So, you want to become a freelance SEO Consultant in India! Great, Let’s Get Started!
Now you are in a situation where you have already finished your academic life, and you learned SEO somewhere; it might be from a Training Institute or Online SEO course or YouTube.
Now you might have started working for a company or agency as an SEO Executive/Analyst or Digital Marketing Executive/Specialist etc.
Now you want to start something independently, and you don’t like to do a 9-6 job anymore. I know it’s painful, and you have struggled a lot in your starting career.
Now you got the feeling of why I shouldn’t start my own online business service?
Now you are feeling confident enough that you have good knowledge of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).
If the above statements are matching your current situation, that means you in the right place to start jumping your career as a Freelance SEO Consultant in India!
Now you are looking for how to improve yourself and the SEO skills that will prove yourself as an SEO Expert in Digital Marketing Field, and then you want to start consulting and networking with people to get projects.
Fret Not! Let me start with basics because it’s essential to understand the true meaning of Search Engine Optimization.
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So, what is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization(S.E.O) is a process of improving the webpages for your user and search engine, so that search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo will crawl and index your site and ranking your website to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Advantages of SEO
– There are many advantages of SEO from getting traffic to leads, high conversion rates, higher closer rates, cost management, brand awareness, brand credibility, better website speed, mobile-friendliness, better user experience, better social media followers, and much more.
– According to research, 81% of buyers doing an online search before going to the physical store to making the purchase.
– In the end, it wins the trust of the customer; in the long run, you will gain a market share, and this will stay ahead of your competitor.
– Some business owners still have questions about what kind of benefit they will get if they hire an SEO Consultant for their business. Let me brief you about the benefits that everyone should know.
1. SEO Gives Better User Experience / User Friendly Website:
- There are many ways SEO helps for better user experience, such as providing your visitors with relevant information, related images, videos, site structure, speed improvement, and, most importantly, a mobile-friendly website.
- All this belongs to better user experience. The resultant of doing all this will get more clicks, more leads, and better brand recall and higher conversion rates. Google and other search engines giving priority to better user experience.
- A well-structured clean and uncluttered website makes a casual visitor stay longer, and this will decrease in bounce rate and increase the page views. Thus, it helps to better rank at SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
- If your website using WordPress then Read this- Best Free SEO Plugin for WordPress.
2. SEO is the primary source of Traffic & Leads:
- S.E.O can be the number one source of leads for both B2C and B2B marketers. Let me tell you how?
- Think about how many searches you conduct every day and then think about the world. The study says, every second, 40,000 searches happening around the world. Just imagine how much searches are happening per day.
- In this case, if your website appears in the SERPs and people are found the right solution to their problems, they will interest in your product or service, and they will share their email id and subscribed to your email list.
- Then you can nurture them through email automation by giving some value; then, eventually, they will buy your product or service. Like this, your email list will increase every day and increase the leads.
3. S.E.O provides Higher Conversion Rates:
- As the site is SEO Optimized, it loads faster and displays on all types of platforms such as desktop, mobile, and tablet, etc.
- The websites that are ranking on top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) will always give higher conversion rates.
- Your target market becomes more aware of your product and services that lead to recall them later, and the needy one wants to connect with you through your subscribed list and buy your product/service.
- So that you will get consistently better conversion rates and always stay ahead of your competitor.
4. S.E.O builds Brand Awareness:
- Brand Awareness simply means how familiar your customers with your product or services. Search Engine Optimization ensures that your services or products shown on the different search engine platforms.
- When your site appears at the top of the Search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, then your potential customers more likely to trust your brand.
- When they search for a particular term related to your business, if they found your brand name, then they want to go with your brand rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence.
- This can be the main reason most of the small businesses want to build their brand locally and nationally. They keep investing in SEO and start ranking on top of the search queries.
- As now everything going digitally, even smaller shops and businesses also want to promote their business online, and the demands keep increasing day by day.
- So, it’s better to create your brand awareness starts today before your competitors do!
5. S.E.O promotes Cost-Effectiveness:
- SEO is the most cost-effective marketing strategy, according to Search Engine Journal Report says, inbound leads to lower the cost of lead generation by 61% compare to outbound leads.
“Inbound lead means when your customers or prospects directly come to you, and outbound lead means you are reaching out to your customers.”
- There are many small businesses you can found, they don’t have a strong web presence, and in the end, they are spending a lot of money on paid advertisements.
- They do paid advertising on platforms like Google ads, Facebook, and Instagram platforms to generate leads by paying higher costs as compared to SEO.
- SEO can be a Long Term Strategy, and once it builds a strong web presence, it consistently gives you quality leads organically without paying for any advertising platform.
What Can Every Business Get by Hiring An SEO Consultant?
Quality Traffic-
- If one can do SEO properly, then it will get the quality traffic that means those who are looking for your product or services will visit your website, and the chances are very high to contact you.
Increase Revenue-
- By consistently improving your search engine optimization, you will get more and more quality traffic that leads to convert more customers and an increase in revenue.
Saving Money-
- Search Engine Optimization is organic results that show up in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). So, once it will do with an SEO expert, it lasts long term benefits and saves a lot of money.
- Now, these days, most of the business has a website, and they all need an SEO Consultant to manage their online activity on the right way to optimize their website so that their business will gain more popularity and sustain for a longer time.
- Mostly every small to medium level business prefers to hire an SEO Consultant for their business.
What & Who is an SEO Consultant?
- An SEO Consultant is a person who has expertise in the SEO field and who knows the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization, attracts the potential visitors to your website organically, and can give you the right SEO strategy for your business growth.
- An SEO Consultant will do a thorough analysis of your business and start with SEO audit to your website and check for the issues and problems and fix them all.
- He will also educate you on the right way of managing the online activities that will helpful for improving the visibility of the website and attracting the right visitors to your site.
What Education does it need to become a Freelance SEO Consultant in India?
- There is no formal education to become a Freelance SEO Consultant in India. But a bachelor’s degree with a marketing background or computer science background can help to understand this topic quickly.
- To start a career as a good SEO Consultant in India, one should learn the SEO skills from any good digital marketing training institutes or he can also learn from online training courses that are widely available on the Internet such as, from the-
- Udemy Platform: SEO Training Course by Moz
- Udemy Platform Free Course: Link Building Basics
- Neil Patel’s Free SEO Unlocked Course
- E-Marketing Institute: Free Online Marketing Certification Course
- BACKLINKO BLOG
- SEMRush Academy
- Moz SEO Certification Training
- To Get certification in this, one needs to take a paid SEO training program like Yoast SEO Training, Click mind, Udemy, Coursera, Simplilearn, upgrad.com, Seopros.org, expertrating.com, bruce clay. Inc. etc.
What are the responsibilities of an S.E.O Consultant in India?
- As an SEO Consultant, he will be responsible for your overall Website Performance from planning, implementation to maintain the client’s overall SEO Strategy.
- When a company hires an SEO Consultant, first, he/she will review all the online activities that are running on the website and provide a solution for all.
- He/she will give you the right solution for you based on which you can boost your ranking and conversion rate.
- He/ She will perform some specific tasks before making an SEO Strategy That works for his client’s business.
Understand the business Needs:
- First of all, The Search Engine Optimization Consultant will clarify the client’s business objective, goals, what the client wants, and expecting from him.
- Then accordingly, he will move further for preparing the SEO Strategy after doing thorough research.
Examine the Website:
- After knowing the requirements, keeping that in mind, the SEO Consultant will start reviewing the client’s website.
- He will review how the website is functioning, User Experience, Content optimization, Technical Errors, etc., based on these parameters he will find where it is lacking and provide a solution by keeping in mind, he laid down the SEO Strategy.
Deploy a Content Marketing Strategy:
- By keeping a focus on generating organic traffic for the website, he should provide a content marketing strategy by doing thorough keyword research on which topic the content must be placed on the sites or blogs to keep attracting the right audience to the website.
Check for Technical Issues and Give a Solution for them:
- There might be a lot of webpages in the websites that are not working properly or showing any errors like 404, broken links, redirections 301/302. Crawling errors, server errors, duplicate content, etc.
- Identify those issues and fix them all one by one.
Comprehensive Website Audit by the SEO Consultant:
- The SEO Consultant must do a complete website audit to improve the website’s existing problems. He should inspect in technical, website/ blog content, grammatical error, user experience, call to action, and can be suggested the design structure.
Make Use of S.E.O Tools to determine the Performance:
- To make sure his optimization process works well and to check the performance measure, the consultant must use different SEO tools to verify the results and accordingly suggested the changes.
Structuring A Forward-Looking SEO Strategy:
- Based on the above criteria, the consultant must prepare a forward-looking SEO strategy for further changes or to improve the existing functionalities.
The Key Factors of the Best SEO Consultant in India:
- There are many factors to consider by a Company before fixing an SEO Consultant India.
- The main goal of hiring a Search engine optimization Consultant is to improve the user experience for both users and the search engine, improve the search engine ranking and increase in organic traffic to the website.
- So, here I am providing you some areas where you should improve your skills to become an SEO Consultant in India and in your Area/City.
- Complete Website Audit.
- Competitor Analysis.
- Client’s Business Analysis.
- In-depth Keyword Research.
- Google Analytics
- Should know basic HTML, CSS or familiar with programming languages
- Expertise in WordPress.
- On-Page Optimization.
- Link Building Activities.
- Ranking Measurement.
- Client Reporting.
1. Complete Website Audit:
- The SEO Consultant should know how to do a comprehensive website audit by using some SEO Tools or manual. He should know different ways to identify the issues and prepare a report on it.
2. Competitor Analysis:
- Competitor Analysis is the main task an SEO Consultant should pursue while preparing the SEO Strategy for any project or website.
- In this process, the consultant will do thorough research on who is their competitors and how they are promoting their business and what is their online presence status.
- After Analysing all these, he can understand the level of competition through this process. Accordingly, he will prepare the strategy to beat the competitor and ranks his client’s website on top. If the game is very high, it may take several months to beat the competition.
3. Client’s business Analysis:
- The SEO Consultant should know how to analyze a business and should have some knowledge of their industry related to how it works and how he can deal with it and provides a solution to their problems by contributing to it and fix them all.
4. In-Depth Keyword Research:
- It involves the process of finding the relevant queries or phrases that people are searching in different search engines like google.
- While searching for the keywords, always target those keywords which have good traffic potential, business value and are not too much competition.
- That means those keywords have high search volume and clicks and have business value but low ranking difficulty.
- Any SEO Consultant needs to choose the right keyword for their client’s business. Otherwise, the client will miss potential customers and thus leads to a loss in company growth.
- So this is a crucial stage to choose the right keywords based on the competition.
- The client should get some quality traffic so that they can get some leads and conversion and run their business smoothly.
- To identify the potential keywords, the SEO Consultant uses different SEO Tools and search engine autosuggestions to collect the relevant keywords.
- Then he will check their search volume how much traffic it gets on a particular keyword, and based on the competition level, he will choose the keywords for the initial phase to target and later stage he can add some new keywords.
5. Google Analytics
- It is an essential tool for google search engine analytics where the SEO Consultant can do the traffic analysis and measure the performance of the traffic, able to track different sources of traffic, referral traffic, etc.
- Based on the study, he can further make changes to the SEO strategy process and improve the SEO traffic to achieve the goal.
6. Should know basic HTML, CSS or familiar with programming languages:
- The Search Engine Optimization Consultant should know some basic HTML tags and CSS properties to understand the webpage and functionalities.
- This will useful while implementing the On-Page SEO and Technical SEO.
7. Expertise in WordPress:
- An SEO Consultant should well aware of the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) because of the blogs mostly running under WordPress CMS now.
- If the consultant does not aware of WordPress and its optimization techniques then he can’t able to optimize one’s blog/ website that is running on these platforms.
- So this skill is a must for every Search Engine Optimization Specialists.
8. On-Page Optimization:
- This is the practice of optimizing the web pages for users and search engines to improve rankings and attracting more organic visitors to your website from search engines.
- There are some elements available to optimize it for the webpages, such as 1. Title Tags 2. Meta Description 3. Headers Tags 4. URL 5. Images 6. Content.
9. Link Building Activities:
- Link Building is the process of getting links from third party sites. This will help to improve ranking and organic traffic and also send some referral traffic to your website.
- There are three main types of links that you can use it for boosting your ranking, organic traffic and established the authority of your site and improved your user experience.
10. Ranking Measurement:
- It is very important to keep track of the keywords ranking position and measure the performance on a weekly and monthly basis.
- This track record can give an indication of the website’s performance and competition level or algorithm effect.
- By measuring this one can ensure that the SEO strategy is working perfectly and fulfills the client’s requirements.
11. Client Reporting:
- At the end of the month or week according to the client’s requirement, the Consultant should prepare a report on the achievement, work progress, and the status of the website health, etc.
- The Report includes Website Traffic, Keyword Rankings Report and Website Health Report.
- This is very important to keep sending report to the clients on time to aware them that you are truly working for their goals and objectives and this gives satisfaction to both of you and it builds a strong relationship from both sides.
- This shows proof of your work. According to the business objective and goals, the work progress going on the right way and you will get the hope to improve further to the next level to make your clients happier and fully satisfied with your work deliverables.
How much can you Charge to Clients in India?
- A Search Engine Optimization Consultant can charge the price or amount to a client varies from business to business and is based on the works assigned to you.
- In India, an average SEO Consultant can get up to 30k – 35k per month based on the area or locality.
- The figure is not an exact fact; it may be decrease or increase based on the location and depending on the task that you are responsible for. This is just an approximate value that I can assure you.
Where can you Establish your profile to get freelance SEO jobs?
- There are several websites available where you can create your profile showcase your skills and expertise and can get your freelance SEO jobs.
- These sites are-
- Upwork.com
- Worknhire.com
- Freelancer.com
- Taskr.in
- Craigslist
- Guru.com
- PeoplePerHour.com
- iFreelance.com
- project4hire.com
- Workhoppers.com
- FreelancerMap.com
- These are some sites where you can showcase your service and get your freelance projects and work on it and deliver on time and get paid for it and get good feedback.
- You can work in India or throughout the world; there are no limitations or boundaries for you!
Conclusion:
- In this post, you learned who is an SEO Consultant, what they do, how they do, and what their responsibilities are and the essential skills you need to become an SEO Consultant in your area.
- One thing I want to recommend you that you should keep acquiring knowledge on the SEO industry and up to date yourself according to the industry changes and algorithm updates to ahead from the rest.
- One more thing I would like to tell you that for long-run sustainability and to stay ahead of your competitor, always focus on your soft skills that play a vital role while dealing with the clients or managing the people or employees.
- The skills you need to improve like attitudes, body language, people skill, being a good listener, building customer trust, business etiquette, and social etiquette, etc.
- To learn all these, I recommend you keep a habit of reading self-help books daily for at least 30mins can solve all your problems, and you can stay ahead on your life goals.
- Now when you are following this and come back after some months, check the missing links. At that time, you already become an excellent Local SEO consultant in India and in your area or city. So, congratulations and all the very best for your career!
- I hope this will help you find your missing links and show you the path to become a true Freelancer SEO Consultant in India. How do you feel let me know in the comment sections!