What Search Engine Marketing Consultants Do And Why You Need One

Search engines didn't use to be very complicated. Getting a website to the top of searches was often as simple as applying the correct meta tags, with searches which included similar phrases yielding your site as a result. People took advantage of this simplicity, though, and in response companies like Google to developed complicated trust-based algorithms which decide which websites will make it to the front page.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has now grown and developed to cover a massive range of different practices, from working with meta tags to structuring pages in a way which robots find more comfortable to read to improving the usability or speed of a website. Unless you spend a huge amount of time pouring over blogs and websites like a search engine consultant or SEO agency would do, most people don't have the time to develop the skills to handle this. Unfortunately. With SEO and marketing being professional fields, it takes an awful lot of learning to be successful with it, and this is something which companies big and small will struggle with. When you don't have the time for it, how are you supposed to improve your website's search performance?

Search engines do however provide an easier route to get to the front page, that is via their paid advertising services. In the UK this is largely Google Ads or Bing Ads. But even these systems require a level of expertise to manage correctly. It is so easy to create poor performing campaigns that don't work as well as they should. You can easily waste money with paid search with poorly constructed campaigns and strategies.

So how should a business promote itself via search engines? How can they know that they are getting value for their efforts or even know if they are going to get the return on their investment? This is where a Search Engine Marketing Consultant (SEM Consultant) can help.

In the post below we'll talk about the role and some of the services that a SEM Consultant or consultancy can offer, how they can benefit your business and what you should expect from your Search Engine Marketing Consultant.

Need a Search Engine Marketing Consultant? Contact Improve Marketing.

What Is A Search Engine Marketing Consultant?

The name covers a search engine marketing consultant's role. Professionals like this work with businesses to improve their website's SEO and or PPC, offering advice and sharing methods which can bring a lot of new users to it. SEO all starts with a little bit of assessment, called an audit, using specialised tools to scan each page on your website, and getting an insight into what has already been done to get the site into searches.

With an idea of what might be missing, or where your website might be lacking, your search engine marketing consultant will be able to start putting together a strategy for your business. This will cover the aims they have, the methods which will be used to achieve them, and a way to measure the results to ensure that they can prove their success. It will take a little bit of time to get to this stage, but it will be worth going through this to make sure that you're receiving the best possible campaign.

Along with SEO, a search engine or internet marketing consultant will also work with PPC advertising. Helping you to choose the right keywords, target audiences, and other elements which go into online adverts, they will be able to make your ads perform far better than if you were doing it alone. This can go hand in hand with your SEO and other marketing, creating a cohesive campaign which people will be able to understand.

What Will A Consultant Work On?

As time has gone on, marketing has broadened and expanded to include lots of different areas. While you don't always need to work on all of them, it is worth doing some research to make sure that you're not missing any opportunities. Your search engine marketing consultant will be able to do this for you and will focus on the areas which can be found below.

Page Optimisation: Making each page on your website perform as well as it can, can take a lot of work. Headings have to be laid out correctly, keywords need to be in the copy, and all of the writing needs to be easily readable. Going through this process on your own could take weeks, with a lot of the changes you make impacting other parts of your SEO.

Technical SEO: It isn't just about how your site is laid out but how it performs. An SEM consultant will look at the technical set up of a site, assess the speed that it loads, identify any errors in the code and create a plan to rectify them.

Back linking: Thanks to the reliance on trust in SEO, connecting yourself with other websites which are already successful is a great way to boost your reputation and search presence. Finding good back links can be a challenge, but most search engine marketing consultants will have experience in this area.

Local SEO: Local businesses used to get hurt by the way that search engines worked. Nowadays, though, local SEO can be powerful, with town names and the user's location making your business appear in more searches. Working with local SEO isn't as hard as cracking wider reach, but will still take expertise which most people don't have.

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising is always becoming more popular, with loads of companies using this tool to get their name into the world. It isn’t as simple as buying ad space, though, and this is where a consultant comes in. Not only will they be able to plan your adverts for you, but they will monitor them and make sure that they are reaching the right people. Improve your landing pages and ultimately reduce the cost of finding and converting new customers.

Monitoring: Making sure that their efforts are working is a big part of a search engine marketing consultant's job. Using analytical tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics and AdWords, they can provide you with regular reports to show you how many users are visiting the site and clicking on your adverts. This sort of information can be beneficial when you're trying to decide where to spend your marketing budget.

Usability and Conversion Rate Optimisation: SEM Consultants don't just want to deliver more traffic to your website, they also want them to convert into customers as well. A good consultant will look at how your site performs, they'll take steps to improve the user experience. They'll work to improve the conversion rate of your website.

How Will A Search Engine Marketing Consultant Benefit You?

There is a range of different factors which are worth considering when you're looking at the improvements an SEM consultant can bring. This sort of work is fundamental to success on the internet, whether you're a multinational or a local business. How exactly can a Search Engine Marketing Consultant drive more profit into your company, though?

Search engine marketing consultants are professional internet marketers. They know how search engines work. They can work quickly and deliver results faster. By working on your SEO and PPC they will improve revenues generated from these channels. Here's how.

More Visitors: Having your website in the top few results of the searches your customers make will ensure that you're getting as many visitors as possible. More visitors usually means more sales, making this a significant benefit.

Better Reputation: With companies like Google relying on trust and reputation, you'll often find that users will only feel confident with sites which are on the first page. Those more in-depth into the search will usually get ignored, making it worth pushing yourself to as many top spots as possible.

Greater Reach: When working on SEO for the first time, it's easy to make mistakes which lock you into local searches, but won't give you the results you want from those which are further afield. A professional SEM consultant can improve your reach, getting your site to people around the globe.

Reduce Advertising costs: If your business relies on PPC or paid search then an SEM consultant will look to improving your paid search campaigns. They'll make them more efficient, lower the cost per click and in turn the cost per acquisition of new customers. This saving can be banked or re-invested into acquiring more customers.

Improved Conversion Rates: Some websites will get thousands of users each day, but won't still sell anything. An SEO consultant can help with this by improving the presence of individual landing, product or service pages, along with giving your adverts much greater reach. They'll analyse your websites performance, improve the user experience, drive efficiencies in your cost per click, target and focus on 'money' keywords. All of these factors combined improve your conversion rate and therefore lower the cost to acquire a new customer.

Search Engine Consultant Case Study:

At Improve Marketing we love all things search. Last year we were approached by a business that was suffering. They relied almost entirely on search, with SEO being their primary channel but they were spending significant amounts with Google and Bing Ads as well.

The business is a multi-million pound international supplier of performance car parts. They sold into many markets including the US, UK, Middle East as well as other countries including Australia, South Africa and mainland Europe. The business had been built on search with not only 'brand part' targeting but also many thousands of product pages that were targeted at individual part names and numbers.

They had recently changed their website design, they had an experienced in-house developer who had taken care of this as well as a head of marketing who was more than competent with digital marketing. However, in the weeks that followed the website change the website began to decline and its performance and in turn sales with it.

This is a common problem, the issue here is that the team had presumed that a web developer was an SEO. Although very competent, an extreme techy, web developers aren't SEO's, they build websites. With the site in ever steepening decline they made contact with us. We immediately went to work on identifying the issue. Starting with a full audit of the website.

Over the coming days we looked at everything. Structure to content length, technical SEO to usability. We eventually found the problem. The developer, had been 'cleaning' the site. We noticed this by an ever decreasing amount of back links showing in their Search Console account. Google was declaring less and less links pointed to the site. Coming in after the development had been made live made it difficult for us to find but it turned out that the developer had no-indexed some hundreds of pages in an attempt to prevent duplicate content. These pages happened to also hold a huge amount of link equity and in turn the site began to decline in traffic faster and faster as links no longer pointed to a found page on the website. We fixed this issue and whilst investigating the problem found a large number of items that we could fix and optimise. We eventually won the client for a longer term contract and our team of SEO consultants proceeded to develop an SEO strategy to take the site forward.

6 months later, the site had recovered its lost traffic and increased its yoy traffic by 25%. Sales of parts were also up by a whopping 35%. Although we were introduced to this client during a period of search crisis. We went on to help them grow their business, their PPC too!

If you are a business that would like to grow your business via search engines why not get in contact with one of our consultants today. At Improve Marketing we work with a huge number of SEO clients across a wide range of sectors. Give us a call and let's talk about how we can grow your websites traffic and sales using search engines.

Summary:

Search engines can be tricky to overcome. Most people don't have experience with these sorts of tools and will struggle to make sure that they are taking the right steps to improve it. The skills which are required to work in this area are diverse and unless you do it day in and day out, tricky to learn. Most people don't have the time required to learn these skills. Of course, though, this doesn't mean that you can't make any improvements yourself, but you may need to get some help along the way.