When you decide to enhance your online presence and take advantage of the many benefits the Internet offers, the next question you should answer is whether you should hire an SEO consultant or a digital marketing expert.
The difference is unknown for many people, but to help you make better decisions, let me explain some basic things.
What is the difference between an SEO consultant and a Digital Marketing Manager?
The first thing to understand is that it does not necessarily mean that there is a difference between an SEO and a digital marketing expert. In many cases, both will perform the same functions and have the same skills, but they may use different titles mainly for marketing purposes. Before understanding why they may do that, let’s see what the theory says.
SEO Consultant
An SEO consultant is someone who has the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience to optimize your website for search engines and improve your position in the search results. To do that, he/she will use search engine optimization techniques and practices. The ultimate goal of an SEO consultant is to increase website traffic.
Digital Marketing Manager
If you look at the diagram below, you will notice that SEO is a subset of digital marketing and that a true digital marketing manager will have to manage many other areas besides SEO, such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, banner advertising, etc.
By definition, the difference between the two is that the SEO guy only cares about getting more organic visits, while the digital marketing guy looks at a company's complete online presence, which goes beyond SEO.
Theory VS Practice
In the real world, the theory is different from what is happening, and this is exactly the case with SEOs and Digital marketing experts. In the majority of cases, a good SEO consultant will also take care of all the components of digital marketing. They may use the title SEO consultant because, for the majority of people, this is more understandable than the more sophisticated term of a digital marketing consultant.
Take, for example, our case. While we offer a range of digital marketing services, we still name our services page SEO Packages because this is what our customers use to find us in Google. They may use this term, but what they want in reality is not just SEO but a number of other services, and this is what we offer them.
Digital marketing is the latest trend
If we forget about the different titles for a minute and concentrate on the actual functions, it is clear that you need to do much more than plain SEO to succeed online. In the past, SEO was enough, but with the growing use of social media and mobile phones, if you want to have a proper online presence and get to your customers before your competitors, you need a solid digital marketing strategy.
Is SEO dead? By all means, NO, SEO is not dead, and it will never be. The only difference is that you need to care more about things and not only SEO. When I refer to SEO, I am not talking about buying/building/exchanging links to manipulate search engine rankings; this is not SEO but spam techniques made by spammers.
SEO is about building high-quality websites that are user-friendly but also understood by search engines.
So who should you hire?
You need to hire someone capable of promoting your business online by taking advantage of all the available tools the digital World has to offer. It doesn’t matter if that someone is called an SEO consultant, Internet marketing expert, or digital marketing manager; what matters most are their skills and experience and, of course, the results they can produce.
5 Questions to ask your prospective business partner (whether it’s an SEO consultant or digital marketing manager)
When it’s time to decide whether to hire a consultant or agency to promote your business online, there are a few questions you should ask your prospective business partners.
- What is their working experience with SEO and Digital Marketing? Ask for live examples, case studies, or testimonials about their work. In addition, you can ask how long they have been working online and details about their academic background, qualifications, etc.
- Ask for the techniques they will use to promote your web properties—what SEO techniques they will use, how they are going to utilize all digital marketing components (content marketing, social media, email marketing, mobile marketing), and how this will benefit your company.
- Ask about pricing – How much will you pay for their services? Will they charge you a fixed cost per month, or is it an hourly charge? Do they provide detailed monthly progress reports so that you know where your money is spent? For more details, you can also read SEO Services Pricing
- Ask them if they can guarantee you first position on Google. That’s a tricky question to ask, but a good consultant will never guarantee that. For example, we guarantee and offer money back for an increase in your website traffic, but we never guarantee you first positions, even if we manage to do that.
- Test the work before going full scale—To allow prospective clients to test our quality of work, communication, and overall service, we offer them the opportunity to start our cooperation with our SEO Audit Service. This service has a low one-time fee and results in a report describing website problems and what needs to change. It is the first step in designing the overall digital marketing strategy customized for the particular company's needs.
If they don’t offer such a service, you can agree with them to do something that will not cost a lot of money (maybe ask them to do a competitor analysis report) but will give you an idea of how committed they are to deadlines and the quality of their work.
Conclusion
If you live in a perfect world where everybody knows about the latest trends in digital marketing, then you should hire a Digital Marketing Manager. According to the theory, that person or company should be able to manage and take advantage of all digital marketing opportunities.
In the real world, though, not everyone is up-to-date on what is happening in the online world, so they still use the term SEO to find consultants. What they actually need is a consultant who will do more than SEO, i.e., a digital marketing manager.
Some agencies (like our agency) still use the term SEO for their digital marketing services to speak the users' language.
Regardless of the terminology and titles, what is more important at the end of the day is the result and benefit for your company from whoever consultant this is coming.
