7 Reasons Why You Should Hire An SEO Freelancer
If you have a website for your business, you may have thought about using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics to increase your ranking in search engine results. However, you may also have been left scratching your head, after making no progress at all. Consequently, you might have thought about hiring an SEO firm or freelancer to help you, but don’t really want to spend a dime on it. However, what most business owners don’t realise is that they’re losing opportunities and business due to a lack of visibility and customer awareness in the online environment. The internet is the new market place, and if other products are put in front or on top of yours, then you will be left unseen. With all the noise and clutter on the web, it’s not that easy to make yourself heard or seen. You need to stand out and to scream louder and, most of all, provide your customers with exactly what they are looking for.
You might provide a superior product or service. You might know more about your industry than all of your competitors. But that is not what Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines see. What they see is just one of the millions of websites in your particular niche, trying to offer the same service with the same level of quality. So, how did your competitors get on to the first page of search results on a site like Google? Because they know something you don’t – you guessed it, SEO! It’s important to invest time, effort and money into SEO to help your business. While learning about SEO is a daunting task, you don’t have to do it yourself. You have the option of hiring an SEO company, or you can hire an SEO freelancer/consultant to help you reach your target audience and show off your business to the online world. Here are a few appealing reasons why you should not hesitate to hire an SEO freelancer. Though there are advantages and disadvantages, this article discusses the benefits of hiring a freelancer to improve your company’s SEO.
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SEO requires a Specialised Skill Set
While you are an expert in your niche, you might not know anything about SEO. Search marketing is not a subject that you can learn easily while simultaneously working on a key project or running your business. Search engine algorithms evolve every day, making it hard to catch up, particularly if you’re still on the first page of the book. Recently, Google made some “tweaks” that affected search results, and rankings and almost every search marketer was trying to figure out what these were. This was just a tweak, not even a full update, which would stimulate even greater change. SEO freelancers and practitioners know their way around, and have spent years studying and practicing prior to working their way up in the field. It’s best to leave it to them. They will be able to implement a strategic marketing campaign that also utilises other forms of online marketing, such as paid searches, affiliate marketing, email marketing and so much more.
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They Have The Tools
SEO freelancers have invested not only time and effort in mastering their craft, but also in tools, which they use to efficiently optimise your website. They know which tools work well and which are no good. SEO freelancers have tried, failed and tried again with different tools and tactics; they can do the same for you in a fraction of the time it would take you to do this yourself. If you invest in your own tool, it is possible that you will receive something inefficient and difficult to understand. Another angle from which to look at it is that SEO experts are not going to charge you for all the tools they use, because they use these for all of their clients, whereas you would purchase it all and use only for your site. Not a smart investment.
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Faster Way Up
Imagine that you and a competitor start a website on exactly the same day. You start studying SEO while they hire an SEO consultant. After a year, you might be able to decently analyse a website and know couple of tactics for how to rank well. On the other hand, your competitor has already made the top ten search results list and is creating a buzz, they are now well known on social media with a growing following, while still developing and improving their products. Most important, they are making money. They let an SEO freelancer carry out the SEO part, whilst they worked on the business part. Now what do you think is a good strategy? You need to get ahead, not only in the rankings but in terms of the time it takes you to get there. Build authority and credibility while also working on your business by employing the help of a professional SEO consultant.
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Avoid Being Penalised
SEO freelancers know what is good and what is bad in terms of SEO tactics. Of course, you can learn about the trade. However, just a few mistakes might lead to being penalised by search engines. While you’re trying to figure out what you need to do to rank better, it is quite possible that you might do something that Google or other search engines consider to be a ‘black hat’ strategy, which essentially means cheating. Black hat SEO practitioners don’t have a bright future; Google updates its search algorithms around 500-600 times a year, which means all loopholes will be closed, so black hat strategists have to continually look for new ones. Even if you didn’t intend to utilise lack hat tactics, Google would still have to penalise you, either by dropping your rankings significantly or having your site de-indexed. Ouch.
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Conversion, Not Just Traffic
SEO consultants do not base their results solely on traffic. Of course, traffic is an indicator that you are getting attention, but what’s more important is how your traffic converts into money. SEO consultants breathe with their analytics. They dive deep into the data you are getting and develop further strategies based on those. It’s important to understand conversion funnels, the amount of time your visitors spend on your site, keyword trends; you should also create landing pages and study your user’ activity on your site. The bottom line is that you want them to be converted into cash, not just be visitors.
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Well Rounded Link-Building
Anybody can throw links back to your site, and links drive traffic, as well as improving ranking. The problem is that proper link building is so important, but is not easy to achieve. You need to understand the value of each link and how it is related to your niche. You need to analyse what kinds of links are valuable for your industry and what’s working for your competitors that you are not yet benefitting from. If you throw links everywhere, even to irrelevant sites, you will be considered to be a spammer and you’ll just waste your time and effort, and possibly your rankings will actually suffer. Hiring an expert will help you to achieve the benefits that artful link building can give you. One strategy an SEO consultant might deliver is the growth of natural links by putting together an excellent content strategy, as opposed to swapping links with other webmasters!
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Bottom Line: Better Results
The bottom line is that hiring a SEO freelancer can give you better results than trying to do it yourself. By results, we mean conversion, authority, credibility and stability. If you spend your time studying the craft while working on your business, it is still possible to learn and to gain traction, but the results will be average at best, and possibly your business will suffer as a result of your spreading yourself too thin. Why not spend your precious time working on what you’re an expert in, namely your business? Let a SEO professional help you with your site optimisation.
Search Marketing evolves rapidly; different rules, tactics and players emerge every day. This not only makes the industry harder to penetrate and the craft more tricky to master, it also makes the game more exciting and rewarding. In the world of business, of which marketing is only one part and not the entirety, you don’t have to learn and join the game. You just need to hire someone who knows it by heart, and let them do it for you.
About the author...
Ajay Dhunna, a Freelance SEO & PPC Consultant, providing strategic online marketing campaigns and consultancy services to businesses throughout UK. Ajay has a great passion for all aspects on Online Marketing and is also a Google Adwords Certified professional. Find out more or get in touch by visiting www.seoguy.co.uk