The Two-Way interview

OK, you are certain you have a site worth optimizing, and equally certain you want a professional to help you. The next step is the two-way interview, a process critical to assessing if you and your prospective SEO will be a good team. On your part, you want to check references prior, and then gauge an SEO’s actual understanding of your business in the interview itself.

Here’s where the two-way comes in. Any SEO worth their salt will ask you the following questions:

  • What makes your business unique among your competition?
  • Who is your customer? How do your customers find you?
  • What are you doing outside of your site to draw customers?

The SEO Audit

When the IRS wants to conduct an audit, it’s terrifying, but an SEO audit is a wonderful, enlightening experience, designed and enacted only to help your business grow. That said, what should it include, and how do you interpret the results? The audit conducted by your potential SEO hire should do the following:

  • Identify performance issues
  • On-page factors
  • Off-page factors
  • Provide improvement strategies that they can assist with
  • Provide improvement strategies that you need to execute

The technical audit can address areas such as internal linking, URL parameters, crawlability, server connection, and response codes.

Getting Advice & Taking Advice

Here we circle back to the concept of collaboration and partnership. When you hire an SEO, you are committing your own efforts as well to your site’s improved performance. It’s like having an expert river guide in the raft—you still have to put your paddle in, but you’ll get the best of the whitewater. A good SEO will address a full range, from best practices for page titles to complex markup issues.

As Google will affirm, customer experience is everything. Ultimately, the changes and additions (or subtractions) an SEO recommends for your site improve usability and help the searcher in meaningful ways. It is easy to reduce the equation for success to search + click = conversion, but the path to that success requires a comprehensive approach, and SEO that actually optimizes the customer experience. You can expect to realize the effects of implemented changes between four months and one year. At which point your SEO can move past scaling the SERP and help you continue to enjoy the view.

Master Your SEO with the Help of G5

The G5 SEO team holds over 30 certifications in multiple digital marketing disciplines. We use this expertise to guide and deliver an effective SEO strategy for your website. By partnering with G5 for your SEO services, you’ll receive deep insights and an evolving SEO strategy tailored to your business.