If you've decided to hire a search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist to help you with your online marketing needs, here are two tips to follow.

Come up with a list of keywords you think you need to target

After talking to you about the service or product you're trying to market, and learning about the demographic you're interested in, an SEO specialist should be able to help you select keywords that will allow your website or social media accounts to be found by the right audience on search engines. However, it could still be very helpful to come to your first consultation with a list of keywords you would like to hone in on.

For example, if you specialise in selling skincare for those with rosacea, you might want to target the keyword ''most effective rosacea treatment'' or ''skincare products for rosacea''. Coming to the meeting armed with these keywords will save both you and the SEO specialist some time as they won't have to spend a chunk of the first meeting working out what type of keywords you're likely to need in order to drive the right search-engine users to your website or social media accounts. This might then mean that they have enough time during this initial meeting to use your list to do some basic keyword research (instead of having to wait until after the meeting to start doing this), and check if the words or phrases you've selected are ones that are frequently searched for and would be worth utilising in your new SEO plan.

Don't make any major changes to your website's design before the consultation

If you have a website that you use to share your services or products, and you'd like the SEO specialist to make it more search-engine-friendly so you can use it to market yourself or your business in a more effective way, you should not try to make big changes to the design of the site prior to this consultation. The reason for this is that if you don't know much about the relationship between web design and SEO, any aesthetic changes you make might negatively affect how search-engine-friendly your website is. The SEO specialist might then have to help you correct these issues before they could offer advice on how to make the site more search-engine-friendly.

For example, if you add lots of beautiful, but very large image files to your website, and this results in it loading far more slowly than it did previously, you might inadvertently drive visitors away from your site because certain pages on it take too long to load. The spike in the number of visitors who quickly leave your site after being on it for a short while could then result in your site not performing as well in the search engines. As such, it's best to simply wait until you've had your consultation with the SEO specialist before you try to make any aesthetic or SEO-related improvements to your website.

For more information, reach out to a local SEO service, such as Crunchy Digital.