Did you know that leads from SEO are 8x more likely to become paying customers than leads from traditional ad campaigns?
Or that 14% of website leads convert into a sale?
These are impressive statistics, but it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get a website to a place where it’s ranking and attracting traffic. Getting onto the first place of Google is becoming tougher, and SEO techniques are more evolved than ever.
One of the big mistakes new business owners make is trying to DIY their SEO instead of hiring an SEO company. If you go this route, you might waste weeks’ worth of time, spend more money than you planned, and hurt your SEO in the process.
Have you been weighing up whether to DIY your SEO or hire an SEO service company? Continue reading to find out 8 reasons why outsourcing your SEO is a smart move.
1. Your SEO Will Be Better
Like we said above, as Google refines its algorithm, SEO techniques are becoming more evolved and complex. Currently, Google uses more than 200 factors in its algorithm. Gone are the days of simply targeting a few keywords, buying some backlinks, and calling it a day.
Now, websites have to be optimized in every single area, from site speed, ease of navigation, to optimizing for mobile and targeting the right keywords (while avoiding pitfalls like keyword cannibalization).
Tackling all of this yourself, as a new business owner is a huge task. Unless you have a strong background in SEO, you won’t be able to achieve the same results that professional SEO companies can.
You might even harm your website, both in the short- and long-term (more on this below) and end up losing traffic rather than gaining it.
2. Online Visibility Is Everything Nowadays
No matter what kind of business you are, online visibility is essential. Nowadays, having a web presence is not optional.
According to insights from Google, 60% of shopping occasions start online. If you’re not ranking in the top search results for your target keywords—you’re going to miss out on business.
If you are a local or service-based business like a restaurant, ranking in search is just as vital. Reports show that 97% of consumers who utilize online search look for local businesses.
If your business isn’t showing up in relevant searches, you’re leaving money and leads on the table.
In short, good SEO can be a make-or-break factor in business success, even if you’re a physical, location-based business. Given how vital SEO is nowadays, it’s not worth jeopardizing your business’s visibility and online presence by DIYing your SEO instead of using a local SEO company.
3. You’ll Save Yourself a Lot of Stress
Not only is professional SEO more effective than trying to do it yourself, but hiring an SEO company will also save you a lot of stress.
Instead of having to figure everything out on your own, you can let your SEO services company handle all the details.
If you try to manage your own SEO as a novice, things can get frustrating fast. For example, after reading a bunch of guides on SEO, you start optimizing your website. Next thing you know you’ve installed dozens of plugins, and your site is operating at a snail’s pace.
Then you install a plugin to speed up your site, only to find that it conflicts with another plugin and makes your site malfunction, or worse, crash completely.
This is just one example of a frustrating scenario you might face trying to optimize your website on your own.
4. You’ll Win Back Time
Another benefit of leveraging the services of an SEO company is that you’ll win back valuable time. Time that you could be using to focus on the core operations of your business.
If you already know all the ins and outs of SEO, doing basic site optimization will probably take you an average of 6-12 hours per page. However, if you’re new to SEO, optimizing your site will come with a learning curve that can eat up days and weeks of your time.
Learning SEO and implementing it can turn into a near full-time project in the beginning. Once you’ve taught yourself some of the fundamentals of site optimization, you’ll still need to do maintenance SEO and other inbound marketing tasks like content creation.
Of course, you can choose to outsource content creation to a writer, but this too takes time. You have to find a suitable writer, work with them on your content strategy, handle their invoices, check their work, etc.
If you work with an SEO company like Bear Fox Marketing, you can skip all of this. We offer content marketing as one of our SEO services. Not only do we work with skilled content creators to generate an ongoing stream of optimized content for your site, but we also carry out an in-depth analysis of your niche and industry to identify information gaps to create a results-driven content strategy.
We even take care of publishing content to your site, and all relevant social sites to help you gain exposure. If you wish, we can also supply content to supplement in-house content you are already creating.
5. SEO Has Long-Term Effects
Another reason to hire an SEO services company is that SEO has long-term effects. Unlike outbound marketing methods like PPC advertising, SEO builds on itself and you can enjoy compounded results over time.
The money you invest in professional SEO won’t just buy you temporary results. It will set a basis of growth for your website, and if you continue with your inbound marketing, your website traffic should continue to grow into the future.
In contrast, paid advertising will only get you traffic for as long as your ads run. As soon as the ads stop, so will your traffic from them. An optimized blog post, on the other hand, can attract traffic for years into the future.
Because inbound marketing is a long-term investment, you want to ensure that you’re doing it right from the get-go. If you spend a year or two getting your SEO right, this will delay the long-term rewards.
6. An SEO Company Can Save You Money
One of the primary reasons business owners try to DIY their SEO is because they assume they will save money. But this is not necessarily the case.
If you do your own SEO, you’ll more than likely end up having to take out subscriptions on paid SEO tools. Depending on how many tools you use, the cost of this can quickly add up. Most good tools cost between $50 and $100 per month.
On top of this, you’re probably going to have to spend money on things like content creation unless you create all content yourself, which most business owners don’t have time for.
Lastly, you might also find yourself needing to shell out for things like paid plugins, plagiarism checkers, subscriptions for stock images, etc. Added up, this could total quite a few hundred dollars per month, and that’s not even factoring in the value of your time.
In contrast, even if you hire the best SEO company, you might find that for a local SEO campaign you only have to pay around $500 per month.
The exact cost will depend on your site and the scale of your SEO campaign. But in a lot of cases, hiring a professional SEO company might actually be the cheaper option.
7. Amateur SEO Can Be Very Harmful to Your Rankings
Besides netting you better SEO while potentially saving you money and time, a professional SEO service company can also protect you from derailing your site through beginner mistakes.
Amateur SEO can be very harmful to your site rankings. If you aren’t versed in SEO, you might find that despite your best efforts, you’re losing traffic. This could be due to a variety of things.
For instance, you might have inadvertently caused Google to blacklist your site. Maybe your site security was weak and attackers placed malicious code? This is a recipe for a Google blacklist.
Or, perhaps the content writer you hired sold you a plagiarized blog post? Not wanting to waste money on a plagiarism tool, you didn’t check the content and simply published it.
If the original owner files a complaint, this will also cause Google to blacklist you from its search engine.
8. SEO Is an Ideal Outsourcing Opportunity
Outsourcing is all the rage at the moment, and for good reason. Outsourcing certain functions can help your business tap into top talent and knowledge while remaining lean and easily scalable.
Hiring an SEO company is a great way to outsource a time-consuming area that requires expert knowledge. Depending on the SEO company you select, they might also be able to manage other areas for you such as PPC and social media marketing.
Looking for the Best SEO Company?
Hiring an SEO company can save you money, time, and hassle, while simultaneously netting you professional results that compound over time.
Do you want to take things to the next level by working with an SEO services company? If so, it’s important to choose the best SEO company you can, and avoid fly-by-night operations.
Bear Fox Marketing is a team of SEO and marketing specialists dedicated to helping you achieve your goals.Instead of googling “SEO companies near me” head to our SEO services page to find out why Bear Fox marketing is one of the best SEO companies in town.