The Upwardly Mobile

My virtual assistants have done a lot for me. By scheduling meetings, sorting through data, and even researching international business opportunities, my virtual assistants have saved me time and money in ways I never expected. In fact, I’ve used them so successfully, that one of my good friends, Greg Herring of Emergent Energy, recently asked me to talk with him about virtual assistants and the extent to which one could use them for personal and business productivity. Our conversation got me thinking about all the functions VAs have, and one in particular that’s becoming increasingly important: website search engine optimization and traffic-building.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly time-consuming task no matter how much of an expert you are. But it doesn’t have to be your time that’s consumed. In fact, an increasing number of virtual assistants have added the title virtual website assistant to their CVs.

What’s a Virtual Website Assistant?

We’ve mentioned the time and productivity savings virtual assistants create once or twice before. Like their generalized counterparts, virtual website assistants work on tasks so you don’t have to, saving you time and money in the process. Virtual website assistants perform the gamut of traffic building and SEO tasks. From backlink building and content creation to meta tag optimization and adwords campaign management, a virtual website assistant will save a webmaster considerable time and funds.

Finding a Virtual Website Assistant

Finding a virtual website assistant is easy. A quick search on elance for search engine optimization produces about 2500 results as of this writing, many of whom charge comparable rates to generalized virtual assistants. While a Google search isn’t quite as fruitful, many VAs offer virtual website assistant services, and most of the major virtual assistant directories and services now list SEO and website promotion as core functions.

If you’re already trained at SEO and prefer to manage your site yourself, you may find it helpful to train your existing VA or start her on some SEO coursework, like the articles and videos at Sitepoint.com (great for virtual website assistants and SEO-experts alike), to support your efforts. Given the savings, increasing the SEO efforts of your company with a virtual website assistant is an incredibly cost-effective marketing strategy. No matter how you find or use one, a virtual website assistant may be just the edge you need to one-up the competition and make your site a success.