
It’s not just about understanding business; you need to reasonably meet your new friends.
When you work closely with other members of your client team, what they think about your work ethic and personality can positively affect the length and return of your contract.
Demonstrating ROI
When you join a new company as an employee, you are more likely to have a trial period – a few weeks to months where the company assesses your fitness and potential.
If done well, it will be time for you to work with your manager to fill in any gaps in your knowledge and develop a training plan to ensure you are a good start for the company.
As an independent SEO, you will not get this.
Instead, you may have a breach of contract or simply the client’s option to terminate his recurring monthly contract if they do not like your work.
A skill you will need to develop in advance as an SEO consultant indicates the return on investment in working with you.
This means understanding what you are expected to deliver and making sure it is possible.
There, you will need to report back to your success on these goals.
Resilience
PsychologyToday defines resilience as “psychological quality that allows some people to experience life’s problems and return at least as before” and is a skill to develop.
As a consultant it can be boring.
In a month you may have a lot of work to do and wonder when sleep will be an option.
For others, you are nervously watching your emails, and you want the proposal to be accepted.
The stability of the workflow you achieve can be slow to build.
Then, in the middle of the night, a global catastrophe could cause them to dry up. One thing you seem to be short on contract SEO is for sure.
An important skill of an SEO consultant is perseverance.
Recovery When a customer suddenly terminates his contract or there is a competing dispute, it is a challenge.
Even when everything is going well, there will always be a need to look for invoices after 60 days.
She can sometimes feel overwhelmed.
Personal Branding
There is something in the SEO consultant not only selling their services, but also selling the dream to work with them personally.
As a consultant, you will be the same as going out for a job interview every time you get a job. Your client will need to believe that you are the best candidate for the job.
This may start well before the field match.
Appropriate for many consultants is to be well-respected in the industry in which the word of mouth produces leadership for them.
Instead of spending a lot of time and energy on marketing, they have customers coming to them.
Some of the most successful SEO consultants have chosen a factory and become experts.
When they do, they can choose who to work with and charge a fee that reflects the value they bring.
If you are looking to become an SEO consultant, it can help you understand your local market, the needs of businesses that might work with you, and what you can do to attract them.
This can mean finding a space to stick with your market. It could mean after all the small businesses that need all the SEO support.
Whatever you want to achieve as a consultant, you will need to be good at presenting your knowledge, skills, and values outside of a promising start.
Salary Expectations
You may have a good idea of what salaries look like in your country and region, but what about the value of SEO contractors?
Recently, Search Engine Optimization conducted a paid survey looking at SEO industry data points.
The results of the independent professionals were particularly interesting.
Search Engine Optimization found that independent SEO consultants earn less than $ 34,000 a year on average.
Survey respondents who identified themselves as independent had significantly less than two years of experience. This will significantly divert their income.
With this in mind, take the stated average salary of an SEO consultant with a pinch of salt.
Yours may be higher depending on location, years of experience, and specializations.
In the U.K., Glassdoor says independent SEO can make £ 31,540 a year (approximately $ 41,000).
What you choose to charge for each project or hour will greatly affect how much you spend at home each year.
You also need to consider how many hours you want to work each week. Together this will help you determine how much you can earn per year if your customer load is full.
Additional Costs
It is important to remember that you will also need to deduct the cost of running your business on a net income.
This can include items from team membership to taxes and insurance.
Helpful Certifications And Experience
One of the biggest things about getting an SEO skill is that there are very few barriers to entry.
You do not have to have a college degree or a governing body to join.
Meanwhile, there is little for future clients to use to measure how good SEO is.
Because of this lack of regulation in the industry, there are no standard certificates or certifications to prove your competence.
Instead, you may need to share your experience with potential customers in other ways.
Demonstrable Experience
The best way you can show that you are an expert in your field is by showing your expertise.
Unfortunately, many customers may have similar years of industry experience. This is not always the case.
Experience in Special Projects
The consultant may have made 20 web moves during their three years in the industry because they worked for an SEO agency.
Another contractor may have done only one in their five years in the industry because they were working on a single brand house.
Clients looking for SEO support for migrating to their next website may well look to a consultant who has worked in the industry for five years.
They may mistakenly believe that many years of experience equate to better performance.
If you are looking to set up a website migration project, an SEO consultant, you will need to be able to demonstrate your unique experience in the SEO phases on which the project depends.
Another aspect of your experience that you will need to present is the industry in which you have worked.
For some customers, knowing that their consultant understands their market, their customers and their products will be important.
If you have worked in various industries, show them their marketing and products.
If you have worked in limited and straightforward areas, you can talk a lot about the depth of experience.
You may find it helpful to show that you have a lot of knowledge about these particular industries which would make your education more attractive to new and faster clients.
If you have been in the SEO industry for some time, you have probably encountered forums and topics where inexperienced SEO experts have landed their first clients and are now asking veterans how to do SEO.
This is not a situation you will benefit from being in.
If you manage to land a client whose SEO needs are greater than you can meet, it is likely to cause concern for both parties.
As a consultant, you will need to learn to quickly identify the scope of a possible project and decide if you have enough knowledge and experience to manage it.
Awards
As mentioned, there is no management team that oversees SEO practice, which can validate the consultant’s ability to perform SEO.
However, there are many awards and rewards programs that somehow serve as a proxy for this.
Rewards accuracy is a hotly debated topic in SEO circles.
However, the success of one indicates that you have been independently sentenced to perform a highly effective and efficient job.
Case Studies
Providing past work examples in the form of case studies can help future clients feel confident in your abilities.
Sometimes it can be difficult to exclude former customers from using their data, so you may need to hide a bit.
Make sure you have permission to share any details, especially if it comes from the work you did before you became a consultant!
Recommendations And References
As much as you may need to provide a new recruitment role, having judges available to future clients can help them understand what it will be like to work with you.
Having several current or former clients who are happy to provide references can benefit the consultant.
Platforms like LinkedIn also allow you to request and receive tips that can go a long way in trusting your work.
In addition, although it is not neutral, the written tips on your site may help convert potential customers.
Certifications
While there is no standard SEO certificate that is acceptable, several tools, agencies, and organizations offer search engine optimization.
Choosing to take their training and exam to get a degree may seem daunting if you have been in the industry for many years, but it can help you prove that your current knowledge and understanding have reached a certain level.
In addition, qualifications in the following areas such as analysis, data science, and programming can all help you demonstrate your unique skills.
Consider specific SEO certificates and tools focused on analysis.
These can show customers that you can use their equipment-free without additional training.
Who Hires SEO Consultants And Why?
There are many types of agencies that will contract with SEO consultants. It can be their only SEO resource or to complete an existing group or list of freelancers.
Small Businesses
Small businesses that are unable to afford their internal resources often contact SEO consultants.
SEO consultants often have lower costs than agencies and may be cheaper to work with. This can be an attractive alternative to cash organizations.
Rounding Out A Team
Brands with an existing SEO team can use contractors to reinforce their tools or fill in specific professional gaps.
For example, brands looking to appear on Google Discovery for the first time may want external advice on how best to do this if their internal team lacks experience.
Filling A Temporary Gap
There may be a need to increase resources during busy times or to cover long vacations for existing staff.
If an employee leaves the union, the counselor can fill the gap when hiring a replacement.
Whitelabel
Some agencies may not have an SEO product but want to work with a consultant to provide existing customer service.
They may also want to test the waters as adding SEO to their services will work before hiring staff to cover it.
Counselors can provide support without the cost of hiring, training, and staff benefits.
Assisting Agencies
Like the types that need temporary help in busy times, the agency may need an extra member of their team to complete a staff vacation, a career gap or to consult with specific industry projects.
Agencies can often offer resume consultants for this reason.
Support With Hiring
An excellent project that you may find yourself ready to do as an SEO consultant is recruitment support.
So instead of filling the skill gap yourself, you can become a hiring consultant for working SEO professionals.
For organizations that do not have, or are very small, SEO teams, it can be difficult for the hiring manager to know enough about SEO to make a wise decision.
Counselors can bring their expertise to the writing process.
They may also recommend job descriptions, review CVs, and even conduct interviews.
Setting Up A Department
In addition to helping with writing, SEO contractors may also help create a scrapbook.
This can be the case when a team is needed, but high-level professional recruitment proves difficult or very slow.
An SEO contractor may be contributing to the creation of the department and will be able to lead up to a senior and consistent staff.
Considerations For Becoming An SEO Consultant
Finally, there are many things to consider when moving from work to contract work. It can be free and fun action, but it can also be risky.
No Boss
When you become an SEO consultant, you will trade in the global structure of independent companies.
This includes not having a manager.
Legal And Financial Implications
You will need to follow the rules, taxes you pay, and additional expenses to become a consultant that you will need to be aware of.
All of this can affect your finances.
Pick And Choose Projects
SEO consultants have a great deal of freedom to decide who they want to work with and projects.
Pitch For Work
You need to improve your business pipeline, including creating leads and ultimately replacing them. This is likely to mean negotiation and contract negotiation.
Set Your Own Fee
Although it is mostly based on the type of client you want to work with and the market you are working on, you will decide how much to take.
Benefits
Depending on where you work, the differences in the employer’s employment rights and your rights as an independent contractor can vary greatly.
In addition to the legal rights you may be granted as an SEO-employee, there are also additional benefits offered by your employer.
You Only Get Paid If You Issue Invoices
There is no “benefit” to this.
It is basically one of the most difficult aspects of SEO consulting.
If you cannot work for some reason, such as illness or vacation, you will not be able to get a job. If you do not pay for a job, then you will not be paid.
Unlike work that may still give you if you can’t work, that won’t be something you get from an independent SEO consultant.
If you can’t send an invoice, or worse, you do, but are not paid, you may have trouble making your paycheck.
Conclusions
The daily working life of SEO consultants may seem like the same for SEO experts who work in terms of work.
However, there are often additional complexities beyond the SEO performance that can make some of the prospects dreadful.
Taking the plunge into the free SEO world can be liberating, however. There is great freedom to choose what you want to do and when.
Some choose to put their thumbs up for consulting on their regular job (if allowed by the employer)
This can help with the learning curve in running a business during occupational safety.
You may not be motivated to quit your job, but it is always best to keep an eye on the market. You may not want to be an SEO consultant but you need to write one.
Visual image: PureSolution / Shutterstock
