Questions About Hiring an SEO Expert

That wouldn't really work on a local SEO project so well. You can create quite a clustermess with citations if you try ranking one site and then rank another with the exact same address. Sure you can change all the citations to the new website. In some cases, getting a citation edited is more difficult than creating it in the first place.

Your thinking like a link builder, any business person with half a brain shouldn't hire an SEO without doing research/testing on the provider. Granted there's a lot of clueless people (people in general) buying SEO without having a clue.

There's zero trust on an unknown, good grief even testimonials are mostly BS on the web.

No way would I trust 99.99% of people claiming to sell SEO, when it's usually junk link builders. Lets see how long it takes the WF for hire crew to chime in with their sales pitch, lol.

For lack of a better way to say it.. I agree with you, Tim.

To rank a website nowadays must involve at least one other website with relevance and authority. You creating the content makes the website relevant. Google having assigned PageRank to a domain name, makes it more or less authoritative or the best chance to become an authority website (again).

Whatever the strategy being used, the SEO guy must at least be incorporating one such method that covers relevance and authority.. and as of now, the only way for this to happen is by re-purposing expired PageRank-ed domains..

Definitely would cost more. I guess it all depends on how much potential money is in that niche or what it is worth to the business. Of course if it takes 50+ sites to get it to rank then it would be cost prohibitive to outsource but 10 to 20 sites I think a few hundred a month would be reasonable.

You probably have a different take on this because you get SEO and are capable of doing it yourself. When someone else has to commit a budget and pay someone to manage it the way you would, they can end up spending the same money or more as a PPC campaign to get those results. The difference is with PPC those costs are controlled... whether you're #1 or #10, you're paying what you can afford and can put all of your focus into increasing conversions instead of just increasing traffic.

I used to be among those who struggled with PPC (especially given that most of my products are $19.95, it was nearly impossible to even reach a break-even point). What it came down to was that I, like most people, was mixing strategies - we design pages to be "search engine friendly" but search friendly doesn't usually equate to conversion friendly. Organic traffic was converting at 1-2%, and paid traffic was converting about the same overall.

The "lightbulb moment" for me was the day I realized I could do a better job of targeting my paid traffic without the burden of the rules of SEO. Mistake #1 was sending people to the homepage. Mistake #2 was sending people to the same page that was optimized to attract organic traffic, instead of being optimized for conversions. So what we would do is create separate landing pages for the paid campaigns; that way the overall site could stay "Google friendly" but a paid visitor coming in from an ad could have a highly focused page that's all about solving their problem (by getting them to buy the product) and expedite the checkout process, without the fluff of bloated keyword-based content, search-friendly use of H tags and other on-page elements, etc. That made a huge difference in the conversion rates, and in the end we were turning more visitors into sales for the same dollar spent.

Another benefit was to create landing pages that were based on the feature-benefit the customer was searching for - for a product that was dual function, like a high speed polisher/sander, there are two audiences for it: people searching for power sanders, and people searching for a buffer to wax their car. Rather than sending both of those visitors to the same product page, one page could be all about its uses as a buffer and only casually mention its sanding capabilities, and vice versa. Granted you could deploy this strategy with SEO too, but all of the content optimization required to organically rank means you're weakening the conversion capabilities of the page in favor of traffic - and there may be dozens of relevant keywords you could use to drive someone to that page in a PPC scenario, whereas with SEO you could only focus on a couple.

It does take a budget, no question, but so does a proper SEO campaign for someone who isn't capable of doing it themselves. If nothing else, I always encourage people to do PPC as a test before they start an SEO campaign - There's nothing worse than saying "I want to rank for XX," waiting weeks with no sales to get there, and then learning XX doesn't convert because the BUYERS are searching for YY. Start with PPC, test a variety of keywords, and then if you think it's worth it optimize around the ones that converted best.