If you are looking to hire for SEO in Austin, find someone who has already shown they are a successful Organic Search Engine Marketer. Look for current organic results in a competitive market. I recommend you keep your eye out for page one results for short-tail phrases where it is a small company below only a major brand…since the capable search engine expert is normally doing far more with much less. The tough part of this is you need to be able to identify who is doing a lot with a little to understand who has the most valuable set of skills.

Once you can do this, though, you simply need to find a way to incentivize the Search Engine Marketing Expert and provide them the needed resources. These additional marketing resources should include things like a budget for PPC, links, press, and other SEO placements, a copywriter, and possibly a small amount of graphic design work.

Start-up Search Engine Marketing

If you are a startup and have the ability, you should strongly consider offering a skilled search engine marketing expert equity. This should allow you to pay them a much smaller and more reasonable employee level salary compared to the huge fee’s they will normally demand.

Or better yet, you might even be able to get by without paying them any salary at all, especially if the search engine expert is truly as capable as they need to be. In these cases, the search engine specialist would be more interested in the budget set aside for the position, but from the perspective of how they can leverage those dollars as an additional optimization/marketing spend. This, along with the budget for the more standard marketing initiatives, would allow them to spearhead a much more significant and effective plan right from the start.

Enterprise Search Engine Marketing

If you happen to be a manager for a larger company, hopefully you still have options to ‘bring them in’ on the project, whether it is through equity, a revenue share, commissions, or some other type of corollary incentive.

Search Engine Marketing Solutions – Getting Results

The bottom line is, show the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Expert some upside based directly on their level of Digital Marketing success, and your job will then simply be to provide the additional resources necessary. If you can accomplish this type of partnership with someone who truly has what it takes, you will not only take away their fears of never being rewarded for what they bring to the table, you will also give them the sole focus of making everyone involved a lot of money. I promise, if you can find a way to pull this off with the right search engine marketing expert, everybody wins…and wins big.