WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HIRE AND BUILD YOUR OWN SEO TEAM IN MUMBAI?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has always been a mysterious side to Digital Marketing in India. Even though online advertising is growing at 35% every year since 2009, many digital marketing professionals in India are unaware of the contribution of SEO (organic results) to online advertising. Let’s take a quick look at some statistics that will give you the chills especially if you are an Internet Marketing professional yourself:-

1.       70% of the links search users click on are organic. (source: searchenginejournal.com)

2.       Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads. An example of an inbound lead might be from search engine optimization. An outbound lead might be from a cold call. (source: searchenginejournal.com)

3.       For Google, a study from Slingshot SEO shows 18% of organic clicks go to the #1 position, 10% of organic clicks go to the #2 position, and 7% of organic clicks go to the #3 position. (source: searchenginejournal.com)

4.       79% of search engine users say they always/frequently click on the natural search results. In contrast, 80% of search engine users say they occasionally/rarely/never click on the sponsored search results (source: searchenginejournal.com)

Here’s a quick look at the difference between organic results and paid results in case you don’t already know.

(picture source: SearchEngineJournal.com)

The data above clearly suggests the importance of SEO in online advertising. So, does India have the right SEO professionals that are capable of driving organic traffic, increasing search engine rankings, following webmaster guidelines? In the last 12 months I have interviewed over 40 candidates for different SEO positions i.e. senior and junior. And within a couple of minutes you will know what my experience has been like in the past 12 months

 “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you” - Oprah Winfrey

Because I’m so passionate about internet marketing, the first thing I ask the candidate is how did you get into internet marketing or more specifically SEO and one of the most common answers I get is “My friend suggested this for me”. And I’m not talking about candidates with less than a year into this field. I’m talking about candidates with 4-5 years on hands experience. So if you’re not passionate about what you are doing how can you be successful at what you do? So, the first thing to look out for in a great SEO candidate is the passion.

Before I started hiring to build my SEO team I obviously did some research (Google and Bing) on what type of questions one needs to ask a SEO expert before hiring and the most common among them were finding out results that were generated for the candidates previous clients. I was amazed to find out that the number one thing every candidate remembered was the rank of 2-3 primary keywords. Number 2 was the traffic, unique visitors and bounce rate. But as I went deeper trying to understand things like how did these numbers improve the clients ROI there was an uncomfortable silence. Over 50% of the candidates did not even know how you need to setup goals in Google Analytics. This made it evident that so called SEO experts in India were clearly missing something. There was a huge gap that exists. This gap exists because of the lack of passion. The passion to learn, the passion to stay up to date with what’s happening out in the real world, the passion to test and try out different things.

Search engine optimization is an art let’s get that straight. It does not matter how many books, articles you read or how many videos by Matt Cutts you watch. The only way you will perfect this skill is through persistent hard work and testing. It takes years of testing to reach a point where you can consult your clients.  You are robbing your client if you recommend ideas that have no real value, that do not justify their investments. I have had the privilege to interview a candidate who supposedly increased sales by over 100% within 2 months organically by building links using directory submission and social bookmarking. Is that supposed to be impress me or what?

Have you been in this situation before, whenever you’re hiring a SEO expert they inevitably consider themselves as social media marketing experts too. Hold on! Stuffing keywords in the about us section on Facebook fan page does not make you an expert. I’m sure this is a common experience with you too wherein the candidate tries to sell you his/her social media skills when they know that SEO is not going to work out. My suggestion, take the closest exit door and run!

During my sessions of interviewing various candidates I also discovered a trait very very common among all SEO professionals. It was the “I know it all” trait. Speaking as a recruiter or your future team lead this trait is only going to get you in trouble but also contribute to your downfall. Somehow the digital marketing professionals have assumed that creating a few tags (meta, alt) and dropping tons of grammatically incorrect links is the key to success in online advertising. A couple of key technical questions I ask candidates are:

• Do you know what LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)?
• In GA (Google Analytics) under the keywords section, what does “no data” mean?
• Which keyword research tool do you use?

The basic idea here is to find out if the candidate has gone out of his/her way to read or stay up to date. Candidates who answer these questions do impress me as they make be believe that I could be surrounded by more passionate internet marketing professionals.

In a nutshell my experience hiring SEO experts from Mumbai has not been very easy to say the least. I’m not implying that there are no SEO experts out in Mumbai. I did manage to find some really smart and passionate individuals who I didn’t waste a single second in hiring. I’m also a strong believer of sharing information and helping people who belong to this field. Wasn’t internet developed for this purpose in the first place; sharing information and data? It’s time consuming and expensive to hire a SEO expert in Mumbai trust me. In order to save your time and money I have prepared a small table i.e. a guide to hiring the right SEO candidate based on my experience

What you should look for?	Which candidates you should avoid?
Candidates who are passionate	Candidates who took up this profession because someone else suggested
Candidates with fabulous communication skills (especially writing)	Candidates with poor communication skills
Candidates who know what effect their contribution has to made to the site’s ROI on which they are working or have worked in the past	Candidates who boast about keyword rankings
Candidates who know how to setup goals and track them	Candidates who give you jargon about how directory submission, social bookmarks got them results
Candidates who are willing to learn	Candidates who think they know it all

About the author: Cilvan Patrao is an Internet Marketing professional for the last 4 years having worked with E-commerce companies in UK and India. Under the mentorship of Donna Rougeau (CEO and MD Executive ID Web Club) who has over 25 years of digital marketing business, Cilvan has managed SEO and SMO teams that have worked on projects such as Identiti Home, Advanced Nutrients, Ebeez, Rosebud Magazine, Big buds Magazine, Executive Web Club and hundreds more