How to Hire a Search Engine Optimizer—It’s Not Black Magic

How to Hire a Search Engine Optimizer—It’s Not Black Magic

In this How to Hire an SEO video release, Maile Ohye, Developer Program Tech Lead at Google, gives advice on how to hire a reputable SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) and avoid hiring an SEO that implements shady practices, which may result in your site doing worse in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. The first thing to note is that if you want long term success, there’s no magic spell or pills you can take to make your site appear on the first page. Expect a good SEO to take between 4 and 12 months before you’ll see any return on your investment. This will give them time, not only to implement SEO improvements, but to also see the potential benefit.

It is also important to understand that the potential of an SEO is only as good as the content that’s being delivered. In other words, an SEO only dresses up your content for the first date, your website still must do all the talking. As Maile Ohye states, “In a majority of cases, doing what’s good for SEO is also about doing what’s good for your online customers.”

A good SEO will recommend best practices that look to improve the entire search friendliness of your website. Maile Ohye’s most important piece of advice is that you ask companies to corroborate their issues and recommendations with documented statements from Google, either with a help centre article, video or Google’s response in a forum. This will help you from being fooled by recommendations such as buying links or stuffing keywords that Google can detect (and will be detrimental to your SERP rankings).

Watch Google’s How to Hire an SEO video and if you haven’t heard already, read our recent blog post SEO Food for Thought: Ranking Factors to Help Your SERP Position to learn about changes to how Google ranks websites.