[A Must Read]-How to Hire and Manage the Right Person or Company For your SEO Campaign!

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Hi Guys

I have written a detail post on my blog recently titled with "10 Steps To Hire The Right Person or Company For Your SEO Campaign". I believe it will help most of you to avoid scam.

Here's the article again

There are different activities that you can outsource like content creation, seo, graphic design, web development etc. Since I am a seo person so I want to demonstrate the whole procedure from the seo perspective.

The whole process can be divided into 3 major parts. They are:

1. Preparartion

- Know Your Goals

- Know Your competition

- Proper on page Set up

- Get Some Idea about link Building

2. The Hiring Process

- Misconceptions you should be aware of

- Deciding who to hire? Individual or Company?

- Characteristics of the Right Individual

- Characteristics of the Right Company

- Tricks to Do During Job Posting

3. Team Set up and Monitoring

- Ask for Report

- Check ranking and Traffic

- Arrange Weekly Meetings



Preparartion

So, the actual hiring process starts even before you post the job at oDesk or Elance. There is a preparatory phase that you need to go through that will make the hiring process much easier. I am going to walk you through those steps 1st.

Step 1. Know your goals:

you must know what you want to accomplish exactly through your seo campaign. Most common goal of the people is obviously ranking higher is serp that will drive more traffic to the site and that traffic will perform some action (clicking ad, opt-in, purchase through affiliate links etc) on the site that help you to make money. So you should know about the competition you are after and set your goals realistically.

Step 2. Know your competition:

You should know exactly with whom you are competing with. This can be easily judged by doing keyword research properly. If you are in a highly competitive market then you should never expect to rank within a week. Many of the people I have seen are very impatient about this and want their seo's to rank them asap. You should know that they are not Google to rank whenever they want but there obviously some tracking system which will tell you if you are on right track or not. Typically 4 to 12 weeks is a good time period to rank for a moderately competitive keyword but it depends on many other factors. So after checking the competition you should project a realistic time frame to reach to your goal.

Step 3. Proper on page set up:

If you are going to hire someone to do link building activities for your site then you should make sure that the pages are perfectly optimized for that target keyword. You can check out this post by Brian Deane for on page lesson. Many seo people in the freelancing sites just overlook this and start building links right away without even checking the on page seo of the site. But this is not right. Both on and off page seo are equally important for better seo results. If you don't know how to do it then this is the 1st thing you should ask your link builder to check for.

Step 4. Get some idea about link building

This is essential because you should be able to assess what your outsourcing person or company is doing for you. If you have no idea about link building and seo you can be easily fooled. You don't have to be a seo pro but must have some sort of basic knowledge to differentiate between good and bad links. Visit seo blogs like moz, search engine journal, source-wave etc and read latest articles about seo world to gather more information

There are several things you should keep in mind while posting a job. I have mentioned some of the misconceptions people have:

a) Asking for links that are impossible to build

This is the major problem I have seen in most of the job postings. For example, take a look at the screenshot below:



This guy is asking for links from actual PR4-10, dofollow and relevant pages that has very low OBL and do-follow and he's willing to pay only $80 for 600 links! J. This is clearly because he doesn't know anything about link building or Seo.

Let me tell you very clearly, this type of links are possible to obtain in 3 ways.

i) Either purchase an expired domain with PR4 and get a link from that or

ii) By Blog commenting.

iii) By Broken Link building Technique

The 1st one will cost you no less than $50-100+ per link and for the 2nd one there are very less chance of obtaining a do follow relevant link from blog commenting. Because almost 95% blog is no-follow. So someone who knows how to achieve such links will obviously charge you higher per link for the time and effort he needs to put into to find such link. So if you don't have that budget then stay away from posting such thing in your job description.

b)Asking to rank asap

See the screenshots below. If you are a regular hirer in freelancing sites you should be familiar with these types of job postings. This is a clear indication that these people don't know what they are talking about.



If you have done your homework and know your competition already then you should have some sort of idea about the timeframe it may take to rank. If your outsourcing company is promising you to rank in x,y days then they must be lying. Ask yourself, are they Google to rank whenever they want? If you are to do so would you able to tell precisely? Obviously not. So do not ask for fast ranking. I will discuss more about this issue in the later sections



The Hiring Process

So once you are ready by knowing your goals and competition you can now go for posting a job in search of a seo people or company.

Step 5. Deciding who to hire? Individual or Company?

You may often confuse in taking the right decision. The decision is totally up to you. The preparatory phase mentioned above will tell you who to hire. If you want to accomplish multiple tasks that require different skills then you should hire a company. For the tasks that doesn't require wide range of experience then an individual is your right choice.

Step 6. Checklist for Selecting the Right Individual to Hire

a) Should have a clear profile

The person you'll be hiring should have a clear profile with lot of positive feedbacks. You should check the earlier comments of the employers for whom they have worked. This will give you the preliminary idea about any contractor.

b) In depth knowledge about the industry

A true seo person should know the latest happenings in the seo world. If you do not know anything about seo or link building then you'll not be able to assess your contractor's ability. So, Once again the preparatory phase will help you with this. You can ask following questions to your potential contractor:

i) Name some of the latest seo strategies and your thoughts on this

ii) Which seo blogs or forums do you visit often?

iii) What are biggest ranking factors in 2013? Etc

c) What He/she can do specifically for your business

A seo person can be knowledgeable about his industry but that doesn't necessarily mean he is a good fit for your niche/ business. So you should specifically ask what they can do for you exactly. You should seat with him to let him know about your target audience and to determine a strategy for promotion. If someone is promising you to rank within x,y days then he's most certainly be lying with you and saying so just to win the job.

d) Well versed in English

Your seo person should have an acceptable level of command over English. Most of the outsourcing people are from Philippine, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan of which English is the mother language of Philippine only. So it's important that your seo person have this skill to understand your instructions clearly and to communicate with you properly.

Step 7. Checklist for Selecting the Right Company to Hire

In addition to the characteristics of an individual, an ideal company should have additional skills

a) Should have people of varying skills:

you want to hire a company or team with the hope to keep all of your works under one roof. So the potential team must have people of different expertise level to be able to handle all your works. An ideal SEO team should have a programmer, a designer, one or two copywriters and some seo people.

b) Access to premium seo tools

The team should have access to the premium seo tools to perform different activities like keyword research, competitor analysis, link prospect analysis etc. Needless to say, they should be proficient in using all the tools.

So if you find the above qualities and their answers satisfy you then you can go ahead and hire them for the seo. But that's not all. You should make sure your campaigns are running smoothly.

You can't just hand it over to someone and expect them to do the magic trick for you. Rather there should be some sort of control from your side that will help you to run the project smoothly.

Step 8. Tricks to Do During Job Posting

Freelancing sites are now loaded with tons of contractors so it's hard to find real seo people who actually know what they are talking about. There are few ways you can adopt to weed out the junk.

a) Include a keyword in your job description

Always include a hidden word in your job description. This will help you to spot spammers right away. Do not look anything else in their cover letter if your code word is not present in the specified location. This is a clear sign of spamming and proves that they actually didn't pay any attention to your job posting.

b) Ask questions that require descriptive answers

I noticed one thing that even though people include the keyword you ask for, they just copy and paste the rest of the cover letter. So it's wise to throw some questions that require descriptive answers. This will really help you to find people who have actually taken time to read your job description. It will also give you an idea about their English skill.

Step 9. Avoid These People

The followings are the list of people whom you should avoid to hire.

i) Who promises to rank in x,y days

ii) Doesn't have a portfolio or earlier work history

iii) Have little or poor command over English

iv) Only knows how to build web2.0, bookmarks etc. they should know advanced strategies like guest posting, broken link building, blog network etc. This is not absolutely necessary but it's a bonus.

v) Doesn't address your questions in the job posting.

Team Set up and Monitoring

Step 10. How to set control over your company?

a) Ask for report:

A good seo person should send you a work report on a timely basis. Most people are too obdurate and ask for daily report. You don't have to be too harsh a weekly or bi-weekly report is fine. You should understand that these people are not working for you alone. Just make sure they are sending the reports in time. Don't forget to review the report to make sure they are doing the right thing.

b) Check the ranking and traffic

This should be the job of your seo person or team. You can also track the serp yourself. It will tell you if their works are producing any positive changes or not. Don't be impassionate. For some niches it takes time to see rank movement. If you are seeing positive movement in the ranking then you are on right track.

C) Arrange Meetings

Try to arrange weekly, bi-weekly or monthly meetings with your SEO person. This will help you to understand their activity more clearly. If they are doing a good job appreciate them, pay bonuses etc. If you feel that they are not doing as they promised then warn them and provide necessary guidelines.

Some hard truth about seo now days

1. Seo is getting very costly now a days. You can't expect to rank very high even though you write the most amazing piece of content. You need to invest equal amount of time and money behind marketing and content creation

2. Blog network/ expired domain links have always worked best. Though it's a controversial strategy but I have seen tons of niche sites recently ranking high in serp just by utilizing this strategy.

3. Blog comment links work even they are no follow. If you can achieve relevant blog comment links it will get you some positive results.

4. This is ever green: focus on quality not quantity. Don't fall for cheap fiverr gigs or warrior forum link blasts.

People buy what they want, not what they need. So, the biggest piece of advice I can give you today:

Do not buy anything and everything you can find. Buy things that you actually need.
#campaign #company #hire #manage #person #readhow #seo

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