One SEO Professional Recounts the Pitfalls of Hiring SEO Freelancers

Freelance search engine optimization are a dime a dozen these days; you can find low-ball offers from individuals typically working overseas, often in India, who make a range of promises. While many SEO professionals scoff and deride these freelancers, the truth is that many of them end up hiring them for some of their projects. One such SEO professional recently decided to test the waters and shared his experience on an online forum.

What the aforementioned SEO professional found was that the freelancer he contracted spent a month getting quite a few backlinks. The websites where the contractor chose to build links were mostly social media profiles, online forum accounts, static pages, and blogs; all of the backlinks had domain rating metrics higher than 70, so this was a valid approach even though hardly any of them could be considered high-authority sites.

When asked about this particular strategy, the freelancer explained that he intended to improve the crawl rate of the website, which was a Shopify jewelry store with decent traffic but very low conversion rates. Most SEO professionals will begin with on-page SEO, but this contractor actually intended to get to that later. He also mentioned that the keyword density was too high, but he did not make any technical efforts to correct this in the beginning.

Here's something that all SEO professionals should always keep in mind: On-page SEO must come first and without exception. This must be checked and amended with generally accepted practices before getting to auditing the content, doing keyword research, and setting up a solid social media presence. If no results are observed after these actions, going after backlinks will not make sense because it will only create a flash improvement on the search engine results page.

Many SEO freelancers go for the low-hanging fruit of getting backlinks on websites that they are familiar with, and this is done for the purpose of getting a SERP bump that will likely be temporary. In many cases, these freelancers are part of a network that allows them to get backlinks. Mathematically, numerous backlinks with domain ratings higher than 70 will work, but not without completing on-page SEO beforehand. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/frcomn/hiredafreelancerforseoquestionsabout_their/.