I think we can both agree that the hardest part about finding the right SEO consultant is knowing exactly what they plan on doing for you once you hire them.

With so many different methods, theories, and strategies revolving around SEO – many being harmful to your site – how are you supposed to know that what your SEO provider is doing is actually going to grow your business, or put your website at the mercy of our Google overlords?

Coming from someone who owns a lot of their own revenue generating websites, this page is exactly what I’d want to see when considering hiring someone to get me more organic traffic.

A page that outlines everything your freelance SEO consultant intends on doing once you put your trust in them to help you attain your traffic goals.

The benefits of having a page like this are two-fold…

1. You get to make sure that the service you’re being provided will actually help your site, rather than harm it.
2. You get to see where your money is going.

Here's Everything I Do For You When You Become a Client

Before we get into it, I want to preface by saying that no two websites are ever the same.

What you’re about to read below is a general behind the scenes look into what I do for clients who want to gain more organic traffic in order to grow their business.

Once you and I begin working together I’ll be molding these items into a customized plan of action for you based on your websites history and current situation.

Let’s begin…

1. Technical SEO Audit

The first thing I’ll be doing for you when you become a client is taking a deep dive into all of the major technical SEO elements of your site.

This 150+ point audit that I run through is designed to make sure your websites foundation is in check and doesn’t have any major issues that can prevent us from progressing your campaign to its maximum potential.

Without getting into too much detail, some of the core technical elements I’ll be analyzing are things like:

• Checking for xml sitemap and robots.txt errors
• Proper noindexing setup for low quality pages that can be hurting your site score
• Making sure canonicalization or noindex tags are setup properly for pages with pagination and/or URL parameters
• Intuitive website structure (siloing)
• Duplicate/thin content issues
• Page speed
• Schema markup being used properly/at all
• Any backlink issues (over optimized anchor text/low quality links)
• + a whoooooole lot more

Implement

After the audit, I’ll compile a list of all the issues I discovered and explain how to fix them. Once you’ve reviewed it (if you care to), either myself or your web developer will start on implementation.

2. Website Optimization

After we’re done fixing any issues that were found during the technical SEO audit I can start optimizing each page of your website in order to improve their rankings and bring in more traffic.

Using your Google Analytics and Search Console data I’ll identify your most valuable pages and start from there.

Every page on your website will typically be targeting one core keyword, and I’ll be optimizing each page around its keyword to make sure they have the best opportunity of ranking higher.

To do this, I perform competitive research for each page and keyword set using Google’s SERPs and premium software like Ahrefs and Page Optimizer Pro to identify certain ranking signals/benchmarks like:

• Search intent (is your page serving the right intent for its target keyword)
• Word count
• Keyword usage
• LSI/TD-IDF (basically variations of your keywords and other related words)
• Page structure
• etc.

Then based on this research I implement the necessary optimizations to your pages.

The core elements that I optimize are things like:

• Meta titles/descriptions
• URLs
• Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Content
• Images
• Internal links
• etc.

Everything from the research, to the optimizations are all tracked in a Google Sheet.

3. Identify New Keyword Opportunities

Once your core pages are all optimized then this is where I begin competitive and industry research to discover new keywords that you aren’t currently targeting that are valuable to your business.

These keywords will cover all stages of the customer funnel. This typically involves a lot of content creation for your blog, which my team of trained writers will handle (unless you and/or your writers want to get involved as well).

Here’s a basic rundown of how it’ll work:

• Using multiple methods I’ll find keywords that I think would be beneficial to your business.
• I’ll present these new keywords to you and explain why I think they’re worth targeting, and what type of page we need to create to rank for them (i.e. a new category page, a blog post, etc.).
• For each keyword that you approve I go through a similar process that I ran through during your initial website optimizations (word count, search intent, keyword usage, etc.), in order to come up with the best strategy to rank for the keyword.
• Once I’ve put together the strategy outline, we’ll go through the motions of getting the page created asap.

Since discovering and ranking for new keywords is crucial for your website and business success this is something we’ll be doing throughout the lifetime of your SEO campaign.

4. Link Building

I’ve put together a fully transparent outline (similar to this page) of how my link building team and I build links for my clients so I won’t go into much details here.

You can check out my white hat link building service here for the outline.

Basically after we’ve gone through your technical SEO audit and have your on-page optimizations dialed in, and have at least one piece of link worthy content we can start your link building campaign.

It’s pretty tough to find websites that’ll happily link to one of your category, service, or product pages (using white hat methods at least), so a majority of the links we’ll be building will be going to your authority articles and any other valuable resources you might have.

This is where a proper internal linking strategy comes into play…

We might not be able to get a lot of links to your money pages (products/services/categories), but by including internal links that point to your money pages within these articles and resources we’re building links to, we’re then able to spread some of that link juice to your money pages and give them a better chance at gaining higher rankings and traffic.

Confused? Here’s an image:

What types of links do we build?

You can see every link type that we’re capable of building to your site in my outline I mentioned above.

Guest posts play a big role in the types of links you’ll be getting. While guest posts are one of the best links to build, if your site is only getting guest posts then it starts to look unnatural and could result in a potential penalty, or at least become less effective.

So we mix in a bunch of different types of links that all send varying authority signals to your site. Links like resource pages, link reclamation, and even blog comments have their place and effectiveness if done correctly (i.e. non spammy).

Again you can check them out here if you’re interested in reading about each link type.

Links are one of the most important ranking factors for your website. So throughout the lifetime of your SEO campaign with me we’ll be building new links.

5. Monthly reports

We’ll start off our campaign with benchmark reports that’ll show current traffic and impressions numbers for your website.

Then after each month I’ll be sending you progress reports, highlighting traffic and impression growth, as well as the new links we’ve acquired for your site.

Examples of current clients Search Console and Analytics reports

For the first 1-3 months traffic gains will likely start slow, since we'll be tackling your website foundation (technical SEO) and core on-page optimizations first. This is common with every new SEO campaign, since search engines take a bit to react to new changes to your site.

The purpose of you and I working together is to create and implement an SEO strategy that grows your web presence safely and steadily over time.

6. Review Every 3-4 Months

Since there’s no guaranteed, “if you do this to your website, you will go up this many rankings and gain this much traffic” strategies within SEO, I’ll be reviewing each page that we're targeting on your website every 3-4 months.

It’s important that you’re open minded to making changes and sometimes taking risks with certain optimizations.

The purpose of these reviews is to analyze how your site is progressing after we’ve made on-page and off-page changes, and then to adjust accordingly depending on where we’re at.

Even when things are progressing above expectations, I’ll still be doing reviews to identify any strategies we can implement or modify.

I'm In, How Much Does It Cost?

If you’ve read this far, I can only assume you’re at least a little bit interested in hiring me to do your SEO and increase your site’s organic traffic – that’s awesome.

The next logical question is usually, “OK you clearly know what you’re doing, Mackenzie, so how much does it cost?”.

Like any good SEO consultant, I don’t have set prices or SEO packages, since every campaign is unique and requires a different approach and strategy.

So once you reach out to me, and I take a look at your specific situation, I’ll be able to give you a fair price based on how much work needs to be done and how much additional revenue I can bring you.

To give you an idea of what most clients are paying, 70% of my current clients are paying me $1,500-$3,000 a month to increase their traffic.

If that price range doesn’t make you flinch, then let’s stop fartin’ around and get things rolling.