Hire a small business SEO consultant

What sets The Happy Guy Marketing apart: Strategic SEO is effective SEO, and that’s what we do. We look past the ranking numbers, setting our sites on how the search engines can send the most qualified customer leads to your website.

Your SEO strategy – helping your customers find your business

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of shining a spotlight on an otherwise invisible website. Our SEO consultants do more for you than just effective SEO – we do effective website marketing, and SEO is one incredibly useful tool.

We begin by assuming that your goal is to make a profit or promote a cause, not to be able to say “We are the top ranked site for super-gizmos.” Our preoccupation with your bottom line begins in selecting the search terms to work on, so that you are targeting real and reachable customers who are ready to spend.

We then work to build your rankings, so that customers will find your website rather than your competitors’ websites. More on this process below.

Finally, we make sure that your landing pages – the pages that we rank in the search engines – funnel customers into your sales process. This is a major oversight of many SEO consultants, who are focused just on what happens at Google or Yahoo or MSN, but do not take a direct interest in your sales process.

“Treat the search engines like you would the media – as a conduit to your audience. Nurture them, and they will nurture you. Feed them information you would want your visitors to read, and that’s what they will feed your visitors.”

You don’t need to hire a local SEO consultant; you do need to hire the best. We are located in eastern Ontario (the Ottawa-Cornwall-Montreal area) of Canada, but we service clients in Europe, Australia, the USA and elsewhere. We operate using the following optimization principles:

  • Follow the letter and the spirit of the search engines’ guidelines, to avoid placing our clients in current or future trouble.
  • Focus on the visitors, both humans and robots, when optimizing a website.
  • Rankings are not good enough – the listing has to sell and the page has to deliver.
  • We are not coders. We are strategists who use coding and other techniques to market your business and your website.
  • Non-reciprocal links are more valuable than reciprocal links.
  • More is not necessarily better. Optimal is better (that’s what it means to “optimize”).
  • Trust is a valuable commodity. Don’t make false promises to clients.
  • Never work for two clients targeting the same search terms (avoid conflict of interest).
  • We don’t do “crash ‘n’ burn” SEO. If that’s what you are looking for, there are plenty of unethical SEO consultants who do.

Amazingly, many professional search engine optimizers are coders who think of themselves as coders. We are strategists, who think of ourselves as website marketers. We use coding as a tool to get our message across, but it is only one tool at our disposal.

How to hire an effective and professional SEO consultant

Believe it or not, this is a field with a lot of con artists and scams – both freelance search engine optimization consultants and firms. In fact, half of our customers come to us after having had a disastrous experience with a less-than-professional, fly-by-night SEO firm or a poorly-qualified freelance SEO consultant. Before hiring your SEO consultant, there are some questions you should ask:

  • What are your guiding principles?
  • What are the main methods you use?
  • What is the typical longevity of your clients? Do they stay with you? Do they return? Do they recommend others?
  • What do you guarantee?
  • How long will this all take?
  • What sites have you worked on before?
  • How do you avoid penalties? (hint: view the video below)

Looking for an effective SEO specialist to help boost your website traffic? Contact us for a free quote. Fill out the form on this page. Or read more below on what we do to optimize your website for the search engines.

Our SEO process – what we do for you and your website

  • Website SEO audit.
  • Keyword research – what words your clients are using when they search.
  • Competitor research.
  • Keyword mapping.
  • Site architecture.
  • On-page SEO optimization.
  • Optimize internal navigation for the search engines.
  • Link-building.
  • Progress monitoring.
  • On-page tweaking.
  • Reporting.
  • Creating link bait.
  • Ongoing advice.

A complete optimization package starts by a proper SEO website audit to understand its strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities in attracting targeted searchers through the search engines.

Next comes finding the “keywords” or search terms, for your business. Those terms depend on many factors, including your budget. For example, very deep pockets could make Google’s top ten for “web hosting”, but shallower pockets might have more success targeting “cheap web hosting Arizona”, for example. We choose search terms with your bottom line in mind, not by some one-size-fits-all formula that leaves you stranded. That often will include some level of competitor research.

Next, we map out those search terms, across your pages, grouping terms that support one another and separating those that would dilute or neutralize each other. Sometimes we recommend fresh content to address key search terms. This is the stage at which we often look at website architecture, if we have not already addresses it along with the SEO audit.

Then we do the “on-page search engine optimization”. We optimize your meta tags, your title tag, and your other tags. We edit your text for both robot and human visitors, and we work on both text and tag attributes. We make sure that the navigation helps the search engine robots to index your pages, understand what they are about, and maximize your Pawebsite’s authority.

We build links to your website, looking first for non-reciprocal links, where you do not have to link back. Typically, those include mentions in blogs, articles and social media. We also look for opportunities to create “link bait” or “magnetic content”. It might also include a judicious use of news releases and other opportunities. Diversification is a wise long-term strategy (just as it does in the stock market).

As we progress, we monitor the results over time and tweak pages as required. In some cases, we will come back to you with numerous additional recommendations as your site changes and as the state-of-the-art in search engine optimization changes. We keep ahead of the trends so that your rankings can be maintained and enhanced. We also continue to report to you on your progress and our activities.

Want to hire an effective SEO consultant?

If you are looking for successful search engine optimization consultants to increase traffic, leads and sales on your website, contact The Happy Guy Marketing for a free quote. The more details you provide, the better we can serve you. Fill in the form now for a FREE quote.