Unless you are prepared to pay for all the traffic to your website, you are going to need your site to rank well in the search engines for certain keywords to get free traffic. This is achieved using search engine optimisation, and unless you already an expert, you are going to require the services of an internet business consultant who specialises in SEO.
The key to this being a successful part of your business is choosing the internet business consultant who is going to carry out SEO for you, very carefully. It may be an individual who works on a freelance basis or it could be an agency who employs SEO specialists as part of their team. Whichever of these two types you prefer to work with, it is essential that you carry out some due diligence beforehand to ensure you get the results you want.
All internet business consultants are bound to have a web presence of some kind or other. It could be a website in the case of an agency, or it might be a profile on a freelancing site where the individual outlines their skills and experience in the hope of a potential client spotting them.
In both cases you should look to see if there are previous clients who have left feedback, reviews, and testimonials. If there are lots of them don’t be too concerned if there are one or two negative ones. You are better to place your trust in someone who has 98 positives and 2 negatives than someone with just 5 positives. The former has had a lot of clients that have been happy with them and the latter, although 100% positive, does not have much history. Although they might do a good job for you, your preference should be for someone with a lengthy track record.
When you are confident that your potential internet business consultant has a sound record, you next want to determine what SEO services they can offer you. It could be you want one or two services that are likely to take no more than a couple of weeks, and not every consultant will offer that. Many consultants and agencies only work on long term contracts with monthly retainers, so establish on what basis they are prepared to work. Also, check whether their work will be paid on an hourly rate or a fixed price beforehand.
Finally, you want to agree the specific SEO tasks your internet business consultant is going to be working on, and most importantly what the desired results should be. If you are inexperienced about how search engines work it might be worthwhile gaining a basic understanding to fully appreciate what is realistic within the time frames you are working to.
The last thing you should make it absolutely clear to your SEO consultant is that you will not accept, under any circumstances, the use of ‘black hat’ methods. These can potentially cause your website to be delisted and effectively means you must rebuild your site from scratch. It is unlikely they will use these unwanted methods, especially if they have a reliable history of satisfied clients, but it does you no harm to make it clear from the outset.