The main reason every business has a website is to get closer to customers. Techniques including quality content and Search Engine Optimization play a vital role in achieving website success. Technical SEO takes these results to the next level.
In its essence, technical SEO is all about catering to the needs of the search engines and the audience to boost your website visibility.
And here is where technical SEO consultants have their role to play.
What is an SEO consultant?
An SEO Consultant guides with the technical aspects a website needs to fare better on search engines. Speaking of the role of a technical SEO consultant, it involves enhancing a website’s technical build – speed, responsiveness, user experience, and search engine friendliness.
If you are taking the guidance of a technical SEO specialist, expect them to suggest technical improvements – the ones that are except content-based. However, an expert SEO audit consultant might also be able to identify loopholes in the existing content.
What does a Technical SEO Consultant do?
Search engines mainly aim at providing quality results to users. They consider several aspects of a website to rank them on search engine result pages (SERPs).
A technical SEO consultant ensures a website adheres to search engine guidelines and industry needs in terms of competition and user intent.
If you are thinking that technical SEO is akin to basic SEO, let me assure you that technical SEO is a lot more potent.
If hiring an SEO audit consultant is on your mind, and you are still unclear how a technical SEO consultant can help grow your business, here are 6 incredible ways a technical SEO specialist will bring in profits.
Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO Audit includes inspecting your website’s technical performance and compatibility with search engine bots. It is the first step to analyze your website’s current performance and devise an actionable SEO strategy.
A basic technical SEO audit comprises:
- Crawling: To gain insights into the website’s existing errors and analyze areas of improvement.
- HTTPS Inspection: Adding a security factor to a website, one of the determining aspects of ranking.
- XML Site Map Submission: One of the fundamental technical SEO steps essential to make crawlers find your website.
- Site Load Time: Inspects to ensure your site is loading within the mentioned time as per search engine guidelines.
- Website Architecture: Checks if the site pages are both search engine friendly and user friendly and provide easy navigation to find what users are intending to find.
- URL Structure: Analyzes whether a site’s URLs are in place as per the SEO best practices as a good URL structure is essential for excellent navigational experience.
- Structured Data: Optimizes structured data which plays a prominent role in bringing in users to your website from the SERP results.
- Content Inspection: Scrutinizes the content quality to protect your website from the nuisances of thin content, duplicate content etc.
And this is just a pie of the whole tasks technical SEO specialists take care of. Hreflang, Canonical tags, 404 pages, 301 redirects, core web vitals, traffic analysis, goal tracking, etc. – the list of what technical SEOs take care of can be often longer.
Though these practices look achievable, only a technical SEO specialist can ensure that they are accomplished most safely without resulting in any unwanted technical challenges.
Meta Data Analysis
Metadata is a rich source of information to leverage if you want to boost your website’s performance. An SEO audit consultant can help identify how to make the best of the metadata of a website.
For businesses, optimizing the metadata assumes prominence to attract and target customers. Metadata is one of the critical factors in the success of online advertising and e-commerce businesses too.
A technical SEO specialist will implement the best search engine optimization practices in optimizing your website’s metadata elements including title tags, image tags, canonical tags, and structured data.
Optimization
Website optimization is a continuous process that needs periodical inspections. It demands careful analysis of what’s working and what’s not and coming up with optimization strategies that aid your business.
A website that lacks optimization might not live up to user’s expectations and cannot reach the targeted customer group. Here’s where the fee you pay to a technical SEO specialist reaps in profits for you.
An optimized website can bring in more traffic, customers, and thus revenue. Technical SEO consultants believe in optimizing various aspects of a website by tried and tested methods that best suit the business niche.
Right from inspecting the bounce rate to the conversion rate, technical SEO experts come up with SEO strategies to optimize the site speed, image size, website design, UI, and UX to improve the site performance.
Penalty Recovery
Penalty Recovery can be one big hassle for websites. It can occur due to known or unknown causes. Right from algorithm updates to malpractices in SEO Content Strategy, various circumstances lead to penalties on websites.
Search engines levy penalties on websites that do not adhere to their standards and guidelines.
Not many are aware that search engines, for instance, Google employs manual checking of websites for quality assurance.
Those websites that pass automated Quality Check tests often fail at manual inspections. And this comes with a heavy penalty for the reputation of the business and the website owners.
Phil Frost rightly puts it – “Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.”
An expert SEO audit consultant inspects the reasons that triggered the penalty. They will show you a way out of bad backlinks, copied content, thin content (that might arise from guest posts and sponsored content), etc.
Website Migration
In various situations such as rebranding, domain name change, or choosing to switch to other platforms, website migrations might happen. A website is said to be migrated if there is a notable change in its URL structure.
Website migration is a delicate process that needs meticulous SEO strategies. A technical SEO consultant will guide you with the following approaches while migrating a website:
- Explain the risks involved in website migration.
- Give you a picture of migration costs and time.
- Aid with your rebranding strategies.
- Identify duplicate content and remove them.
- Submit the website to search engines for a successful migration.
- Monitor and analyze improvements in traffic and rankings.
Mobile Responsiveness
With evolving mobile user ratio, ensuring a website is mobile friendly is a critical step to its success. Besides, every subsequent search engine update lays more emphasis on the mobile responsiveness of websites.
Surprisingly, 44% of Fortune 500 websites are not mobile responsive. Studies insist that the mobile responsiveness of a website is crucial from an SEO perspective.
Besides, a mobile responsive website can render the best content experience to users. The images, features, and navigation are aptly optimized for the best user experience with a mobile responsive website.
However, when you hire SEO freelancer consultant, you must ask them if they will provide you with the necessary services to make your site mobile responsive.
It is because making a website mobile responsive is a technical task that web developers and designers undertake.
If you can hire an SEO specialist who can help you with both the coding and SEO part for making your website mobile responsive, you just had a lucky streak!
Well, that’s not the end of how a technical SEO consultant can help grow your business. Here are other things you can expect your SEO consultant to offer for you:
On-page SEO: Right from inspecting the on-page SEO factors for the faster ranking of a page to helping you with the latest SEO tricks such as featured snippets, an SEO expert has a huge knowledge your business can benefit from.
Ensuring better usage of crawl budget: Broken links and pages with duplicate/thin content can consume your crawl budget. An SEO Audit Consultant will inspect such unwanted resources on your site and remove them to make your site more crawler-friendly.
Perform a backlink audit: Backlinks are essential to impart your website the authority it deserves. SEO experts will suggest a backlink strategy after performing the initial backlink analysis for your website and competitor analysis.
Social Media Marketing: Social media plays a considerable role in SEO success and boosting your brand awareness. A freelance SEO consultant with intense experience in diverse business niches and handling SEO challenges of various industries must offer you social media marketing services too. They can assist you with paid campaigns, PPC ads, and business branding.
With all these said, I am sure that I conveyed why a technical SEO strategy is crucial for your business.
If you are a beginner and read it this far, I am sure you are keen on how to become SEO consultant to make your mark in this thriving industry.
With my intensive experience in handling global and national clients, here are my six cents on how to become SEO consultant.
How to become SEO consultant
Master the fundamentals: Take the help of online courses and books to master the SEO essentials. Here I have provided a comprehensive book list you might love to begin with.
Put your SEO learning to practice: Implement your learning. Launch your own website, Youtube channel, or eCommerce store. Implement your SEO expertise to rank it to the top. Clients love result-oriented SEOs, let your own website’s success speak for your skills.
Learn practically: Gain practical knowledge from SEO experts. Try being associated with an SEO agency. Learn from technical SEO consultants with ample experience in handling real-time SEO challenges. Approach me for personalized training and mastering SEO.
Conclusion
SEO is a dynamic and competitive field. A well-crafted and implemented technical SEO strategy takes your website two steps ahead of every one step of a competitor. Businesses need to invest in technical SEO only to maximize the returns and boost their website performance.
Reach me at (me@saalimtahir.com) or on LinkedIn for a personal consultation about how to drive your business with the best technical SEO strategy.
