Where do you find an individual/freelance SEO?
-
I know Moz has a directory of recommended companies, and I've found that very useful.
However, we're really looking for an individual (who, of course, keeps up with the latest best practices and trends in SEO) to optimize our site while we put our time into client sites.
We've done Craigslist ads, but those seldom pan out. Have any of you had luck finding part-time SEOs? Where did you find them?
Thanks!
-
Hi Jess,
You'll probably want to figure out what kind of SEO work you need done, technical or editorial. Technical optimization of a website deals with a site's code, user experience, and overall performance while editorial optimization deals with content, linking strategy, and conversion goals. Structured data fits right in the middle, with both technical and editorial expertise needed. Which one to prioritize depends on the resources you have and how fast you need to see results. It will also depend on how competitive your chosen keywords are for the pages you want to rank.
I recommend you offer to pay for ranking performance. Offer a certain amount of compensation commensurate with the number of pages that improve for selected keywords over a certain amount of time. You can get a good baseline right here on Moz.com, and then monitor progress every week or two. Insist on proper SEO strategies and put payment penalties in place for any black hat activity. I've work under this model with several clients and they all seem to be pretty happy being able to see what they're buying.
Before you do all this, make sure it's cost effective--advertising might give you more bang for your buck in a shorter amount of time, depending on your type of business.
Kevin
-
Good suggestion - thank you!
-
Thanks, EGOL. You're always so helpful!
I think you're right - searching the forums (and possibly LinkedIn) for active, reputable posters is probably the best way to go. Time consuming, but in the long run, it should leave us with a good selection of freelancers to call on when we need them.
-
Thanks, Amanda!
I can handle content development and social marketing/engagement for the company without sacrificing our ability to get work done for clients, but nitty-gritty SEO tweaks end up taking up way more time than I have to give when I have many clients who deserve that attention on their own sites.
Someone who can optimize page titles, descriptions, schema, alt image text, etc. and then work on off-site SEO would be ideal. In this case, we need technical know-how more than creativity.
-
I think LinkedIn is a good resource, because like MOZ it has a rankings and referrals system, but it showcases a broader range of individuals.
With SEO it really depends on what skill-set you are looking for. I find that the MOZ SEO scene is mostly populated by technical SEO mavens rather than content stars. Even in SEO people have specialties. Are you looking for Social Media Marketing? Someone who is really awesome with analytics? A writer, who can optimize your pages and text content using keywords, while creating stylish copy? These skills don't always come equally in the same package.
That's why LinkedIn might be a better bet, because you aren't limited only with the SEO pros who like MOZ. As much as I'm a Moz-er, there are other programs and forums, but there's only one LinkedIn. And yes, I do freelance SEO;)
-
...hire for specific tasks....
This is what I have always done. I find someone who has demonstrated expertise for the work that I need. I have gotten paid help from 10-20 people, each on different types of work.
-
Every person who I have ever hired for consulting, SEO, or technical work on my websites has been a person who I have learned about in an SEO forum. There you can see many things about a person. These include:
-
their ability to communicate clearly
-
their areas of technical expertise (htaccess, CMS set-up, programming, etc.)
-
do others respect their work ("good answer" votes from members, "endorsed answer" votes from Moz staff, articles published in YouMoz or the main Moz Blog -- some people at moz have hundreds of "good" and dozens of "endorsed" answers)
-
their personal style (generous, thorough, etc.)
If someone can give great information here at Moz Q&A for free, imagine what you might get when you pay them.
For about 15 years, I have repeatedly gotten paid assistance from forum posters. I have never been disappointed because I knew who I was hiring and seen their good and generous work repeatedly in advance. In my opinion, people from forums are a lot lower risk than other sources of assistance.
Read the person's Moz profile, check out their website. Most people say if they are available for work or not. (I am not, I only work on my own sites, so not hoping to find work here.)
In my experience it is pretty easy to find good help at a place like Moz Q&A. Look at their endorsed and good answer counts on the right of this chart.
-
-
Since you're hiring part-time you might want to make the work more piecemeal in relation to your site, i.e. hire for specific tasks that are aiming to achieve your overall goals. When you're hiring full-time you have more options as you can compete with agencies for their talent. (Sorry for mentioning that agency friends!) As Sean and Ray mentioned above, finding people here at Moz with a proven track record helps as does some out reach via PM.
-
SEO community sources (Moz, DigitalPoint Forum), and LinkedIn. Those are likely your best choices. When you reach out to them make sure you are asking them for their strategies to SEO. Also if they promise quick rankings they are not the one for you.
-
Referrals tend to be a great source for effective SEOs. The low barrier to entry allows for a lot of individuals, many times inexperienced, to present themselves as an authority and word of mouth referrals help weed out the ineffective SEOs.
I can be contacted through my Moz profile, Moz PM or directly through the website listed.
Elance can be a good community, but the risk is high if you cannot identify the low quality profiles.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Volusion SEO
I have an SEO setting on our Volusion e-commerce store enabled, it is titled "Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp)" I am questioning whether or not this should be enabled for optimal SEO performance. Can anyone provide any advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Seo App on Mobile
Hi all i am learning seo mobile app on google play and itune , I'm finding some tips or experience to seo there. Please tell me some advise .Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anhlebksp0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
Advertising links hurt SEO?
I'm working with a publisher who said that having DFA links on his site will hurt his SEO. He is taking my link and pointing it back to his site and then to mine. Does that sound right to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GFTMarketer0