We all love ourselves some guru, and for us, it’s Neil Patel. In one of his articles, Neil talks about the times when a company must absolutely hire an SEO consulting services. It may not necessarily be an agency; it could be an in-house SEO. Then again, Neil also shares insights on why you must not hire your own SEO experts, that is, in-house. Here’s our take on these issues.
When do you need the help of an SEO company?
1) While planning a website
Is your company planning to launch a website soon? Some experts such as Bruce Clay advocates as early as 2012 the need for SEO web design. Yes, there is such a thing. A website that is built from scratch should be also optimized from scratch. While there could be some conflicts regarding structuring and programming the site, a website that is optimized from the ground up performs best SEO-wise.
Unfortunately, not all companies fail to realize this. The most often route taken is designing and developing the website before optimizing it instead of optimizing the design first before it should be developed. Since the website will be optimized eventually, there is the apparent redundancy in cost. Thus, for seamless integration, SEO must be considered early on the planning stage.
A website is an essential aspect of any digital marketing strategy. There is no single digital marketing campaign we’ve encountered that doesn’t involve a website. Even the content marketing is funneled down to and through the website. Website development is inescapable, and so does website optimization from the bottom up.
2) While redesigning a website
A website redesign is almost always considered due to performance issues particularly those that are hurting the user experience (UX). Come to think of it. You won’t be redesigning your site if it is performing to every expectation, right? However, a website redesign is a black hole that sucks whatever ranking and traffic you have built over the years. Would you risk losing such because of a redesign? Definitely not!
SEO should be your number consideration at this point. The experts can conduct a thorough website analysis specifically identifying which among the pages will be affected the most. The covers all aspect of SEO from inbound links to images. Afterward, the expert will come up with recommendations that can be integrated into the redesign. They call these technical SEO.
If you are thinking of doing it on your own, don’t. You cannot wing it; let an SEO company help you with this one the way you would commission a web design company to redesign your website. Just let them do what the SEO company does best. You might be surprised to know just how un-optimized your website is.
3) While recovering from a penalty
Most of the website owners only approach an SEO company when their sites were hit with a Google penalty. A sad truth. Although some site owners would learn a link building strategy or two, they don’t know any better. They won’t know that what they are doing is actually against the guidelines set by Google. In fact, some website owners don’t even know that these guidelines exist.
Recovering from a penalty, regardless of its severity, can take up to 9 months or even more, depending on the strategies and tactics employed to ‘clean’ the website. The fact that websites heavily rely on traffic to rank high cannot be emphasized enough. Technically, your site will receive low traffic volume if Google de-indexed the site. Now, you are seeing the criticality of recovering from a penalty.
The question now is if you are responsible for the de-indexing of your site, should you be the one to recover your website from the penalty? If you insist, you can do it on your own. However, don’t expect any immediate result more so if you have no idea whether the strategies you implement are effective enough to remove the penalty or not. That’s the main difference unlike when you hire an SEO to do the recovery for your website.
4) After conducting a search
That’s very simplistic. Nonetheless, what we mean is if you are doing a simple keyword search and you cannot find your website on the first page of the search results page and not even on the fifth page, then you are definitely doing something very wrong. It is either you are targeting the right keywords, but your website is ranking for the wrong keywords or that you are targeting the wrong keywords. Period.
There are two things that are evident; one, your rankings are declining and two, your traffic volumes are declining as well. These are just two of the things that SEO experts have learned to deal with with utmost eagerness and urgency. Why? Because every single traffic that your website is not able to convert is a lost opportunity. Adding insult to injury, you are losing each of them to your competitors.
Further, there are also two things that an SEO service provider possess namely recommendations and deliverables. Again, after conducting an SEO audit, the SEO specialists will give you a list of recommendations on how to improve your websites along with the target deliverables and timeline. If you or you will allow the agency to do the changes for you, then there is no reason your website should not rank in the very near future. A quality SEO company can rank your website in just three months.
Now, you can see clearly why you should not underestimate the importance of hiring an SEO agency and SEO per se. An agency is there to help, not to scam you. And don’t you ever believe the most common misconception that SEO is dead because it’ll never be; it’s so alive otherwise you won’t be here reading this article. There could be some changes in terms of algorithm updates as Neil points out. However, the core of SEO will remain the same for the years to come, and it’ll only get stronger as competition gets tougher.