The Decider
I’m a fan of the show American Dad. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s one of those adult animations that blends surreal scenarios with dark humor. One of the main characters is a guy called Roger, who is an escaped alien from Area 51. Roger’s backstory is interesting, and comprised of many twists and turns. He starts out in the 50s, and debauches his way through the decades until he is recaptured by the government. But one thread that remains common regardless of the decade (or disguise) he finds himself in, is this idea that Roger is “The Decider”.
This becomes a pretext for Roger’s ill-treatment of others throughout the years. After all, he’s important, he’s The Decider, and so everyone should give him what he wants.
Unfortunately for Roger though, it turns out that he’s not so important after all. And instead of being The Decider, he was unbeknownst to him, nothing more than a live crash test dummy with a pretty story.
Unlike Roger, modern business owners know a lot about being The Decider; making decisions is a large part of running a business. Some of those decisions are minor (like which brand of pens should be bought for the office). However, other decisions are major, and can have long term effects on the prosperity of your company.
Then there’s always the matter of making the right decisions. Which is why I’m here to tell you today why hiring an SEO specialist may be the best decision you could make for business success.
Your Website as Real Estate in Cyber Space
Before I get into the reasons why hiring an SEO company is an awesome idea though, I’d just like to remind you of something that I think is all too often forgotten.
Your website is just as much real estate for your business as a bricks and mortar property.
Far too often, I see business owners not understanding the importance or potential of their websites to reach new customers. For some folks, it seems to be enough to simply have a website, no matter how good or bad that website is. Kind of like ticking the box on a checklist.
But that is a horrible waste of potential to my mind, and especially when it comes to local business. Around 50% of consumers who visit local business websites, visit brick and mortar establishments within a day. That’s huge, (and also why local SEO is so important)! But you cannot get those visits (and sales) if your website is junk. Issues like bad design, terrible content, and low site speed all have potential customers hitting the back button out. A bad website never reflects well on a business to either humans or search engines. And this is where SEO comes in.
The World’s Fastest Explanation of SEO
Okay, so that was hyperbole. This is probably not the world’s fastest explanation of SEO (but it sounded good though, didn’t it?).
SEO, simply put, is the process of optimizing websites in order for those websites to “rank”. You see, the search engines crawl websites, figure out how good or bad they are, and then rank them accordingly. The good sites are rewarded with high ranking in the organic search engine results pages (or SERPs). The bad sites though, end up relegated to obscurity – most people never look beyond the first page of results. So getting on the first page is super important. It’s also only half of the SEO story.
The other half is about having enough quality content on your site that the consumers spend time there. Because the more time spent on a site, the more likely it is that a person will actually do business with you.
But Why Do I Need an SEO Provider for That?
That all sounds pretty simple, right? Like something that can be learned and done in-house? After all, we all know what good websites look like.
However, it’s really not that simple at all; it takes training, experience, and skill to optimize a website. It also takes a lot of keeping up with the newest innovations in what is a very fast moving world. Because that’s the thing with SEO: everything is always changing. With every algorithm change made to the search engines, comes an altered playing field that must be adapted to.
Quite simply, it’s a full time job (and you already have one of those).
Four Great Reasons Why Hiring an SEO Specialist is Best
Now there are many reasons why hiring an SEO could be one of the best decisions you make. However, I’m just going to give you my top four.
1. The Outsider Perspective
We all know what we love about our own businesses and how we like to present ourselves to the world. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that others will see it or appreciate the presentation. Hiring an SEO specialist isn’t just about tinkering about with a website, but includes branding and marketing too. Ever see one of those shows where they tell people what they look good and terrible wearing? We’re kind of like that – but for your website (and much nicer too).
2. The Instant Team
To hire an SEO company is to gain an instant team of specialists! Only without all the costs and time involved in training. Now what’s not to love about that?
3. Avoid Expensive Mistakes
One thing we see a lot of from both DIY SEO efforts and bad SEO providers is mistakes. Maybe there’s a promising shortcut flashing its shorty wares like a shapely leg? Maybe it’s something more nefarious? Whatever; I’m not here to judge. What I am here to tell you though is that often, those mistakes tend to be expensive.
So it’s best to get it done right the first time.
4. Maintenance
SEO doesn’t just end with the audit and initial optimization either. For an SEO campaign to be successful and bring you that ROI (plus more), monitoring needs to happen. As does continual optimization. A large part of what SEO specialists do is analyze website data, perform targeted experiments, and adapt tactics accordingly. Now do you have time to do all of that on top of what you already do?
