Should Your Business Outsource Professional SEO Services?

The largest network in the world is the so-called ‘network’ of the *drum-roll* INTERNET! Most businesses depend on this mystical place as their main source of communicating, establishing a brand and generating leads and traffic to your website.

With less than 20% of business NOT using the internet to garner traffic, leads, sales, promote their marketing and brand, the other 80% are either considering the benefits they could enjoy from an online and digital presence, or have already experienced a huge boost in sales, traffic, social shares and maybe even mentions from other companies.

Hence, SEO is one of the most important marketing segments for any business. Not only will it foster growth on its competitive edge of inbound marketing, but the word on the street is that big players in the digital realm are now garnering their main source of income from personalised, optimised and strategic inbound marketing techniques, rolled out by SEO techniques.

People (searchers) are more likely to click the first, second or third result in a Google search than any other, and if you’re not on the first page, you’re lost.

The first search result gets nearly 45% of all clicks for any specific search term. The first three results combined get 60% of clicks (meaning the second and third place results only get about 15% of those total clicks, combined) – and results on the first page get 89% of clicks. Okay so that’s great – but how do you get to the first page of Google? S.E.O.

The fundamentals of SEO are easy to understand, but it takes a lot of experience and expertise to become a master. There are plenty of resources to support your SEO efforts, though, including courses and tools, many of them free. This process is going to take time – a whole lot of precious time… Or you can hire an outsourced SEO specialist or agency!

SEO helps to maximize inbound traffic without the hassle of paying for sponsored adverts which eventually expire. SEO engrains ‘evergreen’ content onto the www, meaning that if it’s well-constructed, your content may rank for years to come.

Google search engines process more than 3.5 billion search queries in a day – can you imagine how many people might be searching for the services or products that your company provides right this very second, and how they simply don’t know about you because they can’t find you?

When you prepare for SEO, you need to make sure that your website has got sufficient relevant content, structured around keywords related to your businesses specific service or product offerings – keywords and key phrases that are being searched on Google. More than 50 % of web users only visit a website for 15 seconds or less. Sounds like an impossible feat, doesn’t it? Fret not! If your website has relevant content, which is fully optimised for human interaction, you will end up reaping the rewards of SEO – the simplest (and most easily attainable) of which is a longer “time spent on page”. It makes sense – the better the material, the longer and more engaged a user will be.

So we’ve established that SEO is necessary; now the next question is – do you hire for a permanent internal role – or do you outsource?

Let’s consider the option of hiring an in-house SEO employee.

Learning good SEO practices will cost you time, as we mentioned in the beginning of this article, even if it’s not a line item in your marketing budget. The field is constantly shifting, as Google regularly releases new algorithmic shifts that can affect generally accepted best practices. So there can be much more to it than you thought. As search engines have become more nuanced, they’ve also become harder to fool or “game.” That means good SEO requires far more than the clever use of keywords. It’s going to require at the very least a few weeks of training (while someone else does the actual work during the learning process of the new employee). You might want to up-skill the new hire by means of sending them on a course; this too will cost – both financially and in time – again. There is also no set rule that the new hire will stick around long enough for you to see a ROI in them. This entire process can be overwhelming and highly frustrating for any company, and may cause many to simply ‘throw-in-the-towel” and abandon SEO efforts altogether.

The Benefits of Hiring an SEO Expert or SEO Agency

It Shifts The Responsibility Of A Side-Line Task To Allow You To Focus On Your Core Business.

Managing your own SEO campaign takes up a lot of time, especially if you don’t know much about it. Even if you do, keyword research, blog structuring, page structuring and optimisation a, posting, social sharing and tracking can easily take up the majority of your day. If you work with a professional SEO company, you and your employees will be able to focus on doing what you do best: running your business. The SEO experts will take care of the rest.

You’ll Save More Money by Spending a Little on an Outsourced Company

While you may think that you know how to manage an SEO campaign, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up overspending and wasting money. You will most likely spend an absorbent amount of time and money trying to optimize your website. If you are not sure what you are doing and you make mistakes, the consequences may result in decreased traffic, less sales and more time and money spent to correct the errors that you made. SEO cannot be a cost-effective process unless it’s consistent and an experienced SEO company is highly skilled in using accurate and consistent SEO tactics.

You’ll Be Hiring a Professional Service with Vast Experience in Numerous Fields

A professional SEO company has the knowledge and experience necessary to make smart decisions for your site that will result in increases in your ranking and visibility. An experienced SEO company should have experience working with a variety of clients in different industries, allowing them to appropriately handle your unique ranking situation, needs, and expectations.

You Will See Actual Results

Results are the main reason anyone partners with an SEO company. A professional SEO organization will be able to evaluate your website, your business goals, and your industry competitors to build a comprehensive plan to increase your visibility in the top search engines. They will track your progress and adjust their plans to ensure that your business is on the right path to achieving the best results, no matter how long it takes.

An SEO company can help you implement the methods that are crucial for improving your visibility in searches, improving your chances for reaching potential customers, while reducing the amount of money you need to spend on marketing.

If all goes as planned with the SEO specialist you select, these should be the results:

A stronger, wider-reaching web presence
An improved search engine ranking (but again, no credible SEO expert will quantify exactly how much of a boost they can give you)
Increased traffic from targeted consumers
Increased sales and revenue