Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

Learn-Apply SEO or Hire an Agency or SEO Manager?

September 22, 2008

This question spurred on by previous post of my list of SEO tools. “do you think its worthwhile to get a professional SEO company to perform the seo work for us. Or to just learn it like you and implement the strategies ourselves?” So, as I commented, this isn’t just a clear cut answer.  

This truly depends on the company’s ability to financially afford hiring an agency – which can be thousands of dollars a month for a 12-month SEO program. This should be 12-months at least, anything less makes no sense and should not even be considered, simply because it takes a great deal of time and effort to setup and effectively maintain an SEO program. 

 If you do have the funds to hire out, you may want to consider the options of hiring an SEO manager for your own team. This is actually what my company had done. They had hired an SEO agency, but did not have anyone to support them and truly manage this as it should be. To hire an agency or SEO firm is one thing, to walk away and allow them to just collect a check every month without any accountability is another.

 From one who has worked in an SEO agency, I can safely say, you do not want to be this type of client. There are many SEO agencies out there that have “SEO account managers” and “specialists” who may not have very much experience at all. So, if you do hire the agency, I would make sure to ask, who will be working on my program, and what is their level of experience, what other client sites have they worked on? Are there any references from other clients? This is all legit – you are hiring and spending many thousands of dollars on this agency, you can ask who your team is and whether they can effectively lead and manage the SEO program.

 Hiring an SEO manager, preferably one who does have agency experience is a great idea and one that makes a lot of sense for the company and becomes a huge help to your internal marketing team as well as the agency you may hire. I have and continue to hold many internal SEO workshops with my colleagues all over the world, so that they understand how SEO should be applied with regards to their own country sites. I can also work more effectively with our agency of record to oversee all the tactical tasks and keep the strategy in line with our overall goals and objectives.

 Now, if you’re a very small business with limited amounts of cash on hand for hiring an agency or even SEO consultant, then I would strongly recommend you to at the very least understand and learn some SEO.

 Start by reading SEOmoz  SEO for beginners - great tools here the most reputable blogs, i.e. Google’s Webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Blog then follow that up with search engine roundtable  which has posts from all the most popular and widely read forums and newsletters. 

 Understand though, to be real proficient at SEO you should really enjoy it, have a better than average command of the English language or whatever language your appealing to, be somewhat skilled with regards to some technical elements of SEO as it relates to server side issues, code, etc. This does not mean in any way you should know how to write code, understanding a very basic knowledge of HTML is really all it takes and knowing what JavaScript looks like.

 You should have some time weekly to devote to this task as well. I have all too often gone to small business sites that have a copy write date of 2004 or older, the date should be same as current year and more importantly the content should be as current and refreshed as possible.

 So, I guess my answer is if you choose to learn and apply SEO great, do it slowly and gradually there are many great resources out there, like here and  you may find this is a new career for you, as I  had 6 years ago. Or if you choose to hire someone at the very least you know what white hat SEO is and when someone is trying to sell you a bill of goods.  Happy SEO!  

Filed under: SEO - SEM GENERAL, SEO Factors