By J. Carlos Velasquez on 03/11/2011
Why should every small business bring in a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant for their website needs? It’s a question most small- and medium-sized business owners should address to avoid marginalizing their online efforts. It used to be that if your business was small enough, you may not need to hire one; SEO would be would be most beneficial for the big companies and online businesses alone. This was when all one had to do was appropriately use your keywords and utilize local citations and the company would do well in it’s ranking. However, that was before every business had a website and when online marketing was not a necessity to obtain a substantial market share. This is definitely not the case anymore with Google providing local updates faster than bloggers resort to sarcasm. Website management is getting more and more complex, faster paced, and more of a business necessity across the board. With these developments comes a strengthening of the correlation between website management and a websites utility to a business. In today’s market, there are not only many important benefits that come with working with a professional SEO consultant but also a reduction of risk.
Below we will explore a few examples of what professional web management provides for a business.
Appropriate Execution of Devices and Strategies
Many business owners are on the fence when it comes to bringing in an SEO get their optimization strategies via blogs, participation in forums or even through simple trial and error. And while these are all valid sources of education, these mediums are not typically the best at explaining the actual application and implementation of the proper devices and strategies, they merely introduce them. This leaves business owners trying and figure out how to utilize what they learned into use all by themselves with only a tangential understanding. I wouldn’t feel capable of correctly performing surgery after merely reading about how someone else does it on their blog. When I need surgery performed I would ask a surgeon =, if I want to make a good sandwich I would ask the owner of a sandwich shop, and if you want to optimize the effect your internet presence has on your business I would ask Fyresite (a company that does SEO, web design, and marketing) because that is what they all do best. If you as a business owner are not sure, or don’t have a complete understanding as to how to do what your business needs, it’s better to seek advice from someone who does. By simply consulting with a knowledgeable SEO professional you can save your business a lot of time, headaches, and rewrites by getting things right the first time and only investing in the tactics that will really help your site. Not to mention with sites like Google increasing regulations on these marketing tools, you can avoid the severe penalization that come with using these devices incorrectly.
More Tactically Precise Link Development
The trouble with link building is that it’s as important as it is difficult to do correctly; and recent changes in regulation and protocols can actually land your website in a lot of trouble if not done in the approved manner. In fact at the end of February, Google announced that it was updating its search algorithm to serve higher-quality results to searchers. The update has since been dubbed the “Farmer Update” due to the algorithm’s new bias against what Google considers “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” (Translation: if you own www.how-to-rank-better-by-reading-these-articles-i-stole.com, things aren’t going to be looking as peachy-keen as they may have been beforehand). Google can penalize you for suspicious linkage and having your rankings slip or completely disappear from results as a result. Links drive traffic and rankings. Building links to your site is not as simple as one might think. Taking full advantage of linking means being able to identify the distinctive types of links available on the web, analyzing which types would benefit your business most, what your competitors are utilizing that you’re not, understanding what links are most important for your industry, and then developing a strategy for how you’re going to implement them into your business model. If you don’t have someone on your team who is both skilled in and dedicated to the art of link building (and it really is an art and a detailed one at that) you’re going to be missing out on a lot of profitable linking opportunities. Consulting with an expert will help you find existing goldmines on your site you didn’t even know where there as well as the ability to develop new ones. It all comes down to the content.
The Pros Use The Latest Strategies
One thing that’s common among most SEOs is that they live and breathe what they do, they’re absolutely obsessed. That’s not always good for their social lives, but it’s exceedingly good for their clients. People who make their living in the search engine optimization and web design industry pride themselves on being up-to-date and skilled on the latest and greatest tactics. They keep themselves active by always staying one step ahead of Google and their competition, also they are constantly experimenting to see what works right now, but also what will work in six months. That’s something an in house SEO or a DIY SMB owner doesn’t have the access or time to do. Your time could be better spent focusing on other aspects of your business if you can leave reading of blogs and attending conferences up to the professional SEO and Web Design individual you charge with maximizing your website’s utility. When you need a fresh pair of eyes or someone to help you find the signal in all of the noise, an SEO consultant can help you do that.
Better Conversion Rates
Good SEO consultants are responsible for money, not traffic. That means they pretty much live in their analytics, analyzing the data they’re seeing and then using that to create or modify a site that not only ranks well, but that converts. Ultimately that’s the goal of all of this. It’s not to drive as many people as possible to your website (though that is a tool and can be an indicator of progress). It’s to make your site more money, and if you’re not skilled in studying conversion funnels, creating landing pages, understanding time on site, monitoring keyword trends, studying user interaction, or other tactics us professionals do, then you’re not optimizing your site’s utility as much as you possibly could. That behavior is basically leaving money on the table.
Client Support
One of the paramount things you get from bringing an SEO consultant into your business is that it means an expert is never more than a phone call away and customer satisfaction is paramount in their industry. If you’re unsure whether or not you’re doing something correctly, not sure how to target specific content or you think you’re seeing something awry in the search results, you have someone who is an authority on the subject to go to; someone who will either calm your nerves or validate your fear and fix any flaws. Having an expert on your team and on your website can be priceless in giving you that reassurance as well as ensuring that your site is perpetually on the right path. As both business and online culture continue to evolve, SEO is going to become an increasingly important part of the marketing process. If you don’t have someone on your team who is dedicated to that task with substantial resources behind them, you will soon find your website being left behind and unable to keep up with the industry changes that occur on a daily basis. You may know your business inside and out, but when it comes to SEO and web design, business owners often don’t realize how much they don’t know. That’s where we can help.
