No matter whether your business is well established or still building, your web presence is an essential part of its continued success and growth.
With the majority of consumers doing online research before they purchase a product — and with the top result on search engines receiving 10 times more clicks than the tenth-ranked result — it has never been clearer: Getting your pages highly ranked on search engines can make or break deals.
But once you’ve built your brand and created a solid website with content you’re proud of, what comes next? How do you make the most of your online presence and ensure that people see you at the right time? That’s where a search engine optimization (SEO) expert can step in.
In this blog, we’ll explore what SEO is, why it should be an essential part of your marketing strategy, and how investing in an SEO expert can take your business to the next level.
How Hiring for SEO Can Help Your Business
Investing in an SEO professional can help take your business to the next level by bringing more traffic to your website and increasing your visibility online.
For context, SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This can be done through various means, such as improving the quality of the website's content, making the site more user-friendly, and link building.
Keep in mind that SEO is about more than just keywords. SEO strategy is constantly evolving, with new industry standards and ever-changing algorithms. It takes time, specialization, and years of experience to be able to best manage and optimize your rankings.
An SEO expert will help you be proactive in keeping up with the latest trends so you can best avoid losing your SEO rankings due to industry-wide changes.
Hiring an SEO Company vs Keeping It In-House
There are several paths to filling the SEO knowledge gap in your business. Aside from hiring a freelance or in-house SEO specialist, finding a marketing agency with SEO expertise can provide a breadth of capabilities in improving your search engine rankings.
SEO is just one strategy of a comprehensive marketing plan. Having all your marketing efforts in sync means that your content, paid media, and SEO are all in alignment to boost your brand, and a marketing agency can help achieve that goal.
Benefits of Hiring an SEO Company
Hiring an SEO agency or consultant offers several advantages for businesses looking to improve their online visibility, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately grow their bottom line.
SEO companies develop customized strategies aligned with the business goals and target audience of their clients. They conduct thorough research, analyze competitors, and identify opportunities to improve search engine rankings and drive organic traffic.
Here are a few key areas of focus that the right SEO expert will utilize to optimize your online performance:
- On-Page SEO: This includes things like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and headers based on keyword research, as well as making sure that your content is relevant and helpful.
- Off-Page SEO: This refers to the process of building links to your website from other high-quality websites.
- Technical SEO: This focuses on things like site structure and speed. It’s important to ensure that your website is easy for search engines to crawl and index and that it loads quickly.
- Local SEO: This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your website for local search results and includes things like claiming your Google Business profile and listings on other directories, as well as optimizing your website content for local keywords.
All in all, SEO requires ongoing efforts and can be time-consuming, especially for businesses with limited resources or expertise in-house. Outsourcing SEO to a dedicated company allows businesses to focus on their core activities while the SEO experts handle the technical aspects of website optimization.
What to Look for When Hiring an SEO Company
The first step to finding the right SEO expert is to make sure they understand your business. After all, they need to know what you do and who your target audience is before they can start optimizing your website.
Give them as much information upfront as you can about your specific business needs and what your goals are.
Additionally, make sure they use ethical methods. There are a lot of different SEO strategies out there, and not all of them are ethical. You want to make sure the expert you hire is using methods that won’t get your website penalized by Google.
Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Company
Before you start the process of hiring an SEO consultant or agency, be sure to do your research and ask lots of questions before you commit to anyone.
What is your process?
SEO can be a complicated process, so you want to make sure the expert you hire has a clear and concise plan for how they’re going to improve your website’s ranking.
What are your credentials?
There are no formal education requirements for becoming an SEO expert, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check their credentials. Ask them about their experience, how long they’ve worked in SEO, and what kind of training they’ve had.
Do you have references?
When you’re considering a potential SEO expert, be sure to ask for references. A good SEO professional should be able to provide you with a list of past clients that you can contact to ask about their experience, as well as data related to their success in improving ranking for previous clients.
Will you sign a contract?
Before you hire an SEO expert, be sure to get a contract in writing. This will protect you in case there are any misunderstandings about the scope of the project or the expectations for results.
Is Hiring an SEO Company Worth It?
The impact of SEO cannot be denied: SEO drives more than 1,000% more traffic than organic social media, and 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
If improving your SEO is on your mind today, now is the right time to consider hiring an SEO expert. They’ll want to conduct a thorough SEO audit of your web presence to create a strategy, and once they’ve come up with a plan to improve your ranking, it takes time to see results, from months to years.
Consumers rely on search engines to learn about and engage with businesses online, and ranking well is imperative to any business’s success. The value of starting as soon as possible lies in getting results as soon as possible.
