Everyone can agree that the pace with which search engine optimization (SEO) has developed over the past couple of years has been phenomenal. Keeping pace with all the developments taking place in SEO can be challenging for anyone, and if you don’t have a clear strategy in place, it gets even tougher. The dynamics of SEO have changed for the better and it isn’t all about driving traffic to your website any longer. There is no point in having 1,000 new website visitors coming to your website if only 1 out of all those visitors is going to convert into a customer.
That is the reason why you must invest in effective SEO tactics. This will allow you to use SEO as a strategic tool for marketing that will attract the right kind of traffic on your website. You must also focus on driving conversion rates up and boosting your bottom line; that is the only way you will manage to get the right results from search engine optimization. Achieving all of this on your own can be difficult. This is why so many businesses are looking at outsourcing options for their websites’ SEO.
It may seem to you that everyone working in the digital marketing spectrum is claiming to be an expert, which makes finding the right agency to partner with difficult. The term SEO is used interchangeably with digital marketing. You’re not wrong for thinking that it is a clever strategy for getting business owners to invest in something that is difficult to measure and doesn’t offer any immediate benefits. The only reason the field of SEO exists is because of search engines like Google. Their algorithms are constantly changing and evolving. Keeping pace with all the changes and the impact that these changes will have on your website is the main challenge you must overcome.
The best way to do this is by outsourcing your SEO to an agency so that your business stays updated with all the latest SEO changes. Deciding on outsourcing your SEO to an agency is an easy decision. Finding the right agency is the hard part. The most important question you must answer is whether you should handle your SEO yourself or acquire the services of an SEO agency. The wise decision would be to outsource to an agency and here are the reasons for that:
1. SEO Is Evolving at a Rapid Pace
Anyone that has been keeping track of the search engine optimization industry will tell you that the only thing that remains constant is change when it comes to SEO. Even Google insiders have stated that the algorithm is changed about 500 times in a single year. This means there are nearly 10 updates being launched every single week. So, if you’re planning on handling your own SEO, how will you manage to keep pace with all the different changes being made constantly?
The good news is that there is an entire industry at your disposal that is focused on search engine optimization, and you can take advantage of that. Their job is to keep testing new theories, protect businesses from incurring penalties from search engines, and keeping up with the different changes in the industry. An SEO agency will ensure that they handle everything related to SEO for your business, leaving you to focus on core tasks and processes. They will spend all their time ensuring that they keep pace with the latest SEO trends.
When you’re running a business, there are a lot of different things you need to worry about. Taking on the complex challenge of implementing SEO tactics on your website is the last thing you should be concerned about. You should leave that to the SEO experts, as that will help you save time and money in the long run.
2. SEO Depends on Quality Content
A lot of people will claim that the most important thing about search engine optimization is content marketing, which must be spot on to produce the desired result i.e. rising in search results. However, you shouldn’t place all the importance on content marketing because it goes hand in hand with search engine optimization. The mistake a lot of businesses make is in not having a solid content strategy in place. This mistake ends up harming their search engine optimization efforts. The main part of every content strategy is SEO because if you want to rank organically on search engines, you must have quality content. Quality content includes topics and keywords that you are targeting.
On the other hand, if you want people to find your content via search results, you must ensure that it is linkable, shareable, and well-built so that it can rank. It is a known fact that having high volumes of good content on your website will help drive traffic to it and result in more leads.
So, how do you go about creating quality content that ranks high on search engines? How will you integrate SEO into the content? Who is developing the content marketing plan for you? There are a lot of different dynamics that come into play and all of them can be answered properly by outsourcing your SEO to an agency. This will ensure that you don’t have to worry about creating content and the SEO agency will have the expertise to integrate SEO and handle the entire content creation process for you.
3. You Need Consistency for Social SEO
SEO and social media have combined to form social SEO which is being used by businesses all around the world for marketing purposes. The power of social media is apparent for everyone and businesses are using social media to improve their SEO, get their content indexed, and rank higher on search engines. However, all of that requires consistency, which is difficult to acquire on your own. This is where outsourcing to an SEO agency makes sense because you can take advantage of their resources.
This will not only put you ahead of the game but will also allow you to focus on more important parts of your business. When you have an outsourcing partner, you can devise better strategies for marketing and ensure that your business has visibility online. The best way to go about making an impact on social media is through a dedicated strategy. Outsourcing allows you to tap into the talent and knowledge of experts. They will help devise strategies for your business, while you get to put your resources on more important aspects of your business.
4. Link Building Requires Professional Resources
There is a lot of hype surrounding link building, especially because of the numerous Penguin penalties that have given it a bad name. The tactic that is part of current industry practices is link earning, which is a less predatory and spammy form of link building. Link earning is a great concept; one that every business should look to adopt if they wish to rank high on Google. However, the reality of the situation is that links don’t appear magically. You need the expertise of professionals to get the right results.
You could end up earning a link through luck, which can then lead to a penalty. For instance, a business that never bought links or tried any black hat techniques for link building can end up getting penalized if they are referenced by a spammy and low authority blog. The result would be endless frustration for the business as it would require months of link cleanup to overcome that penalty. Nowadays, you require the expertise of SEO experts that can manage the link building process in a responsible manner.
Link building requires a lot of expertise since it’s not only about spamming links on the internet. It involves monitoring the link profiles, cleaning up suspect links before they lead to penalties, and identifying any risky links that you have earned or acquired. Most small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the resources to handle all of that, which is where working with an agency is the best option for them.
5. Taking Advantage of Technical SEO Expertise
One area of SEO that is often underappreciated is its technical side. The technical side of SEO is related to page load times, how your content is ranking on search engines, the quality of the semantic markup and coding, and whether the website architecture is built appropriately. There are several free ‘SEO Audit’ tools that are available online, but the majority of these tools focus only on the On-Page side of SEO. Very few of these resources cover the technical side of SEO. These tools are actionable and informative when used by the right people, but they tend to create more confusion for marketers.
To make things worse, a lot of web designers have no idea about SEO, yet they claim to know a lot about it. In reality, they can do more harm than good for your business because design and development are poles apart. You need the expertise of SEO professionals who know what they are doing. That is where you need to hire an SEO specialist so that you know you’re getting the right feedback from them. A web designer may not recommend website updates to you, because they either don’t want to mess with the current updates or have no clue as to how they should fix the problem.
A good technical SEO analyst will understand the complexities of the technical side of SEO and will explain everything to you in greater detail. The most important thing that they bring to the table is that they will breakdown the development and design language in simple words for you. This will allow you to make the best possible decisions based on the facts instead of relying on opinions. This is where outsourcing to an SEO agency makes more sense than working with in-house professionals.
6. Lower Costs
SEO is extremely complicated by nature. It takes a multifaceted approach which includes link building, PPC, content writing, and web design all combined to ensure the success of a campaign. You can’t choose to ignore one part of SEO because that will get you sub-standard results. This is why it is imperative that you adopt a holistic approach. If you choose to have everything done in-house, you will need to hire new employees—from SEO specialists to content writers. It would put a massive strain on your resources as well. You will not only be hiring new personnel but you will also be investing in their training and development.
When you outsource to an agency, you don’t need to worry about costs. The agency that you will be working with already has a complete staff that will work on every aspect of SEO with you. There are also shorter contracts for outsourced SEO services and most companies don’t have lock-in periods. As you don’t have any additional employees to pay and no long contracts to follow, the overall costs of your SEO are significantly lower. This is one of the main reasons for outsourcing SEO to an agency instead of doing everything in-house.
7. Focus More on Growing Your Agency
When you choose to outsource to an agency, you are taking a massive amount of workload away from your organization. This gives you more time to focus your efforts on growing your agency as all the rest is handled by professionals. Instead of worrying about content writing, keyword research, and link building, you can spend more time developing your main service. For instance, if your company is good at social media management, you should place greater emphasis on that and outsource the rest of the SEO to an agency.
It will allow you to have more room for focusing on your strengths. You can then focus on developing your business and bringing in new clients. When you’re outsourcing your SEO to an agency, you can achieve a lot of objectives, like cutting down on your costs, ensuring the success of your campaigns, and achieving faster growth in your industry.
