I write a lot about SEO on this blog, because I get a lot of SEO questions. Most of the time those questions are from people who want to do their own SEO to save money, rather than hire an SEO consultant. I get wanting to save money. I get wanting to learn to more and be on-top of your website marketing. These are all good things. However, working with an SEO consultant to get you moving in the right direction has many advantages.
Premium Tools
If someone is offering SEO services, there’s a good chance that they have access to tools that you don’t. For example, we subscribe to both Moz and KWFinder, great SEO tools that help us get the information we need to help our clients get found. However, these tools aren’t cheap, and often times, small business owners can find it difficult to digest the cost of these tools for just one site.
It’s really important, though to have tools that can help you find the best keywords for your site, help you track your rank, traffic, and progress, analyze your backlinks and give you ideas for new ways to draw more traffic and customers to your site.
Not only do we have have access to these tools, we know how to use them! It can be overwhelming to learn new software on your own. It can be confusing to try to figure out the lingo. When you work with an SEO consultant, they can explain what everything means. Do you understand terms like search volume, keyword difficulty, and click-through-rate? Those are important when it comes to SEO.
Keyword Research
If you decide to DIY SEO and invest in the tools, knowing how to find the keywords is one step, but understanding which ones to use is just as important. Say I sell apples. When I look at the data on apples, I can see that ‘apples’ has 187,000 searches every month. Jackpot! I can optimize my site for apples and try to cash in on those search results.
An SEO consultant, though, will tell you not so fast. Is a person searching for ‘apples’ looking to buy apples? Or looking to find out more about apples? Apples is a pretty broad term. Just because someone types “apples” doesn’t mean they want to buy apples. Furthermore, the keyword apples is extremely competitive with a high search difficulty. A good SEO can help you find a better choice, such as buy apples online, which has decent search volume and low difficulty. No, you won’t get 187,000 people on your site each month, but you have a more realistic shot of getting ranked for that keyword and getting some traffic.
Interpreting Results
Another great thing about hiring an SEO consultant is that we know how to interpret the results we’re seeing. We understand how Google Analytics works and how Google Search Console works and we understand how to tell if what we’re doing works.
You might login to analytics and see a decrease in traffic and think you’ve failed, but a pro knows how to dig deeper into those stats. Sometimes a decrease in traffic isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I always say that any good SEO isn’t focused on solely increasing the number of visitors to your site, but getting you the right visitors. If you get 100 new visitors to your site, but none of them contact you or hire you, then what good is that. I’d take 10 new visitors and one new customer over 100 visitors who aren’t interested in what I have to offer any day of the week.
SEO results can be deceiving, and it’s important to know how to interpret those results so you can make changes and move forward with more growth. SEO isn’t a one and done job, it’s a never-ending and always changing process.
An SEO consultant can help you get results
It may not be in your budget to pay an SEO company to perform SEO, monitor results, and continue to grow your site’s traffic. It can be very expensive. But hiring a consultant to help you learn how to understand and grow your own traffic can reap many rewards for you and your business.
Interesting in an SEO audit or help with your own SEO? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you with SEO.
Amy Masson
Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.