It’s high time you get serious with SEO.
More than 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. The search engine is the first thing that people use to find something they’re interested in. Even if you’re running an AdWords campaign, you’re still not getting 100% of organic traffic that your website deserves because over 80% of internet users ignore paid ads and people prefer clicking on organic links as compared to paid links.
Don’t relegate SEO to the side. If you’ve been looking for a proven channel for acquiring customer, then SEO is a must for you. The question is: Who should do it? Should it be left to professionals or someone from your team who has no prior experience with SEO?
I would say, let the professionals handle your SEO. But don’t take my word for it, here are seven reasons why you should leave SEO to the experts:
1. Save time
Small and medium-sized businesses have a limited workforce. If you own a small business, chances are you’re already short of people so doing SEO by yourself can be a waste of time and resources. Hiring a professional SEO company can save you time.
SEO requires a lot of time – it’s not like building a few links in a couple weeks and you’re done. You’ve got to build links consistently. It can take 6 months to a year before you start seeing any noticeable change in organic traffic and rankings.
Let professionals do SEO for you while you focus on other important business tasks that are of strategic nature. For instance, instead of spending time acquiring more links why not use the same time to find business partners and move into new markets?
It’s all about hiring the right SEO agency that knows what they’re doing. They can work with minimal testing and experimentation, which means an expert will get to link building immediately as compared to an amateur or your in-house team that will spend several months on this testing and experimentation, which ultimately costs you time. Save it for your business.
2. Real results
Not every SEO campaign turns out to be successful. In fact, most of them fail. Do you really think SEO is all about building links? Not exactly.
Below is a complete SEO campaign planning pyramid that works at the backend of every successful SEO campaign.
Can you develop such a strategy in-house? Amateurs cannot do it either. A professional will do it and once it’s done, you’ll see results.
Professional SEO experts will drive results, save you from penalties, and help you get rid of bad links. Getting the results you desire for your company can’t be completed by any amateur SEO team – it’s the work of experts.
3. SEO is difficult
Search engine optimization (SEO) is like the stock market. Search engine algorithms evolve with every search query. A website that is on page one at 4pm in California won’t be on page one at 4pm in Texas. Search engine algorithm is changed based on the search engine queries – so anything that works today might not work tomorrow.
This is because search engines (like Google) are dynamic and are always busy tweaking their algorithm. Google, for instance, released more than 11 major updates in 2016. Every new update means you have to revise your SEO strategy to make sure you are following the new rules.
If you’re new or unskilled in SEO, you can’t stay updated with all the algorithm updates and even if you somehow know about an update, you’ll be clueless as to what you’re supposed to do next.
You’ve got to understand that SEO isn’t just complicated, it’s difficult because you can’t do it in isolation. You have to stay updated and acquire new knowledge that you can implement right away – this is what professionals do.
The make SEO easier with their experience, industry connections, and knowledge. They make it work for you and your business irrespective of how tough it gets.
4. In-depth analytics
In a survey by a research institute, 44% of businesses reported that they don’t have the quantitative metrics to evaluate marketing ROI while 67% businesses don’t evaluate marketing analytics.
Imagine you’ve been spending thousands of dollars on SEO every month for the past 8 months. Your marketing team has undergone several SEO training but you don’t see any results. Your team is unable to tell you when it will work, why it isn’t working now, and when it’s expected to work.
Professionals, on the other hand, can tell you clearly what’s happening and how to make things better because they have the tools and resources to measure the progress and forecast results. You’ll be able to see the value of every single dollar spent on SEO with the help of charts, graphs, and detailed reports. For instance, do you know that you can assign a dollar value to your organic traffic (i.e., visitor) in Google Analytics? I bet not.
While an amateur SEO may know how to do that, he might not be in a position to provide further analytics and reporting on it, while a professional agency will make it easy-to-understand for you.
Besides, analytics don’t matter. How you use analytics for planning, forecasting, and improving ROI is what matters.
Everyone has access to Google Analytics but there are only a few who know that conversion funnels can be created in Google Analytics. Only a few have created the funnels. But there are professionals who know how to reduce funnel leakages, how to boost conversions, or how to fix the low conversion rate of organic traffic. This is something that only experts can do; they just don’t throw reports, but they make those reports meaningful, understandable, and tweak their plan on the results of the analytics.
5. Experience
SEO is more about experience than learning.
Professionals are experienced; they have done it in the past, and they can do it again today.
Beginner SEOs, on the other hand, may not know how to do it. Maybe they have never ranked a web page in the past but have read hundreds of case studies, know everything on link building, and can tell you their entire SEO plan in no time.
Would you prefer a professional or a beginner?
The truth is, a professional SEO agency is more than an outsourcing agency – they’re your best partner. Take it as a partnership opportunity.
Here is an example of what experience in SEO means and can do:
Eric Ward was having a live Q&A Google Hangout with his subscribers. During the session, a viewer asked why a certain website was ranking so high in Google despite poor SEO and a few links. Eric used Ahrefs to monitor the backlink profile of the subject website, which had only 6 backlinks and it was ranking on the first page for an extremely competitive search term with 1.6 million results.
Beginners will stop here but Eric moved on and ran a search query to monitor mentions of the website. The search showed that the website was mentioned (not linked to) from some top authority sites. He further inspected the social accounts of the website which had thousands of engaged followers. From there, he showed the viewers why Google was ranking this website despite having only 6 backlinks.
This is what experience can do to your website and SEO strategy.
6. SEO evolves rapidly
SEO strategies that used to work in 2012 don’t work today. In fact, what works for one website might not work for another.
Search engine marketing techniques evolve with:
- Changes in search engine algorithms
- Competition
- Advances in technology
- Search engine market share
- Geographical location
SEO is a fairly large industry that can’t be conquered in a few days. Therefore, it’s better left to professionals who are in the industry to deal with the external factors.
Of course, your DIY SEO strategy might work exceptionally well for a few months, but a minor change in the algorithm can push you down the SERPs. By the time you’ll realize it, it’d be too late.
SEO experts have deep insights about the future of SEO or at least they try to analyze it. They can thus help you:
- Avoid penalties
- Adapt to new changes
- Amend SEO strategy as and when required
- Follow the trend
7. Consistent links and traffic
SEO is a long-term strategy; it can take as much as 22 weeks to see the impact of a link in terms of improved organic search ranking.
Links that you’re building today will continue to impact rankings for months to come. It’s not a one-time strategy. Instead, how you distribute links over a period of several months (or maybe years) is what’s needed.
This is where professional SEO marketers can come in to guide you. They can craft a strategy for your website and a link building strategy that will boost traffic, conversions, and improve and maintain the rankings.
Imagine engaging your marketing team full-time for SEO? You can’t afford it because your marketing team has to do a lot of other things.
If you stop building links once you’ve achieved the desired rankings, there’s every tendency that you’ll lose your positions. You have to generate links consistently to maintain the rankings. So, let a professional do it for you.
In conclusion…
If you need consistent, reliable, risk-free, and long-term organic search rankings for your web pages, better leave it to professionals. Anything less than a professional is a big NO.
Eric Sachs
SEO virtuoso, CEO @Sachs Marketing Group. Focused on being of service to business owners - helping to better position them in the eyes of their audiences.