Many small business owners battle with the decision to hire SEO experts or simply try to learn SEO techniques and take care of it themselves. Below are a few reasons why SEO is best left in the hands of a trained and experienced SEO expert.
Familiarity: SEO pros are familiar with the most effective tools for website analysis and optimization, beginning with tools for keyword research. Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of your SEO strategy, everything else flows from this: Onsite optimization, Ad Words campaigns, link acquisition, among others. Choosing wrong or weak keywords means that while you may reach the top; you won’t see much ROI in terms of leads and conversions.
Experience: in a field that is always changing, such as SEO, there are many gains from choosing someone who already has some experience. Mastering SEO takes a lot of time, especially if you’re starting from scratch. This is because SEO is an art, and not a science. Just because this technique worked for one site doesn’t automatically mean it will work for your site as well. SEO pros know how to analyze websites, recognize their needs and implement the most effective strategies, something that only experience can teach you.
Efficiency: It is a well-known fact that Google honors longevity. As such, the sooner your website reaches top ranking positions and the longer it maintains that, the better. SEO is a long-term marketing plan with compounding benefits, just like your retirement savings plan. The sooner you begin saving, the greater the benefits you’re likely to reap.
In a competitive environment, you cannot afford to take your time while competitors are hiring pros and seeing impressive results within a few months. Even when you get to the top, you’ll not realize as much benefit as you would have, because in the interim both Google and your potential clients have acquainted themselves with your competitors, and they won’t be likely to shift just because you finally made it to the game.
Blacklisting danger: when you have worked hard on your campaign but still see no results, it might be tempting to take shortcuts to get where you want to go. This is a bad idea given that there are many websites that have been completely de-indexed from search results. Even without that, you may be hit with manual or algorithmic penalties for applying one technique too much. We still don’t know whether Google holds grudges on sites with previous penalties, but that’s not something you want to find out anyway.
