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Collaborating with an SEO Expert: How to Make the Most of Your Partnership
Collaborating with an SEO expert can be a game-changer for your business. By combining your industry knowledge with their expertise in search engine optimisation, you can create a powerful partnership that drives your online presence and increases your visibility. Keep reading to find out more about how to navigate this partnership through strong communication, setting strong goals, project management and more.
Understanding the Role of an SEO Expert in Your Business
To optimise your collaboration and get the most from your partnership with an SEO consultant, agency, or expert, it’s important to understand the scope of their responsibilities. Typical tasks that you can expect an SEO expert to take on include:
- Keyword research: Identifying high-potential keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business.
- On-page optimisation: Optimising your website content, headers, and metadata to improve search engine rankings.
- Off-page optimisation: Building high-quality backlinks, optimising social media profiles, and managing your online reputation.
- Technical SEO: Ensuring that your business website has a strong foundation, including fast load times, proper indexing, and mobile friendliness.
- Reporting and analytics: Monitoring and analysing SEO performance to inform future strategies.
Build a Strong Foundation for SEO Success
It’s essential to have a strong foundation in place to make the most of your partnership with an SEO expert. Before you implement any new SEO strategies, there are a few aspects of SEO that you should work together on to improve. These include:
- User-friendly website architecture: Collaborate on creating a website structure that is logical, easy to navigate, and caters to both users and search engines.
- Voice search optimised content: With the growing popularity of voice assistances, optimising your content for traditional search alone is not always enough. Instead, ensure that your content is optimised for voice search by incorporating long-tail keywords and using conversational language.
- Schema markup: Work with your SEO expert to add schema markup to your website, providing additional context to search engines and improving the appearance of your search results.
Establish Clear Communication Channels
Any successful partnership will always begin with effective communication. When you’re working with an SEO expert from Core Web Vitals, there are several things that you can do to establish and maintain open communication and drive future success.
- Schedule regular meetings: Weekly, fortnightly, or monthly meetings allow you to discuss ongoing tasks, progress, and any roadblocks that you are facing.
- Use collaboration tools: Leverage project management and communication tools like Slack, Trello, or Asana, to keep everybody in the loop and track tasks.
- Be Accessible: Make sure that you make yourself available to your SEO expert if they have any questions or need further clarification on certain tasks or objectives.
Set Realistic Goals and Expectations
Defining clear goals and expectations from the start will ensure that both parties are aligned and working towards the same objectives. When starting out working with an SEO consultant for your business, there are a few key things to consider:
- Be specific: Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your SEO efforts such as keyword rankings, organic traffic growth, and conversion rates.
- Set timeframes: Establish a timeline for achieving your goals and revisit to review your progress on a regular basis.
- Prioritise: Focus on the more important tasks first and be prepared to adjust your priorities as necessary.
Provide Necessary Resources and Information
You can enable your SEO consultant or expert to do their best work by ensuring that they are provided with all the necessary resources and information that they need. Be sure to offer them:
- Access to tools: Grant them access to any tools that they are going to need to do their job well, such as your website’s content management system (CMS), Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and any other relevant tools.
- Company Information: Share as much information as possible with them about your company, products and services, target audience, and competitors.
- Content support: If necessary, provide access to professionals who can help with creating and optimising content such as content writers, developers, and designers.
Embrace a Teamwork Mentality
A strong partnership between your company and an SEO consultant, expert or agency should always be built on mutual trust and respect. There are several ways that you can foster a spirit of teamwork and work better together, including:
- Value their expertise: Remember that you’ve hired an SEO expert to get help with the areas of SEO that you were probably struggling to do in-house. Recognise and respect your SEO expert’s knowledge and skills.
- Be open to feedback: An SEO expert might not always tell you what you want to hear, but if they are good at what they do, they will tell you what they need to hear. Be open and receptive to constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement.
- Encourage collaboration: Encourage and work towards a collaborative environment where ideas can be shared from both sides and openly discussed.
Review and Adjust Your Strategy
Regularly evaluating your SEO strategy will ensure that it remains relevant and effective. Any good SEO consultant will tell you that SEO is dynamic and always changing, so revisit as often as possible to ensure that the strategies you have put in place are still working well for your business. Consider the following:
- Analyse results: Review the data on a regular basis to determine what is working well and what might need some improvement.
- Seek expert insights: Consult regularly with your SEO expert to discuss any potential or necessary changes or updates to the strategy.
- Iterate and improve: Adjust your approach based on your findings and continue refining your strategy over time.
Stay Informed of SEO Trends
As mentioned earlier, the world of SEO is constantly evolving. Along with keeping your strategies up to date, it’s crucial to ensure that you stay informed of the latest industry trends and best practices. This is where the good communication mentioned earlier will come in handy, as it’s your SEO expert’s job to stay abreast of the latest in SEO, and they will be able to share the newest information with you. You can also:
- Follow industry news: Subscribe to reputable SEO blogs, newsletters, and podcasts.
- Attend webinars and conferences: Participate in industry events where you can network with peers and learn from experts.
- Share your knowledge: Set aside time to discuss the latest development and insights with your team and your SEO expert to ensure that your strategies are adapting to the changing landscape.
Invest in Long-Term Growth
Effective SEO will take time and typically requires a long-term commitment and approach. You can maximise the benefits of your partnership with an SEO expert by doing the following:
- Be patient: It’s crucial to understand that SEO results are unlikely to be immediate, and it might be several weeks or months before you see an improvement.
- Focus on sustainability: Prioritise implementing strategies that promote long-term growth over quick fixes that may be ultimately harmful to your website’s reputation.
- Allocate resources: Make sure that your business has the necessary budget and resources to support your ongoing SEO efforts.
Leverage Your SEO Expert’s Network
Working with an SEO expert can open new doors to new connections and opportunities for you and your business within the industry. There are several things that you can do to leverage your SEO expert’s network, including:
- Seeking recommendations: Ask your SEO expert for introductions to other professionals in the industry who will be able to help you with related services such as web development, content creation, or digital marketing.
- Collaborating on guest posts: Work with your SEO expert to find opportunities for guest blogging on relevant, high-authority websites to increase your online presence and build backlinks.
- Joining industry groups: Consider spending time participating in online forums, social media groups, and other communities recommended by your SEO expert, where you can get the chance to network with like-minded professionals and learn from their experiences.
Optimise Your Content Strategy
Content is a crucial component of SEO success. Collaborate with your SEO expert to optimise your content strategy by:
- Identifying content gaps: Work together to find areas where your website is lacking content or could be improved to better address the needs and search intent of users.
- Creating high-quality content: Develop informative, engaging, and valuable content that not only incorporates relevant keywords but also addresses the needs of your target audience.
- Promoting content: Collaborate on content promotion strategies, such as email marketing, social media sharing, and influencer outreach, to increase your website’s visibility and drive traffic.
Be Adaptable and Embrace Change
Your partnership with an SEO expert should always be prepared to adapt to change over time. There are several ways that you can embrace change when working with an SEO consultant or expert, including:
- Staying agile: Be open to modifying your approach as new trends, technologies, or search engine algorithm updates emerge.
- Encouraging experimentation: Support your SEO expert or consultant when it comes to testing new techniques and strategies to discover what will work best for your business.
- Learning from mistakes: While setbacks are not avoidable, there are several things you can to do reframe them as opportunities when they occur. Analyse what went wrong and use the lessons you learn to improve your future efforts.
A successful partnership with an SEO expert involves working together to not simply optimise your website for search engines, but also to ensure that it stays ahead of the SEO curve with the right strategies.
