Having a website is becoming more of a necessity than a choice in a world where almost everyone owns a computer connected to the Internet. Even local businesses, which have always relied on foot traffic, traditional media, and the yellow pages, are finding that it’s quicker, easier, and more informative for many potential customers to find services and products in their geographic area.
An informed prospect is more likely to call a company that offers a list of services, prices, and products rather than blindly review brief advertisements in the local phone book or newspaper. If a company is targeting national or even global sales, the Internet is the obvious choice.
The first step for a website owner is to identify the keywords that customers might use to find the business. If you offer landscaping services in Miami, some obvious choices would be, for example, “Miami Landscaping Services” or “Miami Landscapers.” How do you know if a keyword or keyword phrase is being searched for in good numbers and therefore warrants an SEO effort? Fortunately, there are services like Wordtracker that can tell anyone how many searches have been done for a given term. Wordtracker not only provides this information but also other very useful data to make the right decisions. Other sites, such as Google AdWords and Overture, provide the webmaster with the ability to find other related keywords using the Keyword Suggestion Tool. These are very useful services because you don’t have to guess what terms to search for.
Once the keywords are identified, it’s time to find out how your competition is doing in the search engines. For local search phrases, like “Boise Florists,” the competition isn’t likely to be fierce. With time, basic HTML skills, and SEO tutorials available on the Internet, it is possible to optimize your site without hiring an SEO company. If you want to read more about basic SEO techniques, check out our SEO walkthrough.
There are many resources available to the public to find out if other websites are well established and optimized. Google publishes the Pagerank score (PR). PR is a measure Google uses to rate the importance of a site. The score ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Only a few sites achieve a 10. If your competitors’ PR is, say, a 6 and your site is a 1, it’s highly unlikely that you can rank well on Google.
When is it then necessary to hire an SEO? Some factors play apart in the decision. First, if the field is highly competitive, the level of expertise required to achieve the desired results will require a professional team that constantly monitors changes in search engine algorithms and has the expertise to know what steps to take to improve rankings. SEO is both an art and a science. Talented SEOs have spent years learning code and trying different methods to help their clients. It is a constantly changing business where what worked 6 months ago may not help at all now. Because search engines are constantly changing the way sites are ranked quite frequently, it takes natural talent and instinct to “feel” what needs to be done to stay on top. Time is another factor in deciding whether to do it yourself or hire someone. Once again, in a very competitive field, it takes many hours of work for the most experienced SEO to achieve effective optimization. Most companies simply don’t have the time and resources to do it in-house. Hiring a full-time SEO expert as an employee is only feasible as a long-term solution. Only very large companies with extremely complex websites go this route. It is much cheaper to hire an SEO than to have an on-site employee dedicated to this task.
There is no doubt that any form of search engine optimization done correctly will benefit most businesses. Choosing to do it yourself or hire an SEO company is a business decision that can affect a company’s long-term success. The time and experience requirements I discussed should be carefully considered before choosing which route to take. Finally, make sure that when you hire someone or do it yourself, no harmful techniques are used. Bad SEO can damage a website. Google, in particular, has penalized and even banned sites that abused the system with unethical SEO practices.