Not every website needs to hire a member of staff for SEO or indeed employ an SEO agency.
Let’s say you sell one niche or a particular service, when you search for this product online you are at the top of the search engines and customers have no problems in finding your product or service. In this scenario, the job is already done, we see no need to hire somebody to focus specifically on SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the practice of optimising a website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google and Bing. It involves a combination of strategies, techniques, and tactics aimed at increasing a website’s visibility to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic. SEO has several components, including keyword optimisation, content creation, link building, and technical SEO improvements.
Why do websites employ SEO?
Simply put, the more traffic your website gets, the more sales or leads you will pick up. If you do not have a mega-budget for paid ads. SEO is one area that can provide a great return on your investment and grow your online brand.
If you open any kind of store and wish to get people visiting your site from the search engines, you really need to get on the 1st page for target keywords, ideally in the top three positions.
If you are on pages 2-10, the amount of clicks you get will be vastly inferior to the websites that hold top positions.
And let’s not forget organic traffic is free. Sure you can pay Google to have your adverts show at the top of the results but this has an advertising cost associated with it. Organic clicks are completely free.
When Not to Invest in SEO
There are certain scenarios where we would recommend not investing in SEO. If you operate in a very particular niche, have limited resources or have built your presence using other channels and get a lot of direct searches, you may need to analyse if investing in SEO is a worthwhile approach.
There could be arguments against investing in SEO if your business falls into one of the following criteria:
- Highly Niche or Non-Search-Driven Audience: If your company’s target audience is highly specific and people are not actively searching for your products or services online, SEO may have limited impact.
- Immediate Results Needed: SEO is a long-term strategy. If a company needs immediate traffic and conversions (e.g., for a limited-time campaign or promotion), paid advertising or other marketing tactics might be more effective.
- Strong Alternative Marketing Channels: If your company has a robust presence and successful strategies in other channels like social media, email marketing, or influencer marketing, they might well prioritise these over SEO.
- Limited Resources or Budget: SEO can be resource-intensive, requiring time, money, and expertise. Small businesses with limited budgets may choose to focus on more affordable or direct ROI-driven marketing methods.
SEO is a Long Term Investment
If you do decide to employ somebody to start working on your website SEO, it is important not to expect quick wins. Yes, they can happen for certain keywords, but in general, SEO should be measured over months and years.
Let’s say a customer comes to us and says “I want to rank at the top of Google for a specific keyword”. This is a common query amongst new customers, and they think an SEO can pull some levers to make this happen. Well we can, and we can’t.
We know about SEO best practices, keep up to date with algorithm changes and help you rank as best we can deploying a strategy that over time, will help us to compete. But we can never promise anything. There are many forces at play, a competitor website could be 20 years old and be highly authoritative in your market, but your new website will need to put the hard yards in before it can hope to compete with the big boys in town.
New websites can pick up traffic for low competitive, long-tail keywords and this is a good strategy to follow for newly established websites. As your website grows in strength it will eventually be able to compete for high-volume search queries that brand names may dominate, but it will take time and investment.
Should I Hire in-house or Agency
There are also scenarios where it is better to employ somebody to work in-house as opposed to employing an SEO agency.
We have seen it all in our time, we have seen website managers for companies who know little about websites, SEOs who know little about SEO and e-commerce managers who seemingly do not understand e-Commerce.
Hiring for an internal position can be problematic. If the director does the hiring and he knows little about the subject, they can have a hard time assessing if the person they have employed is actually any good at their job. They may be able to talk a good talk, but walking the walk is a different thing.
Beware The Internal Promotion
We love to share little stories, a very long time ago we started work for an e-commerce client and introductions were made with the website manager. After an SEO audit, we opened discussions on the URL structure of the website. The website manager asked, “What are URLs?”
Now being relatively techie, we wanted to snigger, but if you do not know, you don’t know. Would you expect a website manager to know, absolutely. You see what has happened here is the person in question worked on the website, added products, dealt with customer orders and all website queries. So the director gave the person the position and title of “Website Manager”. They knew little of websites, in reality, nothing more than you could teach an intern in a week or two.
As expected, from an SEO point of view the website was in a terrible place. Duplicate products, duplicate content, thin content and a total lack of on-page SEO. Considering this website had over 1000 products, it would take some time to work around.
Now this is the crux of the matter. All the pages needed fixing, this was going to take a lot of time. If you don’t do the job properly 1st time around, you do the job twice. Let’s say a company has put 1000 products online and they all need changing and each product takes 2 hours to upload. This is going to take one person the best part of 25 weeks, close to half a year.
Now you can employ somebody in-house to do this work much cheaper than it would cost to employ an SEO agency. But again, you run the risk of “Not doing things properly” again.
We Need Your Help
As much as businesses may need help from an SEO agency, SEO agencies also need help from you.
We do not understand ll the intricacies of your market initially and this takes time.
You could be offering bespoke services that we are unaware of that could bring in a lot of traffic, you may have lots of information that could help us. Close communication is required to get the best out of any agency you work with.
In our opinion the customers who get the best out of agencies are the ones who are proactive and work with them, not just hire an agency and forget about it.
It’s not a box that needs ticking, it’s a process that needs to be worked on regular communication on strategy, tactics and the business landscape will not only help us plan for growth but pivot quickly to target new potential opportunities.
Ask Frankenstein AI
If you would like to as any more questions on the topic, simply ask Frankenstein AI below or simply call us on 0151 662 0298 to speak to an SEO consultant.