Pros And Cons of Hiring an SEO Agency to Take Care of Your Business

If you have just set up a website or a blog, you will no doubt have been inundated with emails and posts telling you how good your site looks, but you need help. Then they continue to tell you how they can get you ranking on page one of Google within 3 months for less than $200 per month. Do not jump at this opportunity until you have done some research and looked at the alternatives, the professionals in the SEO field such as PRable, before committing to anyone. You can find a company that suits your business and budget by visiting comparison sites like The Manifest, which lists their top 100 SEO agencies based on customer feedback.

What is SEO?

If you are new to website creation, you will probably be aware of Search Engine Optimization, but maybe you don't understand the importance of it in relation to your site? SEO is what brings people to your website without having to advertise. It is essentially how Google and other search engines view your site and if you want to rank highly, you need to optimize it by providing keywords and descriptions that are easily searched.

When you type a few words into Google and press enter, within milliseconds tens of thousands of possible matches to what you are looking for pop up. Through SEO, when somebody searches for keywords that match the service you are providing or product you are selling, you want your site to pop up fairly high on the list after the sponsored ads and big corporations. That is why SEO is important to any business with an Internet presence.

Should you hire an SEO Agency?

This largely depends on how much time you have available and your budget. Hiring somebody to optimize your site is not cheap, but then neither is advertising. To get the best results you need to really work at SEO and if that is not your area of expertise, then the cost of your time in learning about keyword placement and meta tags, not to mention permalinks and backlinks, will need to be factored in. It could take 3 or 4 months of hard slog just to start getting your site noticed, and while you are doing this, you are not doing what you set out to do—to provide a service or sell stuff.

You are not alone in this, however. There are plenty of tools and tons of free advice out there, but you need to be selective. It is very easy to find yourself spending hours on webinars that tell you absolutely nothing you didn’t already know but sell you everything you don’t need. Beware the “bonus offers”, the giveaways at the end that they say are worth $$$$’s when in fact they are worth nothing. Look at the PRable blog on SEO tools for more on this and only select the tools that will help you get things started—don’t get bogged down with gimmicks that will do things you don’t need at this time.

How to choose an SEO Agent

If you look at the emails I referred to above, you will find they are very similar if not identical, although they appear to have come from different organizations. Generally, you should avoid these. Whilst they may have the technical ability and probably have a very English sounding name, they are invariably not native English speaking. Why should that matter? Well, when you are writing content and meta descriptions that include your keywords, you want this to be done in a natural way. Simply writing keywords with no sentence structure is bad in terms of SEO and could see your site penalized by the search engines.

Furthermore, because of the intense competition in this field now, they will offer their services at a very low cost—$100 to $150 per month—and this will be reflected in the quality of the places they place ads and backlinks. One of the factors in SEO is authority, and if you are getting links from obscure or unknown sites, this will not look good to search engines and could, in fact, do a lot of harm.

Once you have that presence online and you are attracting traffic to your site, you will need to increase conversions, and you do that by establishing yourself as a brand leader or an expert in your particular field. If you can do that on your own AND provide a service, great, but if not you need to hire an expert to help out and at least get you headed in the right direction.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Halloween – Where Did It All Begin Halloween is a great time for kids to dress up and go Trick-or-Treating, but what is it all about? Well, Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows Eve, which means the evening before All Hallows (or Saints) Day in the Christian calendar. However, the origins of Halloween as a night of celebration date back to medieval times with the Festival of Samhain, an ancient Celtic tradition when people would dress up to ward off evil spirits. Photo by Pixabay on  Pexels.com Halloween was introduced to America by Scottish immigrants in the early 1900s, and thus began the commercialization of the occasion. It died off somewhat in Britain and Europe, just as the celebration of All Saints Day on the 1 st  November became just another date on the calendar. However, as with many things and mainly thanks to Hollywood, what happens in the States one year will happen in the UK the next (or in this case half a century later) and Europe inevitably follows. ...
Read more

How to Access & Share Digital Resources in Education

 A virtual learning environment provides a means for students to access curriculum mapped content and other learning material, but for it to be effective it must be relevant and up to date. It must also be accessible to all students if it is to work for everyone. In recent months, many schools and colleges have had to teach remotely because of closures and this has shown up certain issues with regards to distance learning materials and teaching methods. In this article, we look at how all educational facilities can access digital resources and share them effectively with their students, keeping them engaged as well as educated.   What are digital resources? Digital resources in education are made up of video, audio, text and images. The material is often interactive, allowing students to take part in tests that can then be assessed by the teacher, marked and commented upon. Podcasts are also used by teachers to interact with students, allowing them to ask questio...
Read more
Image
  Bonfire Night – What Is It All About Tonight, all over England (and perhaps other parts of the UK), people will be lighting fires and setting off fireworks in celebration of . . . What?  Well, we know that on this day, the 5 th  November, many, many years ago, a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament was thwarted, and the perpetrator, a certain Mr. Guy Fawkes, was arrested and sentenced to death. A rather macabre thing to celebrate, but we’ve been doing it for so many years now, the actual meaning of Bonfire Night is somewhat lost. Read on to learn more. Who was Guy Fawkes? Guy Fawkes was born on or around the 13 th  April 1570 in York, England, into a well-to-do family of Protestants, although his mother came from a staunch Catholic family. This may be what drew him to Catholicism after his father died when he was 8 years old when his maternal grandparents took more control over his education. He fought in the 80 Years War for Catholic Spain against the Protesta...
Read more