Whether or not to hire an SEO consulting company tends to be a hotly debated question among the business community. What isn’t is using good search engine optimization (SEO) practices to get the highest possible rankings on Google and other search engines.
People are more likely to click the first, second, or third result when conducting a search on Google, and if you’re not on the first page, your site probably won’t be seen. A study reported by Search Engine Journal found that more than 25 percent of people click on the first Google search result. How does one get there? Through good SEO practices. The fundamentals of SEO are fairly easy to grasp, but it takes a lot of expertise and experience to become a master. There are tools and courses that can be taken that can be helpful, or you could save time and hire an SEO consulting company with experts who already have everything necessary to handle it as it’s their full-time job.
The answer to whether or not hiring an SEO consulting company is worth it requires asking yourself a few questions.
Can you do it yourself?
SEO might be one of the first places you’d think of when it comes to cutting expenses. And given enough time, a business owner can learn all about SEO at a functional level or even an expert level. But that takes a lot of time and effort. In fact, it can even be a full-time job in itself. The field is constantly evolving, with Google regularly releasing new algorithms that affect best practices. As the search engines become even smarter, they also become much harder to game, which means good SEO requires a lot more than knowing how to cleverly use keywords.
Can you afford the expense?
Hiring an SEO company isn’t cheap. If you decide to hire one that’s offering a low price tag, odds are, you’ll get what you pay for, which likely means the agency is trying to game the system by using black hat techniques. That practice is against search engine guidelines. While there might be a short-term gain in the rankings, these unethical tactics almost always end up in penalties from the search engines, which will harm your ranking, perhaps making it worse than it was to begin with.
Uncomplicated SEO Tactics That Will Get Your Business Found!
The cost of hiring an SEO consulting company runs at least $1,000 a month, but reputable agencies tend to have a price tag anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 a month. While that’s a significant amount of money, if it results in a positive ROI, it’s worth it. And, it’s a lot less than you’d pay to hire a full-time SEO specialist (significantly less when you consider you’d really need several of them), yet you’ll be getting an entire team of experts for your money.
Is the company insisting on a 12-month or longer agreement?
It may not be worth hiring an SEO consulting company that requires an agreement that you use them for at least 12 months. What happens if you aren’t getting results after six months and want to pull the plug? You shouldn’t have to pay for the remainder of the contract when it’s not working out. Having a 30- or 60-day out for both parties is something that should be in the contract. It’s also important that the agency has a transition plan for the next agency should you need to go that route.