Everything you need to know when hiring external SEO - If you run a small or medium business, you will spend a lot of time and money on marketing with online SEO. Due to the size of the business, the budget will be tight, compared to large corporations and companies. Whether you run an ecommerce store, a physical store, a SAAS business, an agency, or anything else, you've heard of SEO (search engine optimization).
Depending on your skills, expertise and experience, you will know a lot about SEO or you may know a little, but somehow you know that SEO takes a lot of time. When you consider outsourcing your business SEO, there are a few things to keep in mind before making a decision.
SEO will take time, be difficult to understand, take a lot of effort to update the algorithm and will cost you a lot of money (for backlinks, technical optimization, etc.).
Below is a summary of 8 tips divided into professional and outsourced SEO software below, hopefully this will help you make the right decision for the company.
What is hiring as an SEO?
Hiring an SEO is when you have decided to pay another business / agency to do all the SEO work with you both on and off the page. This will also be a freelancer, but for most businesses, this will be the company that does the SEO work. If you do not want to do SEO yourself and do not want to hire people in the house, this is what you need to think.
Generally, you have 2 options to outsource:
- Find a freelancer
- Find good company
Advantages when hiring external SEO
- Opportunity cost
Whether you run a new business, a small or medium-sized company, you want to compare tasks and workflows with opportunity costs. The cost to do something different in your side business.
Suppose you only spend 1 hour per day, 5 hours per week for SEO work. What would you do instead of SEO, if you had 5 extra hours per week to do other important things in the business (sales, marketing, customer service, strategic thinking, etc.).
To do SEO, you need to have a lot of knowledge in this area and it takes a lot of time to learn more new knowledge. This means that if you are not good at SEO, you will waste time, which will have a big negative impact on the business.
When outsourcing, you do not need to care about anything mentioned above and you, employees, spend time for other tasks in the business.
Always think about the workflow, the tasks you do, and try to prioritize these tasks so you can only spend time on really important things.
- Specialize
When you hire an agent, you get instant expertise and know-how. They have updated twice with the latest changes in the SEO world and will get results much faster than you. You don't have to worry about whether you do it right, how to create backlinks, etc. SEO is a fast-growing, sophisticated profession.
In addition, most companies also work side by side with other marketing campaigns on your side so everything will work together. If you have a lot of engagement and traffic from social media channels, you can provide more social signals for content and websites to increase SEO even more.
Have a strategic conversation with the companies you are thinking about working with and compare skills, references, recommendations from them, how they want to make changes in your side business and prices. both.
- Solid long-term solution
If you choose to hire an outside agency to market search engine, you find the right partner, you will often have a solid long-term relationship.
Once the solution is established and you are satisfied with the solution, you won't have to do anything or spend extra time on the contract. You will just need to keep up with monthly / weekly updates from the company, where they usually let you see your rankings increase / decrease and anything else changes.
- Save time to do other tasks
When you hire an agent, you will save a lot of time yourself or your staff. Now you will have time to do many other important or even more important things and also do what you are good at, not what you are forced to do (at least for some people and businesses).
See more: Build a professional responsive website
Disadvantages of outsourcing SEO
- Expensive
When you outsource SEO, sometimes it's very expensive. However, keep in mind that, when we write about outsourcing, we are not talking about finding Fiverr gig to do SEO on your side, but a legitimate company that actually works with SEO and digital marketing. We're not saying Fiverr, Konker or similar services can't be good, but we won't recommend any of them, if we're talking about SEO seriously.
We are just honest and we know their side strategy, how they work with their customers and you will not get any good results when working with them. They use the blackhat method (the method of trying to trick Google and then you will be heavily penalized by Google) instead of doing actual, long-term and legitimate SEO work on off-page SEO.
We only do white hat SEO and we know that search engine marketing with search engine optimization requires a lot of time, energy and skill to get good results.
While agents can be expensive, they may work for you, as long as they can provide more value than your cost. Just remember that SEO is a long term job.
Try to contact 2-5 different companies, find someone you like and trust, then make a solid plan that works for your company.
- You have no full control
If you decide to outsource, you will not be in full control of the job. This is something you need to keep in mind. When outsourcing anything in the business, you don't have complete control over the work from them, what they do, how to do it, etc. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but you will not be able to check the goods. on what they are doing.
This means you have to choose the company you trust, be able to operate on your behalf, and the goals discussed with you.
- Not all SEO companies have expertise and subtlety
Unfortunately, not all SEO companies have the right skills to do SEO. Some of them only have favorite websites or good sellers but not really good at search engine marketing. The problem with this is that you need to differentiate between them. There are 1,000 companies doing this in India, Europe, North America and basically all other continents.
This is also why we do not recommend outsourcing this type of work for low-cost solutions. It's really hard to tell which companies are bad and which ones are good, because they're good at telling you what you want to hear.
Of course there are bigger companies that fully master SEO skills, but big companies are also very expensive and don't have the solution you are looking for. Therefore, try to find small and medium-sized company that suits your requirements.
- Cultural barriers
Cultural barriers are problematic if you hire companies abroad. While globalization of the internet has done wonders for most businesses, this also means that many new countries will be able to work together. Unfortunately, differences in cultures can lead to certain problems.
Although the SEO industry is much higher technology than many other industries, this still leads to cultural disagreements.
However, over time, we expect this difference in understanding, expectations, language, etc. to become less and less. This is very important to consider if you choose to hire SEO abroad.
6 important questions to ask before outsourcing SEO
- How do you measure SEO job performance?
You want to measure the difference in organic rankings, and the really important ones are usually the number of leads, sales, phone calls, etc. When you receive monthly / weekly reports, make sure they focus on good rankings but also the rankings that will actually generate revenue for your business.
- How do you decide which keywords / search queries to focus on?
For this part, you are looking for agencies that are doing serious analysis, throughout your website and competitors to evaluate and choose the right keywords. The company mentions test terms to determine which one will produce the best results.
- How do you integrate SEO with other marketing strategies / campaigns?
You want to work with a company that knows SEO is part of online marketing, but not the only thing. It must be a natural part of your marketing strategy and not operate in an isolated environment. You want to work with a company that understands your business and other marketing initiatives you do.
- How do you create search optimized content?
Make sure the SEO company you are working with produces good, quality content, properly optimized for title tags, meta descriptions, etc. If the company has a dedicated copywriter for this task , that would be extra credit. Also, make sure they include rich media (photos, screenshots, videos, infographics, etc.) to maximize content SEO performance.
- What is your approach to getting lots of backlinks?
This is an important part of a company's SEO strategy. Many companies advertise themselves as the best SEO agency because they provide you with the number of backlinks X for only the amount of X. If they write or talk about such things, then they are not good at providing links. solid backlinks, which instead provide something spam, low quality backlinks.
- After starting the job, what is included in the monthly service
Many SEO companies invest a lot of effort into creating a beautiful 60-day schedule for their SEO service, so it looks like they'll work hard on your website. Just keep in mind that a lot of this is a one-time setup like keyword research, reporting settings, tracking setups, etc.When this is done, you don't have to spend time on these in your next month.
Some companies will work very little after doing some work and content created, but still cost you the entire price. Be sure to know what they do to improve the ongoing campaign, month by month. If they can't report exactly what they do to get new backlinks, improve the page, etc. they are not good enough and you should not work with them.
See more: Create Website
Epilogue
Proficient SEO experts will be a great long-term investment if done correctly and will definitely save you a lot of headaches. At this point, you know SEO is important to the business and you know that it's time consuming, but make sure you hire the right people to do it.
If you're going to outsource everything related to SEO, and follow the steps and tips mentioned above, you're ready to get started. This is what we recommend for everyone who works with regards to SEO and digital marketing.
Hope this review article is right for you, and share it with the people you think need this information. We would be happy if you do that.
0 Comments