When Should You Hire an SEO Expert or Agency?

If you’re a struggling business owner trying to reach your target audience, consider hiring an SEO expert or agency to increase website traffic from local visitors seeking your product or service. You may think if Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) takes a long time why should I wait for the traffic to increase? Then you might think that Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with Google might be an easier way for you to get leads more quickly, but if you stop your PPC advertising, then you will stop getting in front of your target audience, with SEO you will reap the benefits for years to come (as long as you use a trustworthy SEO expert or agency).

You might have tried SEO before and it didn’t work, but did you receive reports from your expert or agency? Do you know what they were doing? It doesn’t mean that SEO doesn’t work, instead, it could mean that your SEO expert or agency may have not been doing as much as they could to increase the traffic to your site, or maybe they were targeting keywords that were not being searched by your target audience. Therefore, you need to make sure that you’ve seen examples of work the SEO expert or agency has done.

In this guide, I’ll share when it’s best to hire an SEO expert or agency to help grow your business through search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO expert or agency?

Your website isn’t getting enough traffic or conversions

Your website should be a lead-generating machine if you’re not getting enough traffic or are getting traffic but having a low number of conversions.

If your website is getting very little traffic, this is telling Google that the content on your website isn’t resonating with your audience, therefore, they shouldn’t reward your site with good rankings.

Therefore, what you need is an SEO expert or agency to conduct a full content review of your site to identify gaps in the content on your site to make sure that the content on your site is useful for your target audience. Once your content is useful, then this is when you’ll see better results and will increase the traffic to your site from search engines like Google.

Your marketing team doesn’t have enough time

If you’ve got an in-house marketing team, have a marketing company or website company, but they don’t have enough time to help improve the SEO of your website, or maybe they don’t even offer SEO services, then there are two options for you to either look for an SEO expert or look for a local SEO agency who have the resource and time to focus on improving the visibility of your website on search engines.

You’re looking to get a new website

If you’re looking at getting a new website for your business, then having an SEO expert or are using a company that offers Web Design and SEO is essential, to make sure that when your new website is being built and is ready to go live, then the site is SEO friendly. Migrations from old websites can be the most stressful time for your business, especially if you’re getting good leads from your previous SEO efforts and when your new website goes live, you don’t want the leads to drop. Therefore, having an SEO expert or agency involved will help to stop your website migration from becoming a disaster.

One thing to make sure of before a new website goes live is that any old URLs that are not on your new site are redirected to a relevant or related page on your new site, For example, you may have a page on ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and your old site had this at https://yourdomain.com/services/seo/ and your new site has the same content or similar content and it’s now on https://yourdomain.com/search-engine-optimisation/, therefore, you need to redirect the /services/seo/ page to the new page /search-engine-optimisation/.

What do SEO experts and agencies do?

One of the main factors you need to remember is that SEO takes time – I’ve seen many companies wanting to stop their SEO campaign after three months, however, it can take up to six months to see results. Therefore, there are many things that SEO experts or agencies do to help improve your authority with search engines and to help search engines better understand your site. A few SEO services they may offer are:

• Content creation: This is one of the main services that any SEO expert or agency should provide, as content is king for SEO, as content helps to drive traffic to your site, and can help to increase the engagement of visitors to your site with your site. If you go to an expert or agency and they don’t mention anything about creating and uploading content to your website, then this is a red flag, and you should look at getting quotes from other SEO providers. It is also worth checking the Google Analytics on your site during the SEO campaign to check that the content your SEO partner is bringing visitors to your website, as this is the main goal for writing content.
• Link building: This looks at getting valuable links from other websites to your website, which is used by search engines to work out how trustworthy your website is, if your website has valuable links then this can dramatically help to improve your visibility in search results, and will help to increase the traffic to your site, and hopefully the conversions on your site.
• Keyword research: This looks at analysing and identifying search queries your target audience is searching for. This can then help your SEO expert or agency write content based on the keywords to help improve your visibility for these keywords in search engines.
• Technical SEO audit: If your website isn’t crawl-able by search engines, then your site will not be shown in search results, therefore, a site audit is one of the main services that SEO experts and agencies provide so they can look at how well your website loads which helps to improve the user experience on your site, which is a ranking factor for Google. Site audits can also help to identify any issues on your site which are preventing search engines from discovering the content on your site.

How to hire an SEO expert or agency for your business

As you’re looking to hire an SEO expert or agency, then there are a few things that you need to consider when trying to decide who to choose as your SEO partner.

What are the goals for your business?

The goals of your business will dramatically affect your SEO needs. Therefore, you need to look at how SEO is going to help you reach your business goals, even before hiring an SEO expert or agency.

Some examples of goals can be:

• Increase the traffic to your site
• Increase website conversions
• Improve the conversion rate of your site

How to decide between using an SEO expert or an agency

SEO experts

They are normally one-man bands who are experts in SEO and are cheaper than hiring an employee to do the SEO for you, however, they may not scale as quickly as an SEO agency could if you need extra support or want to increase your SEO budget.

SEO agencies

These are companies that work with multiple clients to provide SEO services to help them grow their sales and leads. They have more scope to scale if you need extra support and want to increase your SEO budget. They normally focus on SEO every day so they know all the latest trends and can be more experienced as they most likely will have a larger team who has their strengths.

Ask for an SEO audit of your site

The best way to choose an SEO expert or agency is to ask them to complete an SEO audit of your website. Some may charge you for this, and some may do this for free. Depending on who you go to. But it’s best to get quotes from at least three providers to help you find which agency or expert is best for your business.

Once you’ve got the SEO audits from your minimum of three providers, then you need to look at the audits and see which plan is the most in-depth and high quality. Then you can make your decision on who to go with, based on their SEO plans and who best meets the goals you’ve set out for the SEO campaign.