Top ten reasons why you may need to bring in an SEO consultant.
Whether you should hire a professional SEO consultant is a discussion that most online marketing teams will have sooner or later. The question is perhaps not whether you can afford to hire an SEO expert but whether you can afford not to. SEO should be seen as an important online marketing strategy and as an investment not a cost to your business. Here are ten reasons why you may need to bring in an SEO company.
Your website has been banned or penalised by Google
If you have employed an unethical SEO company or you are using black hat SEO techniques (used to artificially boost your rankings that are not within search engine guidelines), you are running the risk of being penalized or banned by Google. This can have serious implications for your lead generation and online revenue. If you think your website has been banned, then you should bring on board an SEO consultant straight away.
You don’t have the knowledge or the inclination
Small business owners ideally should focus on their core responsibilities and delegate other tasks that can be done by other members of staff or a consulting company. Like other facets of your business such as bookkeeping, SEO could be done in-house but it’s a specialized task that takes training, ongoing education and keeping up with legislation. Similarly, SEO takes unique skills and is a dedicated role within an organisation.
Your clients can’t find you online
If your own clients can’t find you online, you know you have major problems. This doesn’t mean that your website has been banned or penalized. But if you are not even ranking for your business name, things are not looking good in the SEO department. It just may mean that you need guidance from an SEO expert to help you optimize your website. Call in a professional who can look at all aspects of strategy including off and on-page optimization.
Your business is expanding
When you first start a business, it might seem cheaper to invest your time and resources in DIY SEO but as your business grows and develops, you may find that you will have to reluctantly hand the reins over to the experts. Ever heard of the saying you have to spend money to make money – one of the worst marketing mistakes a small business can make is not investing in online marketing to promote their company.
There is no lead generation from your website
For a lot of businesses, their website is their main sales funnel so when no leads are being generated directly through the site, this may be cause for concern. There may be a stumbling block at the start of the conversion path if your site is not optimised for income-generating keywords that are relevant to your products and services or you may have the traffic but not the conversion – you need to find out why and address these issues sharpish.
Your site is not in the first 3 pages of results when you search for your main keywords
As we head towards people using mobile devices that are time-poor and will only browse a page or more of search results, being on page four of the SERPs just won’t cut the mustard. By hiring a professional SEO company, they may be able to pull your rankings from oblivion to search engine domination. You may be 70% of the way there with your SEO strategies but an SEO company can pull you over the line to get you to page one.
Your website rankings have dropped
Before you hit the panic button, do a site search by typing in ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ and see if Google returns any results. If your website returns results it may have just suffered a penalty and has not been banned by Google. Either way, it’s not great news and this may be the time to bring in an SEO consultant to analyse your site and get to the crux of the problem. There may be several reasons why rankings are slipping.
You have over-optimised your website
The saying ‘you can have too much of a good thing’ definitely applies to Search Engine Optimization. On rare occasions, an SEO expert may be called in to undo all the ‘good work’ you have been doing to your website. Search engines are looking for sites which are built naturally and organically. If 1000 backlinks to your site appear overnight, for example, this may arouse suspicion and your rankings may drop slightly or even a lot.
Google Analytics data makes no sense to you
It’s all and well having a Google Analytics account, but if you don’t know how to use those web metrics to modify your online marketing campaigns, it’s kind of pointless don’t you think? An SEO consultant can help you make sense of your data and explain it in plain English so you can monitor, tweak and adjust your internet campaigns and get more for your investment in SEO.
You are sick of paying for your traffic on a per-click basis
Pay-Per-Click advertising is a great short-term strategy that can drive traffic to your website very quickly but over the long term, it can be very draining on a limited marketing budget. Admittedly organic and natural SEO strategies can take longer for your website to rank but indexing your website on search engines is free. With updates such as Google Caffeine, Google is indexing pages even quicker than ever before.
If you are managing an online business that is operating in a competitive or saturated market, need to target a niche group of customers, rely solely on online revenue or have a large site of 200 pages or more, you may want to consider hiring an SEO company. Take a look at the range of SEO packages we have on offer and speak to an SEO professional consultant about how they can help you optimise your website and maximise your online return on investment.
