Finding an SEO expert in the UK can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. There are hundreds or even thousands of firms vying for your custom.

Naturally, all of them claim to be the best.

Most of them are cagey about showing you any data to backup their claims. Which is to be expected – a lot of the information is confidential client data – but it doesn’t help making the decision easy.

The first thing to do is to create a shortlist. Click through to the SEO expert’s website and see whether you like it’s look and feel. Whilst that won’t tell you anything about how they do business, it will give you an idea of what the company is like – whether it’s staid, brash or somewhere inbetween.

Next, look at the search engine optimisation packages they offer.

• Are they clear or muddled?
• Can you understand them without a degree in geek speak?
• Have you heard of some (or all) of the methods they’re using? Or are there some you’ve never come across before?
• Is there a long contract to enter into?
• Are they claiming to get you to number one on Google? (no-one can actually guarantee that)

Spend some time doing this. You’re going to be spending hundreds or thousands of pounds with this company and what they do will affect whether or not you get the results you need for your website.

Once you’ve narrowed down your search, fire off a message to your shortlisted forms or give them a call. See how they handle this process – if they take forever to get back to you while they’re hungry for the sale, will you get any response once they’ve got your money?

Have a shortlist of questions to ask them when you do speak to them on the phone – these should become apparent in your research but I’d suggest that they include whether or not the language-critical work is carried out in the UK or abroad, who you’ll be dealing with on a regular basis, what the likely timescale is for their work to show through in the results.

Which I guess means I need to answer those questions for us!

• We start with a half day consultation:  in person, on the phone or via Skype. This will involve looking at your site from the viewpoint of a customer as well as a search engine. After all, there’s no point getting lots of visitors to your site if their first instinct is hit the back button.
• Next, we’ll talk about your objectives for your website. Is your SEO work designed to get mainly sales or enquiries or to capture information so that you can keep in touch with potential customers by email? Or do you have a different objective?
• After that, the consultation will take a look at some of your competitors. Our SEO expert will use the same critical eye on their sites – what are they doing well, where could they do better?
• What words and phrases are customers typing into the search engines when they want to reach a site like yours?
• Is there enough potential traffic to make it worth your while targeting these potential customers? Or would it be better to tackle it from a slightly different angle?
• What you need to do – on your own site and on links pointing to your site – to reach these objectives and how that will be measured.

At the end of the consultation, you’ll have a road map for going forward. Whether you use our search engine optimisation services, hire someone else or do the work in-house.

You’ll also get lots of valuable insider tips and tricks that our SEO expert has picked up over years of experience.

To start you off on that learning curve, we prefer to use methods that are generally writing and labour intensive. Because they work.

We don’t blast out “profile links” because in our experience they aren’t worthwhile. They worked well for a few years but nowadays their impact is close to zero. Plus you probably don’t want or need links written in the Cyrillic alphabet or ones where the page reads from right to left.

Likewise we don’t spam other people’s blogs with comments – it’s not good practice to send out hundreds of meaningless comments an hour in the hope that some of them will result in a link back.

Instead, we’ll help build up a natural portfolio of links that Google likes and takes notice of. You can check out our search engine optimisation packages here.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

You need to know where you want to go first.

So you need to book your consultation with me. Give me a call now on 07967 478272 (I’m Trevor, by the way).

If you want to know a bit more about the SEO process involved, click here for a longer read.