Should you invest in SEO?

Short answer is yes. You probably should. No matter what your business is, no matter how local or online it is, no matter who your target audience is, you should always have SEO in mind. It is not the only way to grow a lot, but it is the most scalable.

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The biggest issue with SEO is that for a lot of business owners, specially those that are not in digital fields, SEO is very abstract and steps to actually rank well on google are unclear. Sometimes you can even find contradicting information on what is important and what isn't.

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What are backlinks, what is robots.txt, what is a sitemap, html structure, what content should you produce? There are so many questions and so many people trying to sell you their services while obfuscating the real answers.

I'm a guy trying to sell you a service, but without all the confusion. An informed customer is a happy customer , and if you want to do SEO yourself - I will provide you with some good learning resources.

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When will you see more organic traffic?

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That's the golden question and the answer usually discourages people from trying to get their SEO right. Depending on the competitiveness of your niche and how local you're aiming to be it can vary drastically.

If you are a local Korean BBQ place, chances are that you will already be very close to the top of google for local searches, and if it's a competitive neighborhood for Korean BBQ, then you would probably need someone to optimize the on-site SEO and you would likely rise in rankings a lot. Add to that a few months of off-page SEO operations and you would almost certainly very easily reach number 1. You are local, you are niched down so there is not much competition but people will search for you because who doesn't love Korean BBQ!

If you want to learn about on page SEO more - Here's a good checklist.

However if you're let's say a web designer with no target niche, you will probably literally never reach page one, let alone rank one on Google. Of course, not all hope is lost for you if you don't want to niche down and want to be global - you can invest into facebook and google ads and engineer a landing page to sell your services, but in terms of SEO you are simply screwed. Of course you can still do content marketing and if you are smart about it you will hit gold eventually.

So to gauge how long it will take for you if you do everything right the first step is to answer the questions - how niched down are you and how local is your scope. While it's far from impossible to rank high, it will require a significant time or money investment.

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Should I pay someone or do it myself?

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That's totally up to you.

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It's definitely not something that can be learned fast, but if your business is doing fine and you just want to add an additional tool to your belt, you can absolutely try it yourself, just be ready to truly sit down and study. You will need to understand a lot of topics to get into this, so the more you know about hosting, servers, web development and copywriting the easier of a time you will have.

This here is the golden resource for learning SEO.

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How do I find a reputable SEO service provider?

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That's a thoughie. Whenever I work with someone I tend to show the behind the scenes analytics from other clients that are okay with that information being shared, even then, usually under a veil of anonymity. If you are looking to do work with someone don't be afraid to ask them for stats and to reach out to the people they worked with previously to see what their service is like. SEO is not a cheap service most of the time and since it takes a while to see the results you might not even know that you hired someone bad until you wasted $10k. So do your due diligence.

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That sounds expensive and time consuming, what are my alternatives?

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Sadly, there is no magic pill alternative for SEO. Depending on your business you can get by without it. A web designer can be well off with referrals and cold outreach with some facebook marketing, but a web designer with good SEO will never have to invest a dollar before becoming an agency.

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The only real and sustainable alternative besides ads is social media marketing, or SMM.

In the next blog I will cover SMM and picking between SMM and SEO for your business and how it will reflect on your business in the short term and in the long term. But for now I will leave you with a short answer - You should probably be doing both if you can.

Until next time,

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Stefan.