Should you hire an SEO Consultant or a Digital Marketing Manager?

What is the difference between an SEO consultant and a digital marketing expert? When it comes to outsourcing your website to an agency which is the best choice?

When you decide that it’s time to enhance your online presence and gain from the many benefits the Internet has to offer, then the next question you should answer is whether you should hire an SEO consultant or a digital marketing expert.

For many people the difference is unknown but in order to help you take better decisions, let me explain a couple of basic things.

What is the difference between an SEO consultant and a Digital Marketing Manager?

The first thing to understand is that it does not necessarily mean that there is a difference between an SEO and a digital marketing expert. In many cases both will perform the same functions and have the same skills but they may use different titles mainly for marketing purposes. Before getting into why they may do that, let’s see what the theory says.

SEO Consultant

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An SEO consultant is someone that has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to optimize your website for search engines and improve your position in the search results. To do that he/she will use search engine optimization techniques and practices. The ultimate goal of an SEO consultant is to increase the web site traffic.

Digital Marketing Manager

If you take a look at the diagram below you will notice that SEO is a subset of digital marketing and that a true digital marketing manager will have to manage many other areas besides SEO, for example content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, banner advertising etc.

Digital marketing Services

So by definition the difference between the two is that the SEO guy only cares about getting more organic visits and the digital marketing guy looks at the complete online presence of a company which goes beyond SEO.

Theory VS Practice

In the real World the theory is different from what is actually happening and this is exactly the case with SEO’s and Digital marketing experts. In the majority of cases a good SEO consultant will also take care of all the components of digital marketing. They may use the title SEO consultant because for the majority of people this is more understandable than the more sophisticated term of a digital marketing consultant.

Take for example our case, while we offer a range of digital marketing services we still name our services page SEO Packages because this is what our customers use to find us in Google. They may use this term but what they want in reality is not just seo but a number of other services and this is what we offer them.

Digital marketing is the latest trend

If we forget about the different titles for a minute and concentrate on the actual functions, it is clear that in order to succeed online you need to do much more than plain SEO. In the past SEO was enough but with the growing use of social media and mobile phones, if you want to have a proper online presence and get to your customers before your competitors then you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy.

Is SEO dead? By all means NO, SEO is not dead and it will never be. The only difference is that now you need to take care more things and not only SEO. When I refer to SEO I am not talking about buying/building/exchanging links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings; this is not SEO but spam techniques made by spammers.

SEO is about building high quality websites that are user friendly but also understood by search engines.

So who should you hire?

You need to hire someone that is capable of promoting your business online by taking advantage of all available tools the digital World has to offer. It doesn’t matter if that someone is called an SEO consultant, Internet marketing expert or digital marketing manager; what it matters most are the skills and experience they have and of course the results they can produce.

5 Questions to ask your prospective business partner (whether it’s an SEO consultant or digital marketing manager)

When it’s time to make the decision for hiring a consultant or agency to promote your business online there are a few questions you should ask your prospective business partners.

What is their working experience with SEO and Digital Marketing? – Ask for live examples, case studies or testimonials about their work.  In addition you can ask for how long they have been working online and details about their academic background, qualifications etc.

Ask for the techniques they will use to promote your web properties – What SEO techniques they will use, how are they going to utilize all digital marketing components (content marketing, social media, email marketing, mobile marketing) and how will this benefit your company.

Ask about pricing – How much you will have to pay for their services? Will they charge you a fixed cost per month or is it an hourly charge. Do they provide detail monthly progress reports so that you know where your money is spend? For more details you can also  read: SEO Services Pricing

Ask them if they can guarantee you first position on Google – That’s a tricky question to ask but a good consultant will never guarantee that. For example what we guarantee and offer money back is increase in your overall website traffic but we never guarantee you first positions even if at the end we manage to do that.

Test the work before going full scale – What we do in order to give a prospective client the opportunity to test our quality of work, communication and overall service is offer them to start our co-operation with our SEO Audit Service. This is basically a service that has a low one-time fee and the end result is a report describing the problems a website has, what needs to change and it is the first step for designing the overall digital marketing strategy customized for the needs of the particular company 

If they don’t offer such a service you can agree with them to do something that will not cost a lot of money (maybe ask them to do a competitor analysis report) but will give you an idea of how committed they are with deadlines and the quality of their work.

Conclusion

If you are living in a perfect World where everybody is knowledgeable about the latest trends in digital marketing then you should hire a Digital Marketing Manager. According to the theory that person or company should be in position to manage and take advantage of all digital marketing opportunities.

In the real World though not everyone is up-to-date about what is happening in the online World so they still use the term SEO to find consultants but what they actually need is a consultant that will do more than SEO i.e. a digital marketing manager.

For the purpose of speaking the language of the users some agencies (like our agency) still use the terms SEO for their digital marketing services.

Regardless of the terminology and titles what is more important at the end of the day is the result and benefit for your company from whoever consultant this is coming.

How often should you publish new content?

How often should you publish new content?

One of the standard questions I get when I am talking to clients discussing their content marketing strategy, is “how often should I publish new content?”  Is it necessary to publish new content daily or can I get away with 2-3 posts per week or even less?

There is no definite answer to this question and I would say it depends on the type of blog or web site.  Google and other search engines are looking for good quality and relevant content to show in their search results and freshness is just one of the factors taken into account by their ranking algorithms.

To help you decide the most suitable publishing strategy I added below a few ideas in a question/answer format.

Should I post new content daily?

If you are running a news, celebrity, quotes, jokes, lifestyle or sports site then most probably you will have to post multiple times per day to keep your content relevant and fresh.

If on the other hand you are running a blog or web site in other areas (for example weight loss, nutrition, education, travel etc.) where the status of things does not change daily then most probably you can get away with a couple of updates per week. You can actually use the time to prepare your posts, optimize your post titles, promote your older posts and work on your internet marketing strategy.

What do you competitors do?

Find out what other web sites in the same niche as yours do with their publishing strategy. Do they publish daily or many times per day, what type of posts do they publish (short or long and informative)?

Is there any SEO benefit from publishing new content daily?

Indirectly there is some SEO benefit from publishing regularly (daily or 3-4 times per week). First you give one more incentive for search engines to crawl and index your web site. Second you give an incentive to your readers to come back again and third this combination may give your more exposure, more social media mentions, more loyal readers and why not more natural links pointing to your site.

What does Google say about publishing new content?

There are a couple of videos of Google’s Matt Cutts talking about the importance of fresh content. The one is how important is the frequency of updates on a blog and then other is freshness an important signal for all sites . Also, in their latest quick start seo guide they also talk about content freshness mentioning “keep it fresh and keep it up to date”.

In summary what does Google say is that you need to keep your content fresh and relevant but that does not mean you need to post daily or weekly. What is more important is the quality of the content and not the publishing frequency.

Do not forget about user-generated content

A great way to get new content for your web site without having to generate that content yourself is by having your users generate the content in the form of comments, forum posts, reviews, answers to questions, contests, surveys etc. It’s a big topic and not easy to accomplish if you don’t have a lot of visitors to your web site but it is a way to keep the content fresh. I will come back with a new post for more details about user-generated content.

What do I do and how this can help you?

I don’t post daily. In almost all the web sites I run (including those of my clients) I establish a 3 updates per week policy. The only cases I choose to post more often (i.e. on a daily basis) are in new web sites when I want to build up content faster.

What you should do?

Establish a steady routine – It is important to establish a publishing strategy and stick to it. Having a clear strategy as to when you should post will help you build your schedule, your action plan and deadlines. If you leave it open then most probably you will postpone it with the first difficulty.

What do your readers want? – Put yourself in the position of your readers and think if you would like to get content more frequently. If you are publishing long, informative articles on a daily basis do you think that this is something your readers would like to read day after day?

Check your statistics – Test different scenarios of a couple of weeks and check your statistics to find out if more frequent publishing is beneficial

Write your posts in advance – As equally important as establishing a publishing strategy is the preparation of your posts in advance. What I usually do is have 2-3 posts ahead of schedule to ensure that I will not miss my targets.

Do not forget about the 80/20 rule – Do not forget that 80% of your content online will never get the attention it deserves. This is how the Internet works due to the vast competition so think well how you want to spend your time. If publishing daily does not generate any return (i.e. more traffic, more customers, more social media mentions, more exposure) then better reduce your publishing frequency and concentrate on other actions like finding other sources of traffic besides search engines.

What should I write in my blog and how to choose post titles?

When choosing what to write in your blog (topic, article titles, content etc.) it is important to understand 2 basic concepts:

First is that content is the most important success factor of any web site or blog so this is where you should spend most of your time and second you should realize that you are not alone and so you don’t only have to create excellent content but you also have to compete with other web sites that create good content as well. I will explain below why this is important and what you can do to minimize your competition.

What should I write about?

In my seo tips for beginners article I have explained what is consider good quality content but for the purpose of this article I will go one step further and explain how to distinguish your content from the competition which is essentially the answer to the question: what should I write about so that it stands out.

Before to start writing you next blog post ask yourself these questions:

What would be the topic of my post?

Will my post answer a question or solve a problem?

What others are writing about the particular topic?

How can I differentiate my content from existing posts and make it better?

Once you have the above questions answered your next step is to decide on the actual blog post title, write the post, publish it and promote it.

Best tool for SEO?

I use a number of tools to build organic traffic to my websites but this one is my favorite keyword tool. I use it for SEO, keyword research and rank tracking.

Finding profitable keywords you can actually rank has never been easier

Click here

How to choose your blog post titles?

The blog post title is important for 3 main reasons:

A good title will attract more readers and social media attention

A good title is essential for SEO purposes

Blog titles should help both readers and search engines understand what the post is all about. Google has recently released a one-page cheat sheet stressing the importance of page titles for SEO purposes so it is not something you should neglect for any reason.

So, you know what will be the topic and type of your post and the next step is to choose the actual blog post title. This is where the Google keyword tool comes into rescue.

How to use the Google keyword tool for choosing your blog post titles?

The Google keyword tool among many other useful features gives you 2 pieces of information that are important when choosing blog titles: The number of exact searches per keyword and the competition level for that keyword. I will use these 2 in the example below to help you understand how to choose blog titles that have less competition and thus increase your chances of ranking higher for that term.

Let’s look at the following real example:

What would be the topic of my post? Weight loss

Will my post answer a question or solve a problem? Yes, my intention is to explain to my readers how to lose weight

What others are writing about the particular topic? Searching “how to lose weight” “how to lose weight fast” “weight loss” “I want to lose weight” “how to lose pounds” brings a number of results from trusted web sites and my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero

How can I differentiate my content and make it better? I want to take a step-by-step approach to weight loss and explain how to calculate the weight you should lose and how to create your plan

Notice in the above table that I added the note “my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero”. This is important and what this means is that even if I write a super article with the title “how to lose weight” (or any of the above titles) I will probably never be able to rank in the first positions because there are already trusted web sites in the first page and I need to give Google many concrete and powerful reasons to give me a good ranking.

In reality this is unlikely to happen so this is where I go to the keyword tool.

How to choose post titles using the keyword tool

The first things I do are set the location to ALL Countries and the Match Types to Exact.

Next I start searching for keywords. Continuing with the example above I started searching with the phrase “how to lose pounds”.

From the results what I am interested at the moment is the Competition column and the Global monthly searches column. In particular I am looking for Low competition long trail keyword ideas with some monthly searches. Of course the more monthly searches a keyword have the better, but don’t forget that what is displayed there is only an indication and I have found many times keywords to bring much more traffic than the estimate given here. Also the lower the numbers, the greater are the chances for the estimates to be inaccurate.

Back to our example, fortunately for the term I choose there are many low competition keyword ideas that can satisfy my needs as outlined in the table above.

I did search for the other terms as well but without spending too much time I decided that a keyword that has low competition and a good amount of global monthly searches and fits my topics subject and purpose is “how to lose 15 pounds”.

keyword-research-tool-600

To cut a long story short and also convince that this methodology works you can search Google for the above term and you will see my article on page 1, position 1.

blog-post-titles-in-search

You can also see below a screenshot from Google Analytics showing that in a period of one month the particular page has brought in twice the traffic estimated by the keyword tool.

google-analytics

So, to summarize this post it is important to remember that:

You don’t only have to create good content but you also have to select your blog titles carefully after doing a keyword analysis using the keyword tool and a competition analysis by searching for those terms on Google.

By selecting blog titles with low competition you increase the changes of ranking higher

Choose your blog topic first, find the title and then write the content

Once published make sure that you promote your blog post in the best possible way

Include keywords in your blog post titles but don’t overdo it (see my example above and notice the title I have selected which contains the keywords I want to rank for).

Don’t follow the above procedure for all your blog posts. Choose in advance which blog posts to optimize with the above method but also make sure that you have non-optimized posts in your web site/blog as well.

Mobile web site Vs Native App and why webmasters should care?

A mobile web site or mobile friendly web site is not the same as a native android app or a native iPhone app or a native Windows mobile app. The mobile web site VS Native app is not exactly a debate as to which one is the best, but these are technologies that can (and should be) used as part of your overall Internet Marketing strategy.

Why you should care?

As a webmaster you can use both these technologies to increase the traffic and exposure of your web site. I would say that besides search engine traffic and social media, mobile traffic (either through search on mobile or through the various mobile markets) is among the best ways to promote your web site.

What is a mobile friendly web site?

Smartphones, either Android, iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile, have significant differences compared to desktop Pcs or laptops. They have smaller screens with a lower resolution and their basic navigation method is touch. When a normal web site is viewed on mobile (through a mobile browser), the user experience is not so good since the user has to scroll up and down, left and right and probably magnify the screen in order to read an article or navigate through the site.

A mobile friendly web site is optimized for the mobile browser. The buttons are bigger, fonts are easily read and there is no vertical scroll bar. Click on the screenshots below to see how a non-mobile friendly web site looks on the mobile browser versus a mobile friendly web site.

mobile friendly web site

Click image to enlarge – Mobile friendly web site

example of non mobile friendly web site

Click image to enlarge – Non mobile friendly web site

Providing your users with a mobile friendly version of your web site is a must. Recent research shows that 30% of search traffic is from mobile and this is number is steadily rising. I’m sure that if you take a look at your analytics data you will see the same trend. It is also a fact that visitors are more likely to exit a web site if they don’t find quickly what they are looking for and a desktop web site viewed on a mobile browser is a bad experience.

A mobile optimized web site is good for SEO

I have said it in my SEO Tips article, Google run various campaigns about this and every SEO is insisting that you should not forget your mobile users. In fact if you really want to have a high quality web site, a mobile site is a necessity.

An additional source of revenue

In addition if you are running adsense on your desktop site you can also run adsense for mobile within your mobile friendly web site and gain from the additional revenue.

What is a native app?

If you own an android, iPhone or Windows mobile you may have noticed (or used) an icon on your mobile desktop that leads to the Google Play store, Apple store or Windows marketplace respectively. This is the place where you can download and install native apps on your phone. So a native mobile app is an application developed especially for the particular platform which can be made available in the respective mobile markets.

The hidden benefits of mobile markets to web site owners

Why should you care? How can you, as a webmaster, benefit from these?

For starters, there are millions of users per day who download and install apps from the mobile markets. Both Apple Store and Google Play have reported that they already passed the 1 billion application downloads. In addition, Android is set to have 1,300,000 new users per day!

What does this mean? There is a huge number of online users who are using their mobiles phones to look for information (apps, games, magazines, books etc.) in the respective mobile markets. You may have read about the success of Angry Birds and how the company made millions overnight from selling their game through these markets.

How can a webmaster benefit from mobile markets?

You can develop a native app for your web site and make it available in those markets. The app can represent your content, products or services in a format optimized for mobile phones or tablets. By doing so you are bringing your brand in the hands of more users which will result in:

More visits to your mobile friendly web site and desktop site.

More sales (if you are selling a product)

More direct visits

Brand awareness

Additional revenue from advertising (if you choose to run ads on your native app)

Additional revenue from selling the app (if you choose to sell the app)

More subscribers

More social followers

A real case study

Back in 2011 I have developed a native android app for one of my sites. The app is basically showing my latest content in a format optimized for android phones and tablets (see screenshot below). Whenever I publish a new post on the site my android users get a notification in their mobile phones.  The application is nothing fancy but it’s a good way for android owners to follow my site updates.

Soon after that, I have also developed a Windows Mobile App and published the app on the Windows Marketplace.

After almost one year the applications have been downloaded more than 150,000 times (and growing steadily) and the majority of users still have the app on their phones or tablets. What was the benefit for my site?

More direct visits

More visits to the mobile friendly version

More social followers

Small monthly revenue from the ads running on the app.

How can you develop a mobile web site or a native app?

Depending on the platform you use for your site there are a number of free and paid tools you can use to develop a mobile friendly version. I use WordPress and a paid plugin (wptouch pro – has a free version as well) to easily and quickly create a version for smartphones and tablets.

Developing a native android app is a bit more complicated than just installing a plugin and it also depends on the kind of application you want to create. You can use odesk.com or any other freelancing service to hire a developer (or hire me – contact me for a quote) to do the work for you. I will cover this is in more depth in another post so stay tuned.

So what is the difference between a mobile web site and a native app?

Now that you know more details, it is easier to understand the differences between a mobile web site and native app. In summary:

A mobile web site is a version of the desktop web site that is optimized for viewing through a browser on a mobile device (or tablet). It cannot be published on the mobile markets and the only way for users to find your mobile web site is to type the address from their mobile browsers. You can monetize your mobile web site by running mobile ads.

A native app is an application developed for a particular platform (android, iPhone, Windows). The resulting application is a file that can be uploaded in the respective mobile market. Once published in the market it can be searched through the market and installed on the device.  You can monetize your native app by either running ads on by setting a purchase price.

Mobile web site Vs Native App and why webmasters should care? by Alex Chris