Marketing budgets are going up as even small businesses are now spending an average of $75,000 a year on digital campaigns. This is a significant budget item for a number of businesses, meaning that they want to know that they’re going to get a return on their investment. That’s why an increasing number of businesses are turning to professional SEO services for their digital needs.
Search engine optimization takes advantage of the way that search engines index and rank websites. Search engines use a tool called a “web crawler” to look through every page of a site for broken links, design hierarchy, and keywords. Based on a long list of criteria, they rate these sites as relevant to certain subject matter, indexing them in advance of user searches.
If you’re wondering whether or not your company should consider professional SEO services, here are 6 reasons why you should go with a pro.
1. You’ll Save Time
If you’re running a small business, it’s likely you’re wearing a few different hats at any given time. You could be making executive decisions, inventory choices, and doing small maintenance work, all in the course of an hour. You don’t have the time to dedicate to digital marketing on top of that.
You know your products better than anyone else and how to communicate with customers. You should be doing what you know best–managing your company–and leave the nitty gritty digital work to a professional.
Although most business owners work more than 40 hours a week, your time is certainly worth more than most of the other people in your business.
If, for the price of what you’d pay your receptionist, you could get professional SEO services, why wouldn’t you hire someone who could do that?
It could cost you a few hundred thousand dollars to put together a meager digital marketing team for your business. You could get that value for a fraction of the cost by hiring professionals.
2. Get Great Results
Even if you’ve got a great website, you might not be seeing the kind of traffic that you know you deserve. The fixes to get you to the top of the first page of search results in your industry could be straightforward, but finding the time isn’t.
While you might know some of the issues you have with SEO, you might not have the time to do a full audit. Professional SEO services will start off by assessing where you are and where you need to go.
Most of the initial work of SEO is straightforward, but some of your work could involve cleaning your codebase or fixing your sitemap. This is tedious and time-consuming work. You need to be worrying about closing sales, rather than cleaning up code.
3. Accuracy
One of the great sins of strong managers is wanting to do everything themselves. It makes sense because you know your products and customers so well. Why not handle all of your digital campaignings on your own?
You’ve fixed pipes in your office, designed promotional material, and maybe even repaired your own work vehicle. Unfortunately, fixing SEO isn’t as simple.
Professional SEO services will manage your brand not just as it stands today, but relative to trends coming down the pipeline. While you can make fixes to your pipes and forget it about it for the foreseeable future, websites don’t work that way. They take constant tending, like a garden.
Keyword targeting will change as an industry changes. Regional trends will require your business to use different local terminology and target different audiences over time. Professional SEO services can target your customers with accuracy and turn leads into sales.
4. Track A Moving Target
With changes on social media being introduced daily, it’s hard to know how to target audiences through every channel. Professional SEO services will offer opportunities to engage with your customer base in new ways.
If you don’t have social media profiles for every product under your brand, it’s time to build them now. SEO professionals can help you to track your demographics across each major social media platform and keep you relevant in this changing landscape.
Every social media platform has a different style. Twitter allows brands to engage with their customers immediately, while Instagram lets you show off your products visually. Facebook has a slightly older demographic and allows you to get a little more expository with your engagement.
SEO professionals will help you to understand what kind of content you should be putting on each platform for the best results.
5. No Penalties
One of the worst punishments any business could receive from a search engine is to be penalized for taking shortcuts. The old methods of spamming in comments, filling your metadata with repeating keywords, and hiding invisible text are now considered unethical.
Search engines reward organic traffic or traffic that ends up on your site due to a natural process of browsing and recommending. Once you get blacklisted, it’s hard to dig out of that hole. If you pay for cheap SEO consulting or try to do it the old way, you could end up in this situation.
6. A Second Opinion Is Important
If you’ve been working on your website for a while, you could get bored with things or make simple mistakes. It’s always good to get a second pair of eyes on your work.
You’ll also be able to learn from SEO professionals when it comes to best practices and emerging trends.
Professional SEO Services Bring Quality Traffic
Hiring SEO professionals will ensure that you get quality traffic to your site. While cheaper SEO services could initially bring in higher numbers, those might be bots that hit your site because they fell for cheap tricks. Organic and quality SEO takes time and money.
If you’re ready to find the right professional SEO services for your company, contact us today for tips on finding a perfect fit.