As a professional website SEO consultant, it’s my job to help my clients strike gold in that magic "top 10" list on Google’s listings. The problem is that many blog and website owners don’t truly appreciate what it takes to do so, and many who do come to appreciate it sometimes realize that they simply don’t have the ability to make the necessary sacrifices.

Website SEO Consultant Work Can Be Frustrating

It’s one thing to run a blog or a website that’s beautifully created and brilliantly coded - but it’s quite another to draw in the crowds and keep their attention. The Internet is a fascinating social environment (in fact, one of the world’s most amazing and long-running social experiments), and the "back-door" operations of that environment provides a fascinating glimpse of what the world wants to know about. Or, at the very least, it shows what people use the Internet for.

If You Can’t Be Flexible, A Website SEO Consultant Can’t Help You

If you’re considering hiring the expertise of a website SEO consultant, it’s likely because you’re pretty sick and tired of putting so much effort into building a high quality website or blog, but very few people seem to care. As part of the SEO East Coast crowd, I’m part of a fairly competitive industry where 90% of the folks who think they know how SEO works really don’t. SEO is a lot like cars and computers - everyone’s an expert, but only a few folks can really get the job done well. What does it take to "get the job done well" - that’s what you’re going to need to be ready to face when you employ the services of a true expert website SEO consultant.

• Your focus must change from "popular" to "niche"
• You need to be willing to serve up weird topics in new ways
• You have to accept that Internet travelers decide what your content should be about, not you
• If you have a blog or website to write about topics you like, you may need to do some self-examination

There are tons of affordable SEO packages out there, and there are also tons of scammers. Anything that seems like "voodoo" ultimately becomes fodder for the scammers.  Some website SEO consultants have even figured out short-term methods of scamming the search engines (in particular Google algorithms) so that you’ll see short term spikes in traffic. The SEO consultant takes your money - and your traffic goes even lower than it was before. Why? Because Google figured out your site "gamed" the system and they’ve penalized your site for it - your SEO position is even lower than it was before.

What It Takes - Humility and a Willingness To Give People What They Want

What I’ve learned during my time as an SEO East Coast consultant is that the most successful websites and blogs are those that understand that success on the Internet comes from focusing on underserved market segments, not on chasing after the popular topics of the day. If 99% of folks offer content about a topic, how successful do you think you’ll be? If 1% of folks offer unique and fascinating information - you better believe you’re going to come out on top.