N.B. This is published but nae finished yet.–
This is a post I’ve been mulling over for a long time, giving people an honest overview of the options available when assigning SEO work without being colored by financial interest. To be honest it’s a tough call, as anyone including myself who writes about SEO is almost certainly going to have some kind of interest in selling SEO related services at the same time. I’m giving it a shot though, so here is a no-holds barred opinion of the pros and often costly cons of assigning SEO work.
1. Do It YourSelf.
Here is my first step to shooting my SEO business aspirations in the foot, and hopefully saving some of you an arm and a leg in the process.
- In my experience, for many sites the best solution for SEO is to do it yourself.
There are 2 overriding reasons for this:
- 1. No agency will probably ever come close to the interest you have in your own site to promote it, make it successful and most importantly create good content. This doesn’t mean you can’t outsource individual SEO tasks such as link building, even content creation and so on - indeed you can outsource pretty much everything if you can find the right people - but ultimately you should take responsibility for your own site’s search engine optimizaton. If you take the point of view of placing the entire process in the hands of another, you will with almost complete certainty pay a considerable amount for lacklustre results.
And why? Because as mentioned in a previous post, however many tricks of the SEO trade you employ, link building, submissions, social bookmarking et al., unless there is a real commitment behind them to building a quality site your efforts will be stunted from the beginning, and that commitment doesn’t come from an agency or an outsourced freelancer, it comes from you.
Again this doesn’t mean you have to do everything, but it does mean you should be in control and be responsible for it, and as a general rule outsource individual tasks, not “SEO” as a whole. You’ll end up with a better site and save an awful lot of money on the company, marketing and customer acquisition expenses that are built in to almost every SEO package regardless of quality.
2. Hire an Agency
This is an option for any website. The thing to know about agencies it hat the large majority of them will be outsourcing most of the actual SEO work to often offshore providers, so that typically only 30% or so of your budget is actually going into search engine optimization - the remaining 70% or so is company expenses and sales. If the security and convenience of working with an agency as opposed to putting together your own team of providers is worthwhile for you then use an agency by all means, but understand the costs involved. A very large number of agencies will focus on goals such as top 10 for relatively uncompetitive keywords, so that you can spend a considerable amount of money with a limited increase in traffic and measurable action. Bottom line is choose your agency carefully, be aware of how much goes into company expenses, and keep the focus at all times on real, measurable results. Your goal is to promote your site: is their goal primarily the same as yours, is it primarily to sell SEO services, or is it something of both? Look past the marketing, and see where intentions lie and the degree of honesty and transparent communication provided.
3. Outsource
By this I mean bypass the agency costs and put your own team together. This can be extremely cost-effective, the challenge here is to find the right people. Entering the murky world of offshore SEO providers, who in today’s economy are responsible for providing much of the actual labor of search engine optimization, is a frustrating process because the quality is generally quite low. In general if you see any of the following services offered:
- one-way link building
- directory submission
- article submissions
- article writing
- reciprocal links
- on-page optimization
- social bookmark submission
and so on, then you can be confident that offshore providers will be involved in the business model. Indeed offshore SEO services have become so synonymous with the process of SEO itself that the large majority of webmasters equate SEO with the very list of services mentioned above - which it categorically isn’t, it is first and foremost about building a great site and building relationships to promote your product or service.
Anyway, if you want to go through the process of finding good people without the agency overheads, the outsourcing may be for you.
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And on a promotional note, but that’s exactly what I do. I use great people to do first rate SEO work focused on the systematic increase of traffic, rankings, and measurable action, but being based online I don’t have those huge company overheads. Quality and communication are outstanding and as competitive as any agency. The cost of using our services is anywhere between 20%-50%+ LESS THAN any agency quote.
I mean it. If you send me details of any SEO agency package or quote you currently use on your site, I can in almost every case offer the same package with the same deliverables at 20%-50%+ lower price, simply because I don’t have huge company expenses. Contact me using the “Contact Us” button above, give me details of your situation, and I’ll deliver the same or better at a much more competitive cost. There’s nothing to lose, and I’m for real.
Thanks for reading and good luck :).
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