You might be thinking you’d like to save money on hiring an SEO expert — after all, there seems to be a lot of information on how to manage SEO online. However, if your business doesn’t have a team member that specifically has experience managing SEO and creating SEO strategies, this can backfire and cost your business in the long run.
Digital marketing, and SEO as a highly-technical, complex element of marketing, isn’t something to play around with and risk your brand reputation on. You could run into trouble, since there’s a lot of wrong information and poor advice on the internet about SEO strategies. Outdated information regurgitated from other sites, strategies that don’t really work, unethical or questionable methods that go against the terms of service of search engines, and other bad suggestions, can all cause you a lot of grief.
There are several reasons why it’s in your best interest to hire an SEO agency. Just make sure it’s one that will tailor services to your business, and will use ethical, best practices.
SEO Matters
if your website isn’t coming up on the first page of Google search results, you won’t be found. Studies show that the top organic search result is the one people are most likely to click on to. As you go down, your chances of being clicked on drop more and more, and if you don’t make it to the first page of results, the chance of someone clicking through to your website is almost non-existent.
SEO professionals know how to improve your SEO rankings organically, so you can snag one of those precious top spots.
You Can Harm Your Marketing Efforts If You Don’t Do SEO Right
Search engine algorithms sort rankings for websites based on on-page content, such as body text content, titles, layout, and off-page factors like inbound links and mentions of your brand. However, they also penalize poor SEO , including keyword stuffing, non-organic link building, and duplicate or repetitive content.
You need to intimately know all of the Google requirements, constantly staying up to date with the frequent changes — as well as know the industry well enough to avoid tactics that don’t follow white-hat SEO techniques (including some that are described as ‘tips’ in less-reputable online blogs). Otherwise, your website could be subject to ranking penalties.
As a worst case scenario, poor SEO techniques lead to your website being dropped completely by search engines, but even little issues drop your ranking enough to impact web traffic.
Staying On Top Of Search Engines
It’s a good idea to hire SEO experts, since it’s hard to keep up with the changing world of SEO if it’s not your primary job or specialty. You never know when an algorithm update can completely reverse your rankings.
Some businesses try to use internal resources, but without the right skills, and especially if people are already busy with their other work, your SEO efforts won’t be successful. So, unless you are sure you have enough resources with the right skills, hiring SEO experts is a good choice.
Developing an Optimal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy
Investing in a search engine optimization strategy, and leveraging it to enhance your other marketing strategies, offers a great return on investment. Boosting rankings organically, with higher domain authority, will give you better brand recognition and more organic traffic, for more sales.
However, an effective strategy takes more than just tossing in a couple of single keywords into your content. When you hire SEO professionals, they can optimize for search intent and search queries, not just single words. In modern, competitive markets, the traditional tactics of optimizing for single keywords simply don’t work, and researching for the best word clusters or search queries is an art and a science.
An SEO expert can help you drill down to what people are really searching for, and what phrases will catch the most people in your area, with a carefully-crafted strategy tailored to your unique business.
Expertise for Competitiveness
Since many of your competitors will have hired their own SEO experts, it can be extremely difficult to compete without the same advantage.
If your website isn’t getting much traffic, this will hurt your search rankings, creating a vicious cycle that drops you further.
An SEO specialist will have expertise and experience to tailor a strategy for your business and industry, leveraging high-quality content creation such as blogs and social media marketing content, high quality links strategies, keyword strategies, and other SEO services. This expertise can turn around your negative cycle and get you competitive again.
Most SEO professionals will start with a website audit to identify any issues or areas of opportunity, including technical SEO.
SEO Audit
The website audit will include a review of your web pages, content, meta descriptions, performance, and other elements to see how Google and other search engines view your sites. Even things like loading times and security will impact your rankings. It’s a critical step, and one which many in-house resources don’t have time to do properly.
In addition to a web site audit, for on-page SEO, even off-page SEO – what you do outside your website to drive traffic to it – should be examined.
Competitor and Keyword Research
Another area that SEO agencies or professionals will manage as part of an SEO campaign, that is difficult for businesses to do, is the extensive research on both competitors and keywords. It’s strongly recommended to hire an SEO expert for this time-consuming and specialized work.
An effective keyword strategy optimizes for search intent and behaviour, not just simple words. Blog topics and other content should leverage these phrase clusters, for semantic relevance.
Knowing your competitors, their PPC strategies, the keywords they’re successfully ranking in, and identifying how you can do better is challenging but effective. This includes spotting gaps in their content that you can take advantage of.
Content Optimization
Many businesses that try to handle their own SEO content often end up stuffing it with keywords, which can backfire, or don’t incorporate them naturally, so the language looks clunky and unprofessional. An SEO expert with a team of writers can help you provide true value to your potential clients, which protects your brand reputation, as well as produce highly-optimized content.
Less-Considered Aspects of SEO
There are also several aspects of SEO that many businesses forget to address, and aren’t equipped to do in-house. Technical SEO, which optimizes the performance of your website to work better, for example, is rewarded by search engines. Also, SEO varies by location, so strategies for local SEO campaigns, carefully targeted to the right location, helps ensure you can be found by those nearby.
Trust an SEO Agency That Uses White Hat SEO Techniques — and Has Proven Results!
At Merged Media, we only use ethical, white hat techniques. And, we stay on top of all of those algorithm changes, so you don’t find your website suffering. From website audits, research, and SEO campaign strategizing, we take time to get to know you, and your business, because content and marketing works best when it’s personal.
