Search engine optimization is something that everyone seems to have an opinion about. One thing that people can agree on is that it can be a time-consuming process and if you don’t know SEO from your elbow, then there’s a bit of learning to do. So should you outsource your SEO? Does it make smart business sense?
What does an SEO company do?
Before you can decide whether to outsource your SEO tasks, it’s important to know what most SEO companies do. Most search engine optimization companies, whether they’re a one-person show or have several employees, offer the following services:
1. Website audit. The first thing most SEO companies will do is analyze your site as it stands today. Is it being indexed? What is working and what isn’t?
2. Keyword research. The next step many companies will take is to conduct keyword research. That means researching the keywords your customers are using to find you.
3. Recommendations. The third step is typically for a SEO company to provide you with a strategy. They may include manual submission to search engines for indexing as part of the services they provide, or they may not. They will most definitely have outlined a content and link building strategy for you. What happens next is where firms begin to differ.
They’ll almost always provide HTML coding service to tweak your site optimally for the search engines. Then they’ll either provide all of the services to you, including content writing, or they may simply offer to make sure the links are properly inserted and you’ll have someone else write the content. They may tell you how they suggest you build incoming links, or they may offer to handle the process for you. They may also offer tracking and maintenance to ensure the SEO efforts are working.
So one of the ways to evaluate if a service is worth hiring is to compare the services they offer with your needs. Here are a few other factors to compare them by:
* Their reputation in the industry. It’s important to make sure the SEO company has a good reputation, not only for knowing what they’re doing and getting results but also for using legitimate and respected techniques.
* The policies and procedures. When and how will they communicate with you? How long will the processes take? How often do they evaluate their results? These are just some of the questions to consider when evaluating a potential provider.
* Finally, what does it cost to hire them? Remember, you get what you pay for so hiring a dollar store SEO expert will likely not get you the results you’re looking for. The most expensive SEO jobs — costing up to $10,000 to $20,000 a month – are only required if you have hundreds of product pages. Many experts charge by the page and prices average around $100/page but can certainly be higher or lower.
Analyzing ROI
One of the questions you’ll want to ask yourself before outsourcing your SEO is how much it’s worth to you. In this calculation, you’ll want to consider your hourly value. If it takes you four hours to accomplish what an SEO expert can accomplish in an hour and you’re losing $50/hour trying to code your site when it would have cost you $100 to use an SEO expert, then yes – it might be worthwhile to outsource this task.
That being said, SEO is something you can most certainly accomplish yourself. If you do a bit of research and are willing to experiment with the results then it can be quite satisfying, and profitable, to watch your website grow in the page rankings. So, does it pay to outsource your SEO? It depends on where you value your time and money and the SEO expert you hire.