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Do-it-Yourself SEO: Yes or No?
Most businesses don’t need to be convinced that SEO is one of the primary ways to ensure a successful business presence on the internet. Given current economic conditions, SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways to do marketing for both large and small businesses. The challenge facing many business owners now, however, is whether to hire an SEO professional to take care of SEO tasks or to teach someone within the company how to do it. There are certainly advantages to each alternative. For many businesses, the cost of professional SEO is simply out of reach. But for others, the question remains: are the results of professional SEO worth the money I am about to spend to hire an expert in the field? When you’re making this tough decision for your own business, consider these pros and cons of do-it-yourself SEO.
The Good News:
1. The costs involved in do-it-yourself SEO are minimal. Sometimes they are non-existent.
2. You never have to relinquish control over your website. This means you also save a lot of money as you don’t have to explain exactly what you’re looking for to another person. The ideas you have in your head are immediately transferred to your website.
3. Experimentation is always a possibility. If you hire an SEO professional, you may get charged every time you want to tweak this or change that. If you do it yourself, you can change your site as often as you like and track the results.
4. You never have to leave the house.
5. You’ll have an incomparable sense of pride in yourself and in your business when you see your search engine ranking get higher and higher and see the increase in traffic to your website.
The Bad News:
1. Inadvertently, or even purposefully, using inappropriate SEO techniques can get your site penalized by the search engines. It may even get your site banned altogether.
2. SEO is not an overnight process. It takes a lot of time and energy to learn to do it correctly and to learn to do it well. There are lots of facets involved in SEO, and keeping up with all of them can be time-consuming.
3. Chances are good that your competitors are using SEO professionals. So while you’re sitting at home in your pajamas reading every book and website you can find in order to prepare yourself to do SEO, their SEO professionals are already off and running. As a result, you’re losing potential customers and a lot of revenue.
4. SEO is never finished. You might be tempted to rest on your laurels once your website has reached the first page, or even the top, of the search engine results. But then you have to work to keep it there. An SEO professional’s time is dedicated to keeping you at the top. You, on the other hand, have to manage the rest of your business. Take your eye off of those search engine rankings for just a second and you’ll find yourself back at the bottom.
The three main questions you need to ask yourself when considering whether or not to hire an SEO professional are: How much time do I have to dedicate to SEO? How much time do I need to be spending on the rest of my business, and How important is online marketing in the scheme of my entire business strategy? While SEO may seem cost prohibitive, consider the costs of doing it yourself. You risk your site being penalized or banned. You lose potential customers to your competitors who have SEO professionals working for them. And you have to spend an inordinate amount of time on SEO rather than tending to other important parts of your business.
Can you afford to do it yourself? Think about it!
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