Is search engine optimization something worth investing time and resources?

2017-01-17

Is SEO Worth It?

Jonathan - Engineering

SEO can be costly, so most new site owners wonder if the benefits outweigh the expense. The answer is that SEO can greatly increase your revenue, but it’s an initial investment that should be spent wisely. Plenty of people call themselves SEOs, but you should ensure that the one you choose to manage your site has a good history and performs ethical changes to your site. The results can be devastating with the wrong SEO, so here are some tips when you search for the right individual or agency.

Content is King

The term “content is king” has been around for years to explain that a website needs content to attract search engine users. Search engines love lots of content, because it helps algorithms understand your site and its focus. The more content you have, the more possibilities you have to show up in search engines for a variety of queries.

An SEO will help you create a content strategy. Content on your local site is usually through blogging, but content strategies usually include off-site promotional content. This content is placed on high ranking sites that then point to yours. If the off-site webmaster has a lot of viewership, then you can build more traffic from placing content on these sites. You still want to keep some content on your site, but content marketing strategies are one primary way to increase traffic to your site.

Your Code Could be Harming You

If you’re not a coding expert, you could have mistakes. Even software developers make mistakes, and you would never know if your site still renders properly in the browser. However, search engines crawl your site and parse your code to get your links and content. If you have coding mistakes, you could be ranking poorly just for these coding mistakes.

An SEO can review your code and work with your developers to ensure that it’s fixed and that search engines recrawl your site. When the site is recrawled, you could see an increase in rank from fixing this error.

Backlinking Audits

Years ago, backlinking strategies were to place them on link exchanges, directories and content mills. Now, these types of links can be harming your search engine rank. The link debate is a strong one in the SEO community, but one thing is guaranteed – poor link strategies can greatly harm your site’s search engine rank.

Backlink audits are expensive, because they are extremely tedious, detailed, and it requires a good SEO to determine if a link could be harming your rank. If you feel like you could have hired the wrong SEO, you need a good one to help you identify bad links and have them removed. Google even gives manual penalties for egregious link building, and these types of penalties can cause your traffic from search engines to be halved.

Poor backlink campaigns are one reason you always want to hire an SEO with experience. There are a lot of myths and poor advice online in regards to SEO. A good SEO consultant can steer you in the right direction so that you can avoid massive penalties. If you have a poor link history, you’re forced to contact webmasters and have them removed. Then, you must request for reconsideration. It can take up to a year before you see any results from a link penalty audit and review, so always take precautions before agreeing to any link campaigns.

Manual Penalties

We mentioned manual link penalties in the previous section, but penalties based on quality factors can have your website completely removed from search engine indexes. This can be from a poor content management campaign, or you could have made basic guideline mistakes without realizing it could affect your search engine rank.

Manual penalties based on quality are sent to you in your search engine dashboard (both Bing and Google have dashboards). If you receive one, it’s difficult to identify what could be wrong when it’s your own site. You need a good SEO to help you objectively go through your site and find quality issues. These issues could be structure, links, content, or any number of other issues.

If you automatically translate or create content, this is one main reason for manual penalties based on content. It’s important to write content for users and not search engines. You never want to spin or keyword stuff content either.

If you don’t know what could be the problem, you need a quality SEO consultant to go through each page and identify low quality pages. You then have the choice to either improve the page’s quality or delete it from your site. Since most webmasters created the site, it’s hard for them to accept that quality could be an issue. This is why it’s important to get outside, objective help from a professional.

Finding the Right SEO

It’s hard to find the right SEO, but it’s an important decision that can make or break your online business. First, the right SEO should have references of other sites. Make sure you check the sites to ensure that they are reasonably ranked and they have quality on-site pages.

Just remember that good SEO is essentially a part of marketing, so it’s not cheap. You need to determine your budget and get quotes from various SEOs. You can either work with an individual or an agency as long as the one you choose has a good history of ethical marketing.

If you don’t have a high budget, look towards content marketing and outreach programs to help market your site to other bloggers and site owners. If you feel your site isn’t ranking where it should, then you need a budget that will cover a consultant’s expense of auditing your site.

Whether you need a consultant to help identify issues or you have a new site, SEO is worth the expense. In the long run, you essentially spend money to boost ranking and revenue.