Are you looking to hire SEO professionals from India? India has been the preferred choice of recruiters when looking for SEO professionals. This post provides you with inside details of why there is a huge population claiming to be SEO professionals. The post will also guide you on how to select and hire the right SEO professional from India.
*Do note here that the writer is himself a SEO professional and works with EMarketz India Pvt Ltd.
India rides pillion with US and Europe on the fortunes and changing business landscape. Year 2000 saw a sudden surge in Google stared outshining Yahoo and MSN as the preferred search engine. Suddenly, small businesses in the western world identified that if they appear in top rankings of Google, they get more enquiries and more business. As Google, this phenomenon became an important part of marketing activity. During this time, most western companies wanted to rank higher but did not wanted to spend a fortune on the same. So, India, became the natural choice where few first moves picked up the SEO trick that if you stuff keywords and build more links, you rank higher. Riding on this thought, a whole chunk of candidates who were not performing well in academics moved out to become SEO executives. A majority of them had no or little knowledge of SEO and they flooded the web with spammy comments, links and found content spinning machines work as well. By the time Google realised that this is the real story on how people are manipulating their rankings, India almost had a five hundred thousand SEO workforce.
With Google updating its algorithm and having penalized some websites for the above kind of work done around the year 2012 onwards, India has already more than 5000 SEO companies and a large work force trained to work the traditional way. And more some tricks of the old trade still were working. Workforce started getting higher salaries, rupee depreciated over a period of time which added to the incentive and work boomed like never before.
However, the mind-set, training and knowledge of Indian workforce remain low as they were caught up in old mechanism of spammy work trying to complete the activity sheets for their clients. We all know that this approach does not work as of no or may be harms you more than it can do good. However, there is a flip side to this story. Those, who were interested to understand the real technical nuances of SEO, honed their skills and became what we call SEO PROFESSIONALS. Now, this situation resembles a sea where you as a client need to locate the pearls who are true SEO professionals. Whether you hiring directly or through a freelance platform, you must follow these rules to ensure that you catch the pearls.
Rule 1: Look at the quality of English or grammar while you chat on Skype, WhatsApp or on Email exchange. A thorough professional who has experience will have few or none grammar errors in his communication with you.
Rule 2: Ask the candidate about which all tools does he use for SEO purpose. If the candidate names none or a few, it is an indicator that he still may be doing SEO the old school way. Definitely not a sign of SEO professional.
Rule 3: Testimonials in India can be faked or generated. I know a lot of clients will ask for testimonials or the previous work, however, this the easiest part for any candidate to fake on. The most trusted way is to check for their listing on Clutch or SEO Review. Both usually follow a thorough process of check and evaluation before a profile is made live. Vouch for it.
Rule 4: Guarantees offered. A real SEO Professional will never offer you a guaranteed ranking service. He may however guarantee on the quality of work done. The kind of guarantees you get from the candidate or service provider will be a clear indication of what to expect when work begins.
Rule 5: Look for certifications. While the Google web master and adwords certifications are not all-in-all checks, they filter many such candidates who have not even completed the basic qualifications in SEO arena.
The above rules will help you locate your pearls in the ocean of SEO professionals in India. Best of luck. Do write in your comments or more questions you face every day.
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