Search Engine Marketing Questions and Answers

This page was built for you to post your questions about SEO or search engine marketing and we will answer them them the best we can. The question box is at the bottom of this page.

Should I do my own SEO? I have read a few books on it and it doesn’t seem that complicated and I don’t really have the budget to pay another person.

While we encourage others to do as much SEO on their own as possible, we also add the caveat that SEO is not easy. We recommend that you have a consultant look over your site or assist you with your plan of implementation. Many of people have hindered their website rather than helped it with bad SEO. Maybe they read something online or in a book and thought they would give it a shot. They then discover their traffic numbers begin to drop significantly or maybe they go up temporarily but then Google penalizes them for practicing what is called “Black Hat SEO”

I am the President of a company that grosses $6.2K a year. We want to bring an in-house SEO specialist to the company. A peer of mine said that outsourcing SEO to a contractor is a cheaper and more effective way to do SEO as opposed to hiring somebody, but I don’t see how the numbers add up.

Deciding on whether to outsource or hire in-house is a decision many midsized companies are facing today. It has become an obvious fact that search engine optimization is needed for any company who has a website and for that fact sells something on that website, whether information or a product, to survive. Finding an SEO Specialist who is qualified enough to come into your place of business and develop a strategic plan as well as implement it fully is often the difficult part. While you may be able to pay that specialist $60,000 a year plus benefits to work in-house and that number seems less than what a professional consultant charges per hour – you may want to measure how many total hours either party needs to spend on SEO.

For example, somebody working full time is charging you for a 40 hour work week, 5 days a week, 365 days a year. You are also paying for their benefits, taxes and equipment. A consultant will provide you quotes per service. You are only paying for the actual work done. With this said, whether it is more affordable to hire within or not may depend on the amount of work your company needs. Last, do you know enough about SEO to hire the right person, ask the right questions, and monitor their progress in real terms? If not, using a consultant to assist you with setting up your online marketing as well as educate you on what an SEO Consultant should then do to maintain it may be the wisest step to have the best of both worlds.