How to Hire a SEO Specialist – Practical Advice

How to hire an SEO specialist. Hey guys, my name is John Jonas and I'm going to talk today about how to hire a SEO specialist for your business. So SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It all about getting your website to the top of Google so that when people search for something, you show up. How do you find that person? Well, in my previous video I talked about why you should find that person, why you should hire someone to do your SEO. And when I say someone, I mean an individual person, not a company or some or an agency or someone like that to do your SEO. So in this video, I'm going to talk about how to find that person. So step number one is to decide what it is exactly that you're looking for. If you don't know any anything about SEO, you're probably going to go on to online jobs, which is the next step. But you're going to go there and search SEO. If you do know something, you're probably going to look for SEO and some English skills. Like English is a really important piece of this. So step number two to go on to OnlineJobs ph and search and start browsing some resumes. So the purpose of this one is you're going to go on onlinejobs Ph, which is the largest website where you will find virtual workers in the Philippines. And it's my website. I created it specifically for this purpose so I could find people. There's over a million profiles of Filipino workers there. You're going to go into onlinejobs ph and you're going to search SEO and then you're going to browse some of the resumes. You're going to browse 20 or 30 resumes. And the point here is you're going to see exactly the skills that exist and you're going to see exactly how much people are looking to make. You'll see the range, like here's low end, here's really high end. So you're going to get a really good idea of everything that exists out there when you start browsing these resumes. So step number three, then once you've figured out like, oh, here are the skills, here's the one skill that I really want, and then here's a couple others that would be nice to have. You can go post a job on onlinejobs Ph. Now when you go to post that job, you're gonna write your job title, you're gonna write your description, you're gonna select a couple skills, you're gonna post how much you're gonna pay your salary and you're gonna know all this stuff because you browse the resumes, which makes it so much easier. If you want help with the job posting process or the browsing resumes process, whatever. I have a course that I created where I walk you through exactly what I do. And when I go through this process and it's available at 1vaoa.com, it's $50. I guarantee you'll find someone great or I'll give you your money back. I will walk you through everything in this process. Step number four, then, once you've posted the job and you start getting applicants, is to interview people with lots of questions. So one of mistakes people often make, and I'll cover this in the one VAOA challenge, is people want to jump immediately to a Skype interview. They want to start interviewing people, and that's a mistake. And I'll cover why over there. We don't have time to go into everything today. But correct thing to do is start interviewing people with email questions and see what kind of responses you get. Who drops out and who sticks in. Who do you drop out of your recruiting process because they're not answering good questions or they're not paying attention to details, or they're not responding quickly enough. The reality is you don't need to do a Skype interview. Like, they're never going to be talking on the phone, they're never going to be in front of clients. It's not a required step, and you're going to lose the best potential SEO person in order to find the best person who's most comfortable with Skype. So step number five is to narrow it down with a test. So you've already narrowed it down a bunch. Now, the test is different people have different tests for SEO. And I'm just going to give you one example of something you might do. But the point here is to you have five or six people and you're going to have them take a test. Now, just so you know, if this test takes more than 30 minutes, you should pay them for the test. And maybe you tell them, hey, I'll pay you $20 for this or whatever it is, but you should be paying for the test. Filipinos are very scared of being taken advantage of a good test to do for hiring someone. SEO is, hey, here's this website. Give me an SEO plan, like, what would you do for this? And they'll give you a plan that shouldn't take them more than 30 minutes to give you a reasonable plan. Or, hey, give me a list of keywords that you would target for this website, what have we done well? What have we not done well, is another something that would be reasonable. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you could do for SEO. I would probably ask someone to give me a writing sample. So that's another good test. So at this point in the process, you've narrowed this down to one, maybe two or three people. So step number six is to negotiate your terms. You have the people that you're talking with, and maybe you can't decide between two of them. And so you're going to start asking like, well, how much do you want to make? Or what hours are you going to work? Or how many hours a week? Or how am I going to know that? So all these things that. And again, I cover this in the one VA Away challenge. Like, exactly how to negotiate this and what things you shouldn't be. You should be negotiating what makes a difference here. But you're going to negotiate all this stuff. And often this will set one person apart from another. Like, you can't decide between two people. And finally you realize, oh, this person's asking for $600 a month. This one's asking for $1,800 a month. And outside of that, they look identical. Well, that's a pretty easy choice. Or this person wants $600 a month. This person wants $1,200 a month. And I feel slightly better about the $1,200 a month person. And sometimes, you know, just people who ask for more money are more confident, they're more skilled, or they're. There's a whole bunch of reasons. So you'll get a really good gut feeling through the interview process, through the test, through this negotiation of who's the right person for you. Which brings us to step number seven. Hire someone. So in the Philippines, it's different hiring someone there than it is hiring locally. Where locally, you're like, oh, you got to go through HR and you got to sign these disclosure documents. Here's your training. Or in the Philippines, you're going to say, when can you start? They're going to say, oh, I can start on Monday. Great, let's go. Then you're going to start giving them training. And that's a different process that I, again, I covered that in 1vaoa.1vaoa.com. But for right now, you're going to hire the person and just get started. Your idea with the first task with this person is to figure out, can we work together? That's your goal. Your goal isn't to get everything accomplished all at once. Your goal is to figure out, can this person and me work together? Because if we can, we can do really, really good SEO over the next year or two years by working together with this. So again, my name is John Jonas. I created OnlineJobs ph, which is the largest marketplace for finding virtual workers in the Philippines. There's over a million resumes there that you can hire people. I also wrote a book called the Outsourcing Lever, where I will show you or talk to you about all the things you need to know when you're hiring virtual assistants in the Philippines. The book is free. I bought a whole bunch of copies of it. I'm giving it away for free. You just pay shipping. Go to OutsourcingLever.com where you can get it. I'll ship it to you. You'll get this a physical book, and you can feel confident that you know you're doing things correctly. When you go to hire someone from the Philippines. When you go to hire your SEO specialist from the Philippines.