Growing a small business while still maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction can be a daunting task. Most times, you have to determine which jobs to hire full-time employees for and which ones to outsource.
Building a great website brings you one step closer to broadening your company’s operating footprint. But for your website to bring new customers from far and wide, web searchers need to easily find it. And one of the best ways to bring traffic to your website is through a brilliant and consistent SEO strategy. SEO or search engine optimization is a process of modifying different aspects of a website so that it ranks high on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines’ results.
In the internet’s early days, businesses could rank high by stuffing their website pages with keywords and search terms, some of which didn’t even make sense. Search engines, however, now constantly upgrade their algorithms to provide users with the most relevant results for every search query. As such, companies don’t only need to be the best at what they do, but they also come up with more sophisticated SEO strategies.
You may probably be wondering, “Should I hire someone for SEO or just do it myself?” The truth is, it takes a lot of time and effort to acquire enough SEO knowledge to yield a decent boost in your website rankings. Everything being equal, you should exert this energy towards oiling the cogs in your business systems, rather than learning a whole new skill set.
Having said that, if you have a lot of time but no money to spend on advertising, you can DIY your SEO. The same applies if you’re targeting keywords that aren’t too difficult to rank for. Whichever option you choose to go with should yield a positive return on your time or financial investment.
Hiring SEO Experts
You could have the most beautiful website, advertising top-tier products and services online, but with a weak SEO game, very few potential customers will find it. Done correctly, SEO can boost your website rankings, make your business more visible online, and bring in more customers. Over half of most websites’ traffic comes from organic web searches. That’s why any business needs to rank high for search queries that are related to it. But does this mean you should hire someone to tinker around with your website?
First off, you need to consider if your business has the funds to invest in an SEO campaign. Cost is usually the primary deciding factor for whether to hire someone or do SEO on your own. An SEO campaign can cost as little as $250 a month for a small website in a non-competitive, small-town business. Bigger businesses that provide competitive products internationally or in huge cities may need to invest $5,000 or more per month. Considering that it may take six to nine months until you reach the optimal result, you need to make sure that your business can afford professional SEO services.
DIYing SEO isn’t free either. You need to determine if you can afford to commit hours every day to learning how to boost your website’s search engine rankings. You also need to be prepared to make mistakes that can prove to be more expensive in the long term.
If you choose to hire someone for SEO, make sure you’re getting maximum value for your money. Because the SEO industry isn’t regulated, anyone can claim to be an expert. Plenty of SEOs look excellent on paper, but may not be best suited for your business. You may need to ask how long the SEO agency has been around, what value they offer, how much they cost, how they report updates.
Research what past clients have to say about the SEO agency. No company is perfect, so red flags should go up if every review looks glowing. It’s also good to ascertain what the company’s workload is like. Ideally, you need to work with someone who can devote a lot of their time to deliver quality work.
Can You DIY Your SEO?
If hiring SEO experts doesn’t seem like the best option for your business, then you may have to roll up your sleeves and learn to do it yourself. If you’re looking to get short-term results, you can consider paying for Facebook or Google ads. This type of marketing yields quicker results but only provides results for as long as you’re paying. In the long term, an SEO campaign may be cheaper and provide more insight into your company’s online performance.
Learning to do SEO work is another viable option. After all, an SEO expert that learns the ins and outs of your industry can’t produce the same results as an industry expert who then learns SEO. If you learn some basic on-page optimization skills, you’ll be able to improve your website’s ranking. However, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to produce the same results that an expert SEO team could have. As we mentioned before, it’s challenging to produce a meaningful return on investment as a business owner by spending your time learning to blog, build links, and speed up your website.
Conclusion
A great website can help your business reach more prospective clients in locations that you’d otherwise never have reached. An effective SEO campaign not only helps your website rank higher in search engine rankings but also helps it pop out from the competition.
The prospect of getting more website visitors and leads is what tempts most businesses to hire someone for SEO. Whether or not you should do the same should hinge on whether or not you have enough money to advertise on marketing.
You should also consider how difficult it is to rank for your targeted keywords and if you have enough time to learn how to improve your website. As you’re most likely looking to get a positive return on your time or financial investment, it’s important to go with the option that makes more business sense — pay an expert or do it yourself.
