All you need is an audit of your search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your organic search performance, right? Wrong. There is so much more to SEO than initial exploration. This is why you need an SEO expert to guide you through the process.
To start an SEO program, most agencies and consultants conduct an SEO audit to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a website SEO program. The audit should cover technical SEO, content optimization, and link-and-finish authority in a strategy designed to improve your organic search performance across all three of those areas.
However, no audit, no matter how detailed, can help you through what comes next: execution, control and triage.
When you receive your SEO audit, there will be many projects and strategies to implement. You will face everything from optimizing individual pieces of content to expanding or contracting your indexing levels to acquiring more links from other valuable websites. In each case, you will have choices to make that will affect the performance of your organic search campaign. Making one of the less optimal choices could mean your SEO performance stays flat or even declines.
For example, let’s say an SEO audit indicates that your headline navigation is not working hard enough to drive a link authority deeper into your site so more pages can rank. The recommendation might be to overhaul your header navigation to expand the number of pages associated with them.
However, which pages you add and delete will affect your organic search performance – you may delete pages that contributed to your current performance levels or could not add pages that were essential their contents. In the process of deciding which labels to use for pages in the header, you may choose less valuable terms, limiting future performance. In the coding process, your developers could make coding decisions that make the navigation unbelievable.
That’s just one example of the decisions that multiply to affect the outcome of your SEO operation. An SEO consultant is there to make recommendations every step of the way to improve organic search performance.
Let’s say you completed all the items from the SEO audit. Your work is not done. SEO management ensures that the optimizations you make have the desired effect or are further modified to have a stronger effect. That takes constant measurement, as well as ongoing training and education to know how to respond to that measurement data.
The SEO optimization part is never complete because the digital world in which your site is located is never static. Algorithms are changing, competitors are optimizing their websites, new players are breaking onto the scene. All of these things affect your organic search performance as surely as the projects and optimizations you implement yourself. An SEO consultant takes these things into account and develops defensive strategies to improve performance.
Even with the most careful SEO management, nevertheless, there will be times when you come into the office on a random Tuesday, and organic search performance plummeted overnight. Did IT release something new on the site that caused the issue, forgot to delete robots.txt refuses, or was there an algorithm update? It can be one of those things or something completely irrelevant. How do you find out what happened and what to do next to fix it? That performance triage is part of the SEO consultant’s job.
SEO is not a one-off project. It does not end with an audit. You need an SEO consultant to recommend content optimization strategies, write or optimize, diagnose technical SEO issues and test solutions, measure and respond to performance, and triage when the worst happens. An experienced SEO consultant can do all of those and more to keep your organic search performance heading in the right direction.
For more information on working with SEO consultants see our previous post, “10 Things Your SEO Consultant Wanted to Know.”
