Pros and Cons of Hiring a SEO Consultant. Should You or Shouldn’t You?
Your a business owner. You have a website. How do you gain online exposure from Google and other major search engines?
The SEO Optimization Process
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of attempting to reach the high ranking spots on searches run through search engines. Â
A SEO consultant’s process enhances your website through a series of keywords often searched for by people attempting to come across services offered by your business or brand. These keywords are not only inputted within the content of the website but also through the proper usage of links and URL structure. This  tactic along with implementing numerous other influencing factors that help search engines crawl and understand what your website is about help boost keyword rankings for targeted phrases and terms.
The purpose of this process is to gain further recognition of your brand and increase credibility by appearing highest in the rankings of Google or Yahoo or any other search engine on the Internet.
SEO Optimization Services 101
On a basic level, the higher up the search engine rankings your company is, the closer to the top of the first page of searches your business will be and in turn you will see more hits on your website and therefore, more traffic and more sales.
When broken down to its most basic level, the whole procedure seems simple and straightforward and it makes you wonder why you’re not already on the way to the number one spot. The reason is, because the whole operation has become so crucial to business development and recognition in recent years that most large companies are already on top of their SEO campaigns.
In order to ensure that your brand is reaching the top of search engines’ number one pages, an SEO consultant needs to be underway within your company. But where do you start with this? Is it a process you or someone within your corporation can do yourselves?
The answer is yes and no. With research, time and hard work, you can bring your skills up to scratch to handle an effective SEO campaign within your company but with such high competition, is it worth the effort when you can outsource it to the professionals?
The Disadvantages of Hiring a SEO Consultant:
- Cost – Handling your own internet marketing work is considerably cheaper than hiring a SEO consultant to carry this job out for you. If you are a start-up company or a small brand, you may not be able to release enough budget to pass the project to a paid professional. By doing your own SEO work, you cut that cost out.
- Control – By taking care of search engine optimization for your own company, you can ensure that time is being focused efficiently to the job and you can maintain complete control over what procedures are undertaken to improve your search rankings.
- Knowledge of your business – By assuming the role of your company’s SEO consultant, you embark on a journey of becoming more familiar with the inner workings of your own company. From a backseat role, many find themselves isolated from day to day workings and focus mainly on business related decisions at a high level rather than the actual industry knowledge. By taking on the task yourself, you start to know the intricate detail running through the business.
Additionally, acting as your own SEO consultant you become face to face with your opponents within that industry, giving you a better chance to scrutinize your competition and analyze the process they are employing to wrangle their way to the top spot, and counteract those yourself.
The Advantages of Hiring a SEO Consultant:
- Time – Running your own SEO campaign can be time consuming. Even assigning another member of staff to the job means losing time allocated to their original tasks. As the whole process takes considerable time to execute, both on a daily basis and as a total entity, it isn’t always viable to drop other responsibilities to attend to it.
- Getting clued up – In order to perform the duties of a SEO consultant yourself, you need to not only know everything there is to know about your own company, you need to be fully aware of  best practice techniques and tactics as well as knowing how your competition works and what strategies they’re employing. For example, if your company provides web conferencing services, you need to be aware of what strategies will ensure you reach that top spot and what other web conferencing services are employing to undermine your work and beat you to that golden place.
- Changes – The development of SEO since the start of the Internet has been exponential and it constantly changes now. Randi Thornton, founder and president of www.SEOGoogleGuru.com often claims that even from the last year, changes have been so significant within the industry that techniques employed previously are no longer relevant today. As with the previous example, if you ran a company that offered web conferencing services, your focused keywords may previously have been ‘video conferencing’ or ‘conference call’. Nowadays somebody is much more likely to search for ‘web conferencing’ making previous key phrasing redundant to today’s campaign.
- Recognizing mistakes – An experienced SEO consultant understands how the whole process works and has the ability to employ it meticulously and accurately. Other companies who employ professional SEO consultants to the job will have experts monitoring progress and reassessing procedures that aren’t working to their full capacity. As the assigned personnel for your own company, you need to be able to recognize the same issues, monitor them and rectify them to the same standard as someone who specializes in this field. This can be difficult and can cause issues if you’re not fully aware of what you’re attempting to seek out.
Author Bio:
Seo expert James Martell has made a name for himself in the affiliate world with his podcast series ‘The Affiliate Buzz’. Helping new affiliates build their business is James’ passion. Whether it’s sharing information from sites like  www.webconferenceclassroom.com, or hosting live sessions to help others succeed in their businesses, James is always happy to share his knowledge.
