89% of marketing professionals can’t be wrong. According to a survey conducted by Ascend2, 89% of professional marketers said SEO is an effective strategy for driving traffic to their website, moving up the search rankings, and ultimately, growing the business.
In a world where anyone can become an expert by watching YouTube videos, SEO is a skill that requires experience.
If your attempt at making Steak Charlemagne ends with you ordering pizza delivery, only your ego is affected. But when your SEO strategy doesn’t deliver the expected results, you lose opportunities to place your business, its products and services, in front of prospective customers.
Here are 5 reasons why you need to consult an SEO expert for your business.
1. Get the Desired Results From Your SEO Efforts
To be clear, hiring an SEO expert will not guarantee results. At least not right away. SEO is a strategy that involves different processes and it takes time for these processes to click together and produce the intended outcomes.
Think of SEO as a machine that has many moving parts. These parts include:
- Website mobile responsiveness
- Proper meta, image, and title tag descriptions
- Webpage speed
- Keyword research
- High-quality content
- Keyword integration
- Link building
- Pay-per-click advertising
You simply cannot handle all of these key areas of responsibility yourself!
An SEO expert is a professional who has enough experience under his belt to organize these moving parts and get them running efficiently.
Whether you hire an individual or an agency, an SEO expert has a team made up of experts in each key area of responsibility.
The SEO professional functions like a project manager. He’s focused on achieving your goal, staying within the budget, and providing high-quality work. For these reasons, he assembles a team of talent he can trust.
The team SEO would usually include the following skills: a website developer, a few content writers, a keyword researcher, a graphic designer, and a social media marketer.
2. Because Mistakes Can Be Costly
As mentioned above, SEO will not guarantee results right away. It will take time. Even the most well-thought-out SEO strategy will have its share of kinks and flaws.
An SEO expert will track and monitor the performance of the current SEO strategy. He will identify the processes that are not delivering results and use data to find out if these processes can still be improved or if they should be replaced.
By staying on top of the strategy, the SEO pro can put it on the straight and narrow while assuring that you get a good ROI on your investment. He will recommend allocating more resources to the processes that are delivering results and set aside funding for new platforms for content distribution.
You can say that an SEO expert doesn’t only optimize your content, but also your marketing budget!
Why? Because mistakes can be costly in terms of foregone opportunities and reputation.
Here are 3 examples of how some of our clients lost money on ill-planned SEO strategies:
- Client A hired writers who didn’t know how to optimize content and delivered articles that averaged over 2,000 words. The client spent hundreds of dollars for content that couldn’t be found and indexed by the search engine bots.
- Client B built his website from a free WordPress template. He ended up with a website that wasn’t functioning properly, had poorly written content, and images and tags that weren’t optimized for search engines.
- Client C added links to his content but didn’t conduct the audit necessary to find out if the web pages he linked to were still active or existing. Likewise, he didn’t keep track of webpage downloading speed that had significantly slowed down.
In each case, the client lost opportunities to drive traffic to his website. The more visitors go to your website, the higher the probability of generating leads that can potentially be converted into sales.
The clients also risked the reputation of their brand.
If visitors can’t download your webpage in under 3 seconds, they’ll click out and go to your competitors. If someone lands on your website and can’t find what he’s looking for, he’ll leave the page right away.
If your content isn’t engaging, informative, useful, and is poorly-written with meandering paragraphs, errors in spelling, and grammar, your brand, and reputation will get tarnished.
The scoreboard will read Your Competition: 1, Your Business: 0.
3. Allocate Productive Time on Your Business
Let’s assume YOU’RE the SEO expert. You’ve taken courses and have been certified as a professional who’s qualified to do SEO. You know how to optimize your website and content – but you run a business consultancy company that provides services to a wide range of industries.
Should you do SEO yourself or hire an expert?
We recommend hiring an SEO expert because your time is best spent managing tasks that add dollars and cents to your bank account. It’s better to provide consultation services to clients that generate US$400 per hour than spend 2 hours per day writing optimized content.
More so for entrepreneurs who don’t have the knowledge or experience doing SEO. Not only will you lose productive hours trying to manage your SEO strategy, but as mentioned in the previous section, mistakes can be costly and risky for your business.
4. SEO Constantly Evolves
SEO is both a science and an art. It’s a science because SEO uses digital tools that automate processes, improve efficiency, and provide real-time data to measure results.
But SEO is also an art. How these tools and processes are used depends on the type of business, goals, and content to be produced.
For example, blogs such as this one are more conscientious of keyword usage. If you notice, we use synonyms a lot. Instead of using the keyword “SEO Expert”, we would alternatively use “SEO Professional”, “SEO Pro”, or “SEO Professional.”
Also, we’d add the keyword SEO to “business” and “strategy” because these keywords could originate from different searches.
In contrast, a product review guide might perform much better in the search engine rankings if it’s packed with the same keywords. The reason is that the blog is more informative and the product review guide is intended to sell.
The product review guide includes:
- Detailed product descriptions
- Detailed product specifications
- Pros and cons
- Customer reviews
- Editor’s rating
These sections will require the same high-ranking keywords that customers will use to search for the product.
It used to be that SEO practitioners were more conscientious about the frequency of keyword usage, but based on our experience, the level of keyword density would depend on the type of content to be created.
As consumer behavior changes, so will the application of various tools and optimization principles when developing an SEO strategy.
This is the job of an SEO professional – to keep track of changes in the behavior and preferences of consumers as well as to stay updated on developments in the industry.
5. Keep Up With the Competition
According to a study by Deloitte, the budget for digital marketing increased by 11.5% in 2021 despite businesses incurring heavy losses.
73.8% of the investments businesses made in digital marketing were focused on optimizing their website while 65% spent on strategies that improve search rankings.
When your business is losing money, you want to recover by working on your business, not for your business.
Businesses hired professional digital marketing agencies to design, develop, implement, and track their campaigns so that they can spend more time getting their respective enterprises moving again.
Your competitors are doing it – hiring SEO agencies or professionals – to get their businesses found on the Internet and to drive more traffic to their websites. If they’re doing it, so should you.
Doing what your competitors do isn’t a case of following the leader. It’s about mitigating the risks of making costly mistakes by going DIY with your SEO strategy and maintaining productive work hours.
Conclusion
Let’s get real. When it comes to SEO, leave it to the experts.
Yes, hiring an SEO expert means shelling out cash to pay for professional services. Going DIY might save you money but by making your business a testing ground for YouTube acquired skills, you’re essentially gambling on your SEO strategy.
Done correctly, SEO is an investment that will pay out big dividends for your business.
Do it once, do it right! Give us a call and we’ll get your SEO strategy back on track. Our team has the best web developers, content writers, and graphic designers. Find out first-hand how we helped our clients get more traffic on their website and climb up the search rankings.
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