A website that doesn’t show up on the first page of various search engine results is losing a lot of potential revenue. The company’s target market may not even know the brand exists. A competitive search engine visibility is essential in improving a brand’s website. In return, the exposure local SEO brings can elevate brand awareness and better profits.

But what if the business owner lacks the time or technical knowledge to improve the website’s search engine ranking? It makes sense to hire a skilled, reliable, and efficient SEO specialist.

Here are five considerations in hiring an SEO specialist:

• Background

An experienced SEO specialist must be open to discussing a brief yet concise list of his former and current clients. He should also provide their contact details. These references help in evaluating how qualified the applicant is. The clients can also verify if the person did, in fact, handle specific SEO campaigns. The clients may not offer detailed analytics, but they can, at least, tell if they noticed a positive change in their search ranking as a direct result of the specialist’s initiatives.

Showing up in the top local internet search is particularly crucial to small and brick-and-mortar businesses seeking to draw in nearby consumers. A specialist with knowledge of local SEO techniques is a good choice. If the website is enhanced for local SEO, it will show up when someone close by searches for keywords that are tightly related to the business. To accomplish this, a consultant must add the company’s city and state to the site’s title tags and Meta descriptions.

• Proposal

Avoid SEO specialists who won’t openly talk about their techniques and strategies at length. They need to express the methods they can use to drive up the site’s optimization and calculate how long it will reasonably take to reach the SEO campaign goals.

Ensure the candidate’s proposal contains a preliminary technical report on the website to eliminate any issues that can lower the search engine ranking, such as broken links and error Specialists should also present “on page” optimization, an operation to make the site as search- engine-friendly as possible. Also, ask the candidate if he can provide “off page” SEO approaches to boost awareness of the site’s content on other sites via blogs, press releases, and social media sharing.

• Guidelines

Assess if the candidate strictly abides by Google’s webmaster best practices which explicitly forbid 12 common SEO strategies. If a candidate doesn’t adhere to these guidelines, the company website may be relegated to a miserably low search results position. Or, even worse, Google may suspend it from the rankings altogether. Note that both Bing and Yahoo also have their webmaster best practices publicly posted.

• Guarantee

Even though it’s impossible to assure a number-one ranking on any search engine, some dishonest SEO specialists make such bogus promises. Consider it a warning sign if the candidate boasts of having an insider connection with Google to make the website a priority rank. Only the search engines can regulate how high or low sites show up in their search engine results. These are just five critical considerations to take into account when hiring an SEO specialist. Take the time to assess each candidate to find the best one for the company.