Hiring a professional SEO agency or a SEO pro has many advantages. It allows you to focus on doing what you do best – running your business. As any business knows, search engine optimisation is key and there are many moving parts and managing these all by yourself can be a daunting task.
Before we delve into when you should hire an SEO professional, let’s have a look at what an SEO professional does.
What does an SEO pro actually do?
The goal of any SEO strategy is to gain as much organic traffic as possible for your website. It is estimated that approximately 75% of people do not click beyond the first page of their Google results. In other words, if your site is not optimised effectively, your SEO rankings will be poor, and you will not appear on the first page of the results.
An SEO professional will create SEO strategies tailored for your business to help you achieve those high search rankings your business deserves.
These strategies look at everything SEO-related from on-page and off-page through to local SEO and link building. SEO professionals will also analyse your organic search traffic and perform website audits.
They will create and supervise your content strategy, have an understanding of all the technical-related SEO factors and come up with innovative solutions specific to your requirements.
SEO is imperative for any business wanting to increase organic traffic to their site.
When should you hire an SEO Pro?
Your website isn’t appearing in search results
As discussed, appearing on the first page of search results is key to gaining organic traffic. If your site isn’t ranking when your keywords are searched, you definitely need to consider hiring a professional.
An SEO professional will ensure the most effective keywords have been selected and that the content across your site is optimised accordingly.
Your website traffic isn’t converting
When we refer to website traffic conversion, we are talking about your visitors taking action. Examples of conversion are actions like clicking on links, completing forms, purchasing your product or service, and sharing your content.
Your goal is to improve your conversion rate – you want to convert your site visitors into customers. An SEO professional will analyse and diagnose where your conversion bottlenecks are and provide custom strategies to overcome any issues.
Your organic traffic numbers are dropping
A drop in organic traffic can occur due to several factors, fortunately, most of them can be corrected quite easily. The challenge comes down to identifying the cause and that is where an SEO professional’s expertise is crucial.
They are well-positioned to analyse your search traffic trends and implement effective solutions to get you back on track. It can be anything from an algorithmic change to a technical issue. Without the relevant expertise, you could land up wasting precious time and resources trying to resolve it yourself.
SEO is not static and is constantly evolving, search engines like Google make thousands of changes a year to their algorithms. They use various ranking factors and algorithms to provide the best possible results and unless you keep up to date with the latest trends and algorithm changes, you can easily find yourself on the back foot.
Your content marketing strategy needs help
Content strategies are often the most underrated part of SEO but are vital. They are the most effective ways of improving your SEO. This is an area that can most benefit when it comes to hiring an SEO professional.
High-quality, engaging content is crucial to connecting with customers and driving traffic to your site. There are many ways to optimise your content – you always want to ensure that you are getting the most value out of every piece of content your produce.
An SEO professional will, for example, ensure that your content has the best keywords and that those keywords are utilised effectively. Overuse of keywords can negatively impact your rankings.
A key point is to remember you are writing to create value. Your content should always be written for people and not for search engines.
Your website has technical issues
Technical audit issues can have a significant impact on your traffic and those much-needed conversions.
Site speed is crucial to your rankings, and you will be penalised for slow sites. It is estimated that around 40% of your site visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than around 5 seconds to load. An SEO professional can easily identify which factors are impacting your site speed – it can sometimes be something as simple as large files which are causing the drag
Duplicate content will also negatively impact your rankings. Search engines scan your website and if you have different pages with the same content, the search engine is not sure which page to rank as it targets the same keywords.
Robots.txt files provide the search engines with information around which pages on your site you don’t want crawled or indexed. An SEO professional will ensure that important pages or even your whole site is not being blocked.
XML Sitemaps help search engines index your website quickly and efficiently. An SEO professional will create an XML sitemap that will significantly improve this indexing process.
Your backlinks are non-existent
When it comes to SEO, backlinks are often an underrated and underused SEO strategy. Search engines take into account the number of backlinks your site has from other websites.
Backlink optimisation is another way an SEO professional can help increase your rankings. Search engines look at backlinks as a way of viewing you as an authority within your area. The more backlinks you have from quality sites will see your overall ranking improving significantly.
Your competitors are ranking but you are seriously lagging behind
Competitor analysis is imperative in these types of situations. Your SEO agency will perform an in-depth analysis to identify what your competitors are doing that is leading to better rankings.
Their analysis will look at things like your competitor’s backlink profile, their optimisation techniques, the targeted keywords, organic traffic, shared content, domain details, etc.
During any major website changes
Web designers are generally not SEO experts and major changes to your website can inadvertently cause a negative impact on your search engine optimisation.
Changes to your design layout, navigation, URLs, or domain in general needs to be looked at in conjunction with an SEO professional.
An SEO professional will work with the website designer to reduce risks associated with the changes, as well as track your performance post these changes.
You don’t want all the hard work that has gone into optimising your site to be put at risk purely because you need to make changes to your site.
Conclusion
SEO is key to your business’s online success and hiring a professional will save you both time and money. Every SEO campaign will be different as it is tailored to your specific needs.
We recommend hiring an SEO professional to perform an audit so that you can easily identify which areas require improvement, prioritise and budget accordingly.
Send us an email or drop a message if you need help with your SEO.
