Have I chosen the wrong SEO consultant?

[kembosabe]

Hi all

I've very recently started a small chimney sweeping business for which my friend has designed and built a website, kembersembers.co.uk. Not approaching this from a tech-savvy background I have learnt a lot over the past month but am still an utter novice and as such require some form of help to get me up and running.

My main and immediate priority (sweeping season starts soon!) was to have it so when my company name, kembers embers, was googled I would come up at the top of the results. I understand this can take a little time but it has been a month now since I indexed and I have been told my domain authority is 0.1% so I have sought help.

I don't want to sign up to a 3/6/12 month contract with a firm so I found an SEO consultant local to me who said they could spend a couple of hours doing the right things to hopefully help jump this initial hurdle. I parted with £120 for this which I deemed to be the going rate and they do/did seem honest and professional enough. Upon meeting the consultant he has since told me that he would like to set the website up under a Wordpress template and has cajouled me into changing my hosting over to one he uses also. He says it will take a couple of hours work to do this (there goes my £120) but without this he would hit walls which would be timely to get past and so will save me money in the long run.

Do these kind of suggestions ring an alarm bell to anyone? It didn't seem right that a good SEO couldn't work with what I already have so it leads me to the question is this one to avoid?

On a side note I have also received bad advice from friends of friends/family who claim to know SEO but have, for example, put me in the direction of a link scheme through fiverr.com which I understand may have done me more damage than good. I am now more aware of white hat vs black hat and wish to proceed with the development of my online presence in an ethical way growing organically.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[JordanLowry]

SEO takes time to yield results and I wouldn't worry much about your domain authority being .1%. Reading your response I don't personally see anything that would signal alarm bells yet. Also regarding WordPress, I am not a fan personally but I use them for my personal websites. The issue with WordPress is everytime you add an image, plugin or whatever it will create a new page and multiple files for your CSS and Javascript files. CSS and Javascript are what add interactivity to your website. This can slow your website down over time and cause unnecessary bloat. Now that Google ranks websites based on the mobile version of their site and speed is a ranking factor I would definitely keep an eye on your site speed.

However, if you account for these issues and take the proper steps you should be fine. The main concern I'd keep an eye on is site speed. If your website is loading fast and being indexed within Google then that's a solid start. As far as the hosting provider that's not important for SEO necessarily. It comes back to having a website that loads fast and is responsive.

Also, steer clear of Fiver and anyone who offers to get you backlinks for cheap or quickly. Any backlink that will help your business will not come easy.

Moz offers a lot of good resources to get you up to speed. I'd recommend reading https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Hope that helps some.

[kembosabe]

Hi Jordan

Thank you for your response. That's interesting to know about the importance of site speed. Is there any reason why an SEO worth his/her salt should not be able to work with any sort of platform which the website has been built through? Does having a platform outside of Wordpress for example create big limitations for the vast majority of SEO consultants to do their work efficiently and make the relevant changes?

I'm potentially looking at finding another consultant as the Wordpress site which has been created by the current consultant does not IMO look as near as sharp as the site my friend developed. My friend didn't use a website builder, he created it himself. He just used a code template to make it faster and although he can code in PHP chose not to go with Wordpress as it wasn't as customisable.

Any advice you can provide would be super helpful right now. I'm in a proper quandary!

[JordanLowry]

Personally, I've worked with a wide variety of content management systems and part of being an SEO consultant you have to be able to adapt to the clients specific business needs. The appeal to Wordpress is it's easier to implement SEO changes by using plugins. For example, if you have an image heavy site it's easier to set up a plugin to dynamically compress images and add another plugin to cache static resources to improve your site speed.

Whereas in a custom CMS you may need to work with a developer to implement certain changes and it can become costly on your end. But with Wordpress there comes possible performance limitations and security vulnerabilities since it is an open source platform.

Does your old site have a content management system by any chance? If not it may be easier from a content creation standpoint to stay within Wordpress. For example, if you wanted to add a new page because you identified a content gap would your developer need to code a page from scratch or do you have templates that can be easily implemented? How difficult is it to implement title tag and other metadata updates vs. using Wordpress?

I hope that helps some. It's kinda hard to give you a concrete answer without knowing what your backend system looks like and what limitations would be imposed by making the switch. In the end, it's not enough to have a sharp looking site if it's not driving leads for your business.

[kembosabe]

Definite pros and cons to both it would appear.

I don't have the answers to those questions but I will look into this with my developer.

You've been a great help Brendan! Thank you for the insights and for your time.