5 questions to ask yourself when selecting the right SEO consultant
1. What are the consultant’s references?
A reputable SEO consultant should be prepared to share a brief list of current and former clients and contact information. These references can help you assess the candidate’s effectiveness, as well as verify that the person has actually worked on specific SEO campaigns.
2. How do you intend to improve my performance?
Make sure the candidate’s proposal includes an initial technical review of your website to eliminate problems that could limit your search engine rankings. A good SEO consultant should provide “on-page” optimisation, to make your website as user-friendly as possible. He or she should also take care of “off-page” SEO strategies. This part aims to make your content known on other websites and blogs. An SEO must be versatile and know how to handle SEO as well as web writing and some purely technical aspects.
3. Can you guarantee me a position on Google or another search engine?
The answer should never be yes. It is impossible to know exactly how your site will perform in terms of ranking. Optimisation will always be beneficial, but to what extent is anyone’s guess, not even a Google SEO expert. The acquisition of organic traffic requires a large number of criteria, content creation, netlinking and quality internal linking.
4. How do you measure the success of your SEO actions?
To evaluate the success of SEO efforts, you need to track exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website and where it is coming from. Consultants should be experienced in using Google Analytics. How often do they plan to share these analytics with you? How will they use the data to continually improve your site’s potential?
5. What happens when you reach the end of your contract?
Make sure that the optimisations carried out throughout the service will not be lost at the end of the contract. The actions carried out are supposed to be your property and you must continue to reap the benefits even after the end of the SEO service.
Our SEO consultants are beautiful and above all competent!
William
SEO Team Manager
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
For me, the lever of SEO is the overall on-site quality. When the indexing robots pass by, a site must respond favourably to the various criteria of the Google algorithm.
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
Furniture – Fashion – Medical – Sport – Leisure
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
During the MEDIC update in August 2018, I had to readapt my way of working as well as my vision of SEO. Indeed, the reassurance of Internet users has become essential as a lever of visibility on search engines (EAT method).
Tugba
SEO Team Manager
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
There is not just one lever but three: technique, semantics (SEO content of the pages) and the popularity of the website. Combining these three pillars is the guarantee of an optimised and efficient site.
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
In SEO, it is becoming more and more important to stand out from the competition, and for this, I recommend : a relevant and quality content, which clearly answers the user’s query; the implementation of structured data for a better visibility in the SERPs; the optimization of the site’s speed because it is now a criterion taken into account in Google’s algorithm; a fluid user experience (UX) on computer, tablet and especially on mobile, as mobile-first indexing has been deployed, it is essential to have a responsive site; and finally, local referencing, which is becoming increasingly important, particularly after the health crises we have experienced, as Internet users are turning more and more to local businesses with the desire to support them.
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
The OVH datacenter fire in March 2021 affected the servers of one of my clients. All the SEO work done up to that point was lost. Thanks to a backup that had been made before the start of the SEO project, we were able to restore the site, but the SEO work had to be completely redone. With a determination to quickly restore the positions achieved and a remarkable team effort, we implemented all the SEO actions in no time and achieved better positions than at the start!
Otmane
SEO Consultant
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
Quality of content, quality of backlinks, rich snippets, quality of crawl
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
I don’t have any particular sector of preference, although the medical, tourism and environmental (organic, sustainable development) sectors speak to me more. It’s more the challenge that motivates me
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
The most complicated part is sometimes to involve the client in the creation of content. When a client doesn’t believe in the impact of content on SEO, we offer them an example of optimised content and the results obtained very often motivate the client to continue publishing new content regularly. The regular updates of the Google algorithm are also obstacles but they allow us to question ourselves and find new strategies.
Séverine
SEO Consultant
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
All levers are important but I would say that (semantic) content is the keystone to being appreciated by both Google and Internet users.
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
I don’t have any particular sectors. I like the diversity of the problems I encounter.
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
The SEO of a site is a team effort: between us and the client. A site must live and be animated all the time…not always easy to make people understand but when the results are there, everyone is happy to have been involved in this beautiful project.
Florence
SEO Consultant
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
Bakclinks and semantics. Technique is also essential, otherwise Google does not see the content.
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
Handicrafts, health, organic, leisure, travel
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
Unknown CMS or home-made sites. It is necessary to be precise and especially to try to have a good communication with the webmasters.
Cédric
SEO Consultant
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
The relevance of content
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
Industry, Energy, e-Commerce, Agri-food, Tourism, Telecom.
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
Google de-indexed all the urls of a site because it detected false canonicals due to erroneous micro data. Following a technical analysis and further optimization of the micro-data, the site was propelled into the top 3 of the Google positions.
Marine
SEO Consultant
In your opinion, what is the most important lever in SEO?
In my opinion, the most important lever in SEO is Technique. Once the site meets all Google’s criteria, we can concentrate on semantics and content to gain visibility. It’s also essential to have quality content, thanks to good web copywriting.
What are your preferred sectors of activity in SEO ? ( 4 to 5 sectors )
I don’t really have any favorite sectors, but I must admit that I’m drawn to tourism, industry and the medical sector.
In 2 sentences, tell us about an obstacle you encountered on an SEO project, and how you overcame it?
A website was creating endless URLs. The site had over a million URLs, and a full crawl was becoming very complicated. After an in-depth technical audit, we identified the cause of this number of URLs being created. We were able to quickly fix the problem and limit the creation of new URLs.
Got an SEO question?
Julia can help
7 years of SEO expertise
What is an SEO consultant?
The SEO consultant’s mission is to help companies improve their visibility on search engines. First, we will discuss the tasks he performs. He must have a wide range of skills and be endowed with various qualities that we will present in a second step. The job of SEO consultant is one of the key players on the web.
SEO consultant : the qualities to have
Humility, the first quality of an SEO consultant
First of all, an SEO consultant must be humble. He knows the methods and levers that enable him to improve the rankings of a site in the search engine results pages in order to aim for the first page and the top positions, but he knows that there are no certainties in this field. Furthermore, he follows closely the evolution of the rules to avoid penalties and can redefine the adapted SEO strategy if he considers it necessary. He or she is not necessarily an IT expert, but has some knowledge in coding, as he or she is sometimes required to consult or modify the source code of a web page.
A capacity for analysis and constant curiosity
A qualified SEO consultant is also capable of analysing the ergonomics of a website or an online shop and making recommendations to improve the user experience, a characteristic that plays a role in SEO. The SEO expert is distinguished by his or her writing skills and must be able to deal with more or less complex themes, taking into account the specificities of the web (concise and structured articles that catch the reader’s eye). Curiosity is also one of his particularities.
Indeed, it allows him to be interested in new techniques and to be one step ahead of other consultants who represent a competition in the search engine results. It is also an asset in the search for external links (backlinks) to your site. In addition, a natural referencing consultant has every interest in showing patience and pedagogy. The first skill is essential because it is sometimes necessary to wait several months before observing the first results of optimisations. A pedagogical professional has the ability to transmit part of his know-how, which is not negligible during SEO training courses.
An SEO consultant can work as a freelancer or within a web agency.
The missions of an SEO consultant
In-depth analysis of websites
As the name suggests, the consultant provides expertise and insights to those who use his services. These are recommendations inherent to the visibility of your website in the main search engines such as Bing and Google. In order to do this, the web consultant carries out an SEO audit, just as a search engine optimisation agency would do. This audit aims to determine the factors blocking the good referencing of the blog, the website or the shop.
On-page and off-page optimisation tips
The SEO consultant can monitor and evaluate the impact of the actions that his client carries out and give him further recommendations month after month, depending on the evolution of the site’s positions. He is also able to implement his own recommendations. These are usually optimisations of existing web content, such as writing relevant titles and semantic enrichment (choosing the right keywords). They also include steps to increase popularity through the acquisition of quality links, signals that are similar to positive recommendations in the eyes of search engines.
Technical compliance of sites
Finally, the third type of action concerns the technical SEO aspects. These are likely to facilitate indexing by the search engines’ robots, which is particularly important for very large sites. In addition to these missions, there are reporting operations that guarantee the client that the work is well done to promote the visibility of the site in the long term.
Pedagogy, an essential quality of the SEO consultant
The prerogatives of a web referencing consultant often go far beyond SEO recommendations. He is often called upon to train internal teams in the field of web marketing so that they integrate good practices. In addition, professionals who wish to increase their audience very quickly call on his services for the management of Ads campaigns (formerly Google Adwords).
