Should You Hire an SEO Freelancer?
Getting a website to rank highly in Google search can feel like a full-time job. And actually, it is – that’s why the profession of search engine optimizer exists.
If you’re in the position where you’re find SEO is becoming a bit much to handle alongside all your other duties, it may be a good idea to outsource the job to an agency or freelancer.
In this piece, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of hiring someone to handle your SEO, to help you make the right decision for your needs.
How Can an SEO Expert Help You?
There are several reasons to hire outside SEO help, not least of which is the time it can save you versus handling it yourself. But this isn’t the only benefit. A professional SEO agency or freelancer can also help with:
- Website audits – There’s a lot that goes into SEO, on-page, off-page and from a technical perspective. A good SEO agency will know how to evaluate your site and identify things that are hurting your rankings, as well as identify opportunities for improvement.
- Keyword research – To get quality visitors, you need to target the keywords they’re using in searches. An SEO expert can help you identify keywords you may not have thought of, including important long-tail keywords.
- Content strategy and creation – To reach and stay at the top of search engine results pages, your site needs to regularly publish fresh, relevant content that addresses a searcher’s needs. An SEO professional can not only help you write blog posts and create other content using your target keywords. They’ll also help you avoid penalties for keyword stuffing.
- Link building – Backlinks are an important part of SEO. A skilled SEO professional can handle the task of soliciting reciprocal links, claiming deadlinks and utilizing all the other tactics that get authoritative sites pointing to your content
- Reporting — Collecting and correlating data about SEO performance is a tedious and time-consuming job, but it’s also an important one. If you dread the idea of staring at graphs and spreadsheets, hiring an SEO agency can be a great way to hand off this task.
Why You Might Not Want to Hire an SEO Freelancer
There’s one main reason many small organizations opt to handle their own SEO, and it’s probably one you’ve already guessed: the cost.
As with most professional services, with an SEO freelancer, you get what you pay for. If you try to save money by going with a cut-rate service or agency, you’re going to get cut-rate results. On the other hand, hiring a skillful SEO guru can be prohibitively expensive for some companies.
You also run the risk of outsourcing an important part of your digital strategy to someone who may or may not be as qualified as they are presenting themselves. This is a risk with any hire, of course, and even the best-looking candidates can flame out.
You have to be prepared to cut your losses and start over with someone else if this is the case. And sometimes that means retracing steps you have already taken.
Where to Find SEO Freelancers
There are a number of ways you can find a professional to help you with your SEO needs, including:
- Referrals – These are usually the safest agencies and individuals to hire as they have someone in your community who is willing to vouch for them. Ask your peers, colleagues and even non-business-related friends if they have someone they enjoyed working with in the past.
- Social media – LinkedIn, Reddit and other social media sites can be a goldmine for finding people open to SEO work.
- Job boards – Sites like Fiverr and Upwork are popular places to find freelancers, with filters to make searching easy. Unfortunately, the quality on these sites is variable, so make sure you carefully vet each candidate.
- Google search – Want to find SEO agencies who actually walk the walk? Try looking for them in Google. The top results have already proven their skills by ranking highly in a competitive market.
How to Hire an SEO Specialist
Once you’ve cut your list of possible candidates down to a handful of promising leads, here are some steps to vet them:
- Check their portfolio – Look at their past work. Ask for client testimonials and reports showing the efficacy of their work.
- Ask for references – No one is going to give you access to a dissatisfied former client, but even chatting with their picked references can give you insight into their professionalism and results.
- Conduct and interview – A good SEO freelancer will be interviewing you as much as you’re interviewing them. Look for someone who tries to develop a deeper understanding of your needs. Make sure to ask some technical questions to verify their SEO understanding.
- Request a full or partial site audit – If your website is massive, it’s unfair to ask a potential hire to audit the entire thing for free, but you can ask them to look at some specific pages and provide you with their recommendations.
Not Ready to Hire a Freelancer? Here’s Another Option
If, after evaluating your options, you find your organization is not in a position to hire an outside party to perform SEO for you, there is another option to consider: evisio.
The SEO platform built for SEO experts and complete novices alike, evisio automatically scans your website for issues and opportunities. It then gives you step-by-step instructions for solving these problems and pushing your site higher up the rankings.
Plus, it automates reporting, so you can avoid the hassle of compiling your own research about web performance and instead get information at a glance.
Have a team of people working on your website? Evisio is perfect for that too, with built-in project management capabilities, including color-coded tasks and advanced user permissions. See it for yourself. Contact us now for your free trial.