Handing Over Your Website to an SEO Expert
When you’ve had no experience whatsoever in promoting a website, investing in SEO can seem like a leap into an unknown void. It can be particularly difficult if you’ve been involved with the development of the site, or own the company that it promotes. You don’t want anything to ruin your project.
While this is completely understandable, you have to be able to accept SEO advice otherwise you could be jeopardising all of the hard work you’ve put in. Unfortunately, it is an SEO professional’s job to diagnose problems and offer solutions; therefore, this is often the source of primary conflict and an area where you need to be able to let go most.
Just like any expert in any industry, an SEO expert is well-versed almost solely on the world of optimising websites. As it is their trade and profession, it comes with the territory to take on websites and make them stronger. So suggestions on improvements have to be taken on board, even if you ultimately choose to overlook them.
It is understandable that you may be slightly disappointed to hear that your site needs to be completely re-written as it isn’t search engine friendly; particularly if you slavishly written each word yourself over the previous months. Likewise if you’re informed that your navigation isn’t compatible with most searchers expectations or the search engine crawlers, so you’ll struggle to rank and lower bounce rate, you might be a little upset.
But this is a part of search engine optimisation. Sometimes the answers aren’t what you want to hear, but they do tend to be the objective truth. An SEO consultant gains nothing from hoodwinking you, in fact quite the opposite. If your site fails to improve in rankings and/or visitor numbers, who is it that is going to get the blame? That’s right, the SEO guy. So it’s in their interests to make your site compatible with the most up-to-date industry developments and ranking high up as a result.
Conversely, if you don’t heed SEO advice and your site fails to take off, you’ll only have yourself to blame. So if you are looking to get into SEO or seek a professional to assist your site, be prepared to accept what they say – maybe not quite verbatim, but as near as. If your headers aren’t compatible with your search terms, change them. If your Meta is messy, clean it up. SEO is about subtle tweaks and changes for the benefit of the site, so have confidence in those who you seek advice from otherwise it could be a very difficult process for all parties.
