6 Advantages of Hiring an SEO Company

Intro

All businesses, regardless of the industry or market they’re in, need to have a solid online presence to flourish. It’s how the majority of your customers discover and vet you before making a purchase decision. And the best way to maintain a consistently impressive presence online is to work with professionals, namely, an SEO agency.

There is a fair bit of debate around this issue. Businesses are often wary of taking on the costs associated with an outside agency. Many see the value in hiring an agency initially and then replacing them with in-house talent for subsequent optimization. However, a careful cost-benefit analysis will tell you that having a steady SEO partner on hand — one that knows what they’re doing — can actually save you money and bring in more revenue. Here’s how.

1. You Can Leverage Their Expertise

Consider that Google uses several factors (most of which are unknown) to determine a web page’s ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). Not only are there many unknown variables, but even the ones that are known are a lot to keep track of and continuously optimize by yourself.

When you contract an agency, you work with a range of SEO professionals with dedicated expertise in their niches. These are people who analyze and optimize these metrics day in and day out and know what it takes to drive tangible results.

What’s more, a lot of SEO companies tend to build up expertise in specific industries. Working with a number of brands from the same sector gives them deeper insight into which strategies work better. You can leverage this experience to outperform your competitors and rank higher for competitive keywords.

2. It Saves You Money

While you might think of an agency retainer as an unaffordable cost, particularly early in your journey, that expense is actually saving you money. Moving your site in the right direction with SEO often requires you to hire different kinds of specialists, such as writers, analysts, link builders, and more. Signing up with an agency can supply you with the entire team upfront.

To add to this, it is vital to invest in SEO software and tools that most SEO professionals have at their disposal (and are very comfortable using), which significantly improves outcomes for you. If you’re looking at acquiring the team and all the tools separately, you’re looking at a significant price increase. Alternatively, you can simply hire an SEO services company, which will already have these resources at their disposal.

To create a fail-safe for yourself, consider partnering with an agency that doesn’t lock you into 12- or 24-month contracts. This is usually done to keep a client on board until the SEO optimization finally yields results. However, if the results aren’t satisfactory, you’ve just spent a lot of time and money for nothing. Some of the best agencies — the ones that are really confident of their ability — won’t hesitate to offer you month-to-month contracts so that you can see ROI while the engagement is still young.

3. It Saves You Time

SEO is a continuous process that requires dedicated time to execute the dozens of tasks that will get you the results you want. Writing and link building, for example, are positions that require full-time attention. Keyword research is another time-intensive task, which can prove fundamental to your SEO efforts by optimizing your website and attracting your target customer base.

This can take a lot of time if you or your marketing manager are doing this by yourselves, or can prove very expensive if you’ve hired employees for each task. With an agency, you free up your team to focus on the core aspects of your business.

Established agencies often have proven processes in place, not unlike a services conveyor belt, to efficiently perform each task and deliver results. With them, you can get things done a lot faster than if you tried to do it in-house.

4. You Benefit from a Strategic Approach

A quality SEO partner can often provide the kind of valuable input that elevates your business strategy. Professionals who handle similar brands in the market can offer you tips that have worked for other companies. They can also be a great sounding board for you to bounce ideas off of when you’re making crucial expansion decisions.

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Another reason you should consider hiring an agency for your SEO activities is that they can also handle other parts of your digital marketing outreach, including PPC campaigns, social media, email marketing, and web development. When you work with just one agency, they’re able to take a consolidated approach to your marketing, creating tie-ins and efficiencies where possible to improve results.

5. They Provide-Data Driven Solutions You Can Trust

SEO can be a double-edged sword if you don’t know what you’re doing. Choosing the wrong keywords, for instance, can mean you’re wasting time increasing your bounce rate and receiving uninterested visitors.

Poor implementation can also mean you’re providing poor user experience to your visitors. As many as 88% of customers are less likely to return to websites with poor UX in the future. Good agencies understand this and will put as much effort into improving traffic and conversions on your website.

Consistently poor practices, such as content duplicacy and keyword stuffing, can even rack up search engine penalties for your domain which will see your ranking tank and stay low for some time.

With an experienced SEO partner by your side, you can avoid these missteps. You have the advantage of depending on scientific, data-driven solutions that have worked for other brands in the past and which you can trust to measurably grow your business as well.

6. It Gives You a Fresh Perspective

Sometimes, marketing campaigns fail because they’re simply not as current or innovative as they could be. Both digital marketing and search engines are constantly evolving. Certain SEO analysts even make it their job to decipher all the factors and their relative importance that make up Google’s ranking methodology.

Working with SEO experts gives you access to this kind of expertise. Agency analysts are often clued into the latest trends and techniques being used in the SEO industry as well as your own. They can help ensure that you’re not getting left behind simply because you’re not up to speed with the most effective tactics.

Finally, with an agency, you’re also harnessing their collective marketing and strategic experience. If you feel stuck or need ideas to achieve crucial objectives, an outside perspective can help you break free of groupthink and find new solutions.

Hiring an SEO company is no different from buying any other business or personal service. You could probably do some of it yourself, but a professional could do it better and get it right on the first go. Be sure to thoroughly screen any agencies you’re considering hiring. Ask them probing questions to assess their expertise, check out their work, and vet them through client testimonials. With the right partner by your side, you can unlock tremendous value for your business and create a relationship that’s mutually beneficial for both of you in the long term.