What is an SEO Consultant?

With the growth of the Internet and stay-at-home businesses, the demand for SEO services has grown significantly over the past few years.

So what exactly is SEO consulting? I think it’s important that we break it down into three parts.

First lets discuss what the definition of SEO is:

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is typically thought of the process of improving a website’s natural search engine ranking for some specific keywords.

What most SEO companies claim to do, and of course, what some actually do. However, I think SEO is a lot more than this, but I’ll go into that in a minute.

Now let’s l examine the definition of a consultant:

“A consultant is someone who provides value through specialized expertise, content, behavior, skill, or other resources to assist a client in improving the status quo in return for mutually agreed-upon compensation.” – Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss is a well-respected consultant to the consultants, and author. The above definition was taken from his book Million Dollar Consulting, 4th Edition.

Now, if we put both of those two definitions together we might derive something like this:

An SEO consultant is someone who assists a client by helping them improve their website through content, design, user-experience and marketing to enhance the quality of, and increase their search engine traffic.

Not everyone will agree with this definition, and perhaps most SEO companies wont. But that’s the difference between hiring someone to just go through the motions of a project that you (the inexperienced search engine marketer) dictate, and hiring a real consultant who brings value-added to the job.

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