As head of marketing, you realise you are losing some market share to SEO. Maybe you have been doing PPC Advertising but on key terms and missing out on a good chunk of longer tail keywords that PPC wouldn’t work for.
Assigning budget to marketing channels I am no expert at however I do know that data is used to back up decisions. The point being there was data showing you need to up your SEO game. And you realised that you got sold a bum deal on all that SMM which promised the moon and delivered little return.
Budget likely removes the option of having a dedicated IN HOUSE SEO for many after you work out all the costs of having another employee. The bigger companies may also cover various roles within SEO. It is rare to find a good technical SEO guy if they happen to be good at SEO however it is way easier to skill up any technical SEO guy as the skills for a technical SEO are far greater than those of SEO. However, I should give a nod to the SEO who has been around a long time and has the instinct. There is an art to it. And some Dev Ops experience Technical SEO dudes will lose out on that front.
The Considerations
In many respects, a smaller website can be technically fixed up and optimised and then the job is done- at least for a while. So this favours hiring a good technical SEO Freelancer and then hiring a good SEO Freelancer for the rest. An agency will of course have these skills inside and that is their key strength. Being able to draw on senior SEO staff for bigger questions. Running a whole SEO team in-house must be more expensive than hiring an agency. So small and medium-sized businesses can bring their SEO up to scratch by getting a reputable agency. I say that like it’s easy. Finding a good agency isn’t trivial.
Hmmm, why is it that Freelance jobs are rare? I really don’t get that. Again maybe the difficulty in finding good ones and hiring a bad one is pretty big. Still, you have to apply the same risks to in-house and agency searches anyway. Seriously consider finding a great SEO Freelancer.
I believe that Social Media was not the solution it was purported to be, I also feel like Content Marketing isn’t either. Don’t get me wrong you need content but some of you are going nuts and it may need a clean-up in aisle 5 down the line. So what does continuous SEO look like?
Well, you need to be linkable and create link-worthy assets from within the market and industry.
Have some off-site campaigns within tight guidelines. No, I am not talking about buying links.
Keep an eye on technical SEO and performance-related stats.
Keep an eye on the day-to-day SEO tasks.
Have a content strategy in place that is right for your business and just not as much as we can spew out. Seriously the spewing needs to stop.
So SEO Freelancers may be the best value way to get that SEO performance back.
How to find a good SEO freelancer?
A good SEO freelancer should be able to rank for some decent traffic terms right? Their website should be optimised for indexing and show all the good things you need. Good speed and good UX. Be wary of clicking on an Ad at the top of search result pages. All this does is show that they know how to create a Google Ad unless they even hired a Google Ads Agency. Be wary of freebies you work in marketing cmon!
Look for good SEO case studies with modern examples. Old charts are no good for today’s tougher search algorithms.
How to find a good SEO Agency?
Meticulously going through their cases studies and talking to them is a starting point. My expertise on hiring an agency is zero. I just know SEO. Good luck.
Hope you enjoyed this article.