SHOULD I HIRE AN SEO COMPANY?
16 Reasons To Hire An SEO Company
Find Yourself Asking, "Should I Hire An SEO Company?"
After much consideration we have hand-picked 16 potent reasons that we feel carry the most weight to help you pull the trigger and get started with your SEO (search engine optimisation) journey.
#1 Increase Sales For Your Business
One of the primary reasons people are attracted to SEO is to increase online sales. Increasing revenue and the top line of any business is always going to be the priority. This is also the case for charitable organisations, they need to increase donations and fund raisers to survive and finance their cause or mission.
SEO is a marketing strategy that can directly move the bar on the number of enquiries and leads coming directly to your website which ultimately results in more conversions and sales. It is said that SEO is 70% more effective than channels such as PPC (pay per click) at generating sales and is why SEO budget allocation is as high as 10.5% of all marketing budget allocation.
#2 Increase Organic Traffic To Your Website
Organic traffic is the fuel for a website. SEO is the discipline of increasing visibility in the search engine result pages (SERP’s) to increase the organic traffic generated from targeted search terms. The entire game of SEO is to increase this attention for relevant and intent based keywords so that people with an intention to purchase visit your website and convert.
From conducting thorough keyword research, an SEO company can identify which search terms (keywords) are being searched right now by your target audience that have moderate to low difficulty to compete for in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
The SEO company can then reverse engineer success and create content that meets the demand of that keyword to position you at the top of Google and other search engines.
Why is being at the top of Google important for organic traffic?… well, if you can rank in the top spot for a specific keyword that means you get around 37% of all clicks. The top 3 results get 75.1% of all the clicks.
In contrast clicks on page 2 of Google get around 0.78% of the organic traffic, meaning if you’re not on the very first page of Google your chance of getting any substantial organic traffic is next to zero. This data is from a study involving over 5 million search queries and 874,929 pages by Backlinko.
The graph bellow illustrates the percentage of traffic the top 10 positions receive from a search query (keyword). You can see 31.73% of clicks go to position number 1 and then a clear decline in clicks as the position drops.
#3 Dominate Locally
46% of all searches in Google have local intent, with most of these searches coming from people searching for products and services in proximity to their location. SEO is a powerful marketing tool to make you #1 for the products and services you offer locally.
By creating landing pages for your products and services that specifically target the cities and towns in proximity to your business an SEO company can start to acquire organic traffic and build your brand authority in these specific locations.
The map pack in Google is a display that highlights 3 businesses and marks their position on a map. When a map pack appears in the search engine result pages it will attract 40%-60% of all clicks, which essentially makes it the place you want to be, it will also display information such as reviews, contact information alongside a direct link to your website.
This makes it very easy for a potential customer to make an enquiry, with just a few clicks they could be making an inbound call to your business to enquire about your products and services.
So, should I hire an SEO company?… Well An SEO company will build your NAP listings, optimise your GMB profile and develop a custom SEO strategy to get you in the local map packs and become an authority in your local environment and surrounding areas so its probably a good idea if you need a local boost.
#4 Increase Rankings In The SERP’s
One of the primary tasks an SEO company has is to increase your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). Position tracking is an integral part of an SEO campaign and important for showing exactly what you are getting for your money. Position tracking involves monitoring how many keywords you have in the top 3, top 10, top 20 and the top 100 positions of the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
The aim of course is to acquire as many top 3 positions as possible for money keywords that are relevant and generate high volumes of organic traffic, an SEO company will increase the total amount of keywords you are ranking for overall and also put an SEO strategy in place to push existing rankings further along, for instance an SEO campaign may focus on pushing some keywords you have in position 10-20 to top 3 position where as mentioned earlier around 75.1% of all clicks land.
#5 Acquire New Customers
When considering why business owners fail, in particular small businesses, it usually comes down to 2 things.
- The business runs out of capital
- The business lacks adequate marketing
Investopedia also includes these reasons in their top 3 reasons small business owners fail. Both problems are solved with the acquisition of more customers. Customers are what provide capital and they will also fund your marketing campaigns. A great SEO strategy should always be focused on customer generation with no exceptions. New customers will then in return continue to fund your SEO campaign and grow your business.
SEO can also work to increase the frequency of purchasing from your existing customers, increase the price they spend at your business and may work to increase the number of referrals your existing customer brings to your business. In our eyes customer acquisition should include acquiring more from your existing customers and these are all ways to increase the lifetime value (LTV) of your existing customers.
#6 Expand Your National Reach
SEO is a great marketing tool to expand your brand awareness and sell your products and service across the country. This all comes down to digital real estate, if you want to start servicing people or selling product on a national level SEO can allow you to reach people at the other side of the country where you have zero physical presence.
For instance, a northern business could acquire organic traffic from London. They could also market their services as affordable or low-cost due to London-based businesses usually costing more for products and services. A clear example of this would be for a pint of beer in Yorkshire your paying £3.31 on average vs £5.33 in London.
The local competitors within London will likely need to charge more for their services due to higher running costs involved with their business, this is the importance of digital real estate, you can become an authority in a space where you’re not physically located and have a competitive advantage over the local players.
#7 Build Brand Awarness
SEO will allow you to reach more people and spread your brand values and core messages by creating educational, informative, and entertaining content that users find engaging. Your branding and positioning are then reinforced as a by-product of the content.
When you hire an SEO company, they should implement a content strategy that ensures consistency in your messaging to increase brand awareness and create brand resonance with your target audience.
A great SEO campaign will usually incorporate written word, audio, video, images, and graphics. These are all ways that your brand can be communicated in the marketplace. SEO will optimise the reach of this content and ensure it not only reaches more people but reaches the right people likely to resonate with your brand and become brand advocates.
#8 Optimise Your Entire Marketing Strategy
SEO doesn’t just include optimising your website or digital marketing, SEO also includes optimising your overall marketing efforts. SEO becomes the central part of your overall marketing strategy as all other marketing efforts can be considered as off-page SEO tactics.
Off-page SEO is all activity that takes place away from your website that improves your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). Some examples of off-page SEO may include social media, print marketing and radio. These can all drive traffic to your website and significantly help your overall SEO and therefore your business performance.
When you hire a great SEO company that approaches SEO this way and you start to understand how these existing marketing channels your already using can improve your SEO and in return get you more sales from your website, you will optimise your entire marketing strategy all in the name of SEO.
To be clear a great SEO company will tweak your existing marketing efforts to integrate your existing funnels and ensure that your website receives more enquires as a result.
#9 Provide Strategic Direction
SEO is a great way to use real-time data and statistics to assist with content ideas and allow you to adjust based on those statistics to optimise the results of your content strategy. Keyword research highlights exactly what is being searched for right now and how many times it is being searched for.
The idea with SEO is to create content that meets the demand of the search query, search term or keyword that is being searched for right now. It takes the guess work out of content creation and provides clear direction on what should be produced. This can be achieved using statistic software such as SEMrush.
If you’re looking to create a piece of content that is in demand and people want to consume there is no better place to look. What people are searching for right now should always be the starting point if you want to optimise the success of your content.
This applies even if you have a great idea for a piece of content yourself, after some keyword research you may discover that that content isn’t highly demanded and wouldn’t justify the effort to produce but a slight tweak and adjustment in approach would optimise your content for search engine success.
Let’s break this down with an example. Let’s say we run a Vape Pen shop and want to create a blog post or even a video for social media. We can look at some questions that people are searching right now in Google and other search engines.
As you can see in the image above, we have plenty of ideas for content, but which one shall we choose?… Well, an SEO company can help you decide by assessing the level of competition of difficulty for a particular search term and looking at the organic traffic that search term produces.
From the keyword research above I would recommend we create a blog post on “how to charge a vape pen”, as there is an opportunity to take a percentage of the 170 searches that query received last month. We can also see that the trend is flat meaning the consistency of this search volume is likely to stay at around 170 searches per month.
Finally, the KD% (Keyword Difficulty) is relatively low, we can see it has a score of 22%/100% which means our chances of ranking highly if we create well-structured relevant content are highly likely.
#10 Prevent Traffic Obstruction & Penalties
SEO is all about making Google and search engine favour your website and the content listed throughout your website. This means that if your producing content without consideration of SEO you may be harming your chances of ranking favourably in the search engine results pages (SERP’s) as without SEO there is no conscious effort to please the search engines.
If this is the case, then you’re also harming your chances of receiving organic traffic and customers via search engines which could be costing your business thousands. This is also the risk of DIY SEO, as if your unconsciously using black-hat SEO tactics that breach Google webmasters rules you could potentially be penalised for doing so.
You can find out if this is the case by requesting a free SEO consultation. This involve going over your website with you on a phone call and highlighting areas where your potentially obstructing organic traffic and setting yourself up for a penalty by implementing bad SEO practice or harming your content without any SEO effort at all.
We also offer a SEO starter package which involves a complete fix and tune-up of your on-page SEO to ensure that your website and existing content is optimised for search engines. This is a one-time payment and is our most affordable package we offer.
- Full On-Page SEO Clean-up
- Fix URL's, ALT Tags & meta Data
- Keyword Research & List Building
- XML Site-Map & 404 Redirects
- landing Page & Blog Post
#11 Accelerate Business Growth
If you’re not interested in growing your business, then you need to stay far, far away from SEO as it is a potent marketing weapon of mass attraction when used correctly. However, if you want to accelerate your business and your committed to the growth of your organisation SEO could sky-rocket your leads, sales, and revenue.
Growing your business can include several areas.
- Increasing your workforce
- Increasing your top-line & bottom-line
- Acquiring more market share
- Servicing more clients or customers
- Building more brand equity
This is the primary reason for all marketing to increase attention and in return attract more customers to finance your operation. The more revenue you can generate via SEO and your websites conversions the more you can finance your businesses expansion.
A great SEO company that can create a custom SEO strategy that works to the context of your business and capitalise on the opportunities that surrounds you right now, could dramatically accelerate your growth with no questions.
For some people it may be a longer-term return depending on the starting point of your SEO campaign for others it could be a rapid impact as there may simply be many opportunities that surround your business.
#12 High Opportunity Cost of Not Investing
By not investing in SEO, it could be costing your business thousands if not tens of thousands of pounds, entirely depending on the opportunity that surrounds your business right now that you’re not capitalising on.
This is particularly the case for people that may already have an established website with some domain authority (DA) that they could be putting to use right now and are simply unaware of the huge advantage they have in the competitive game that is SEO.
Ask yourself the following questions.
- How much is a single client worth to my business?
- What is the average amount a client spends on my products or services?
- How many referrals does my average client bring to my business?
- How frequently does a single client transact with my business?
- What is the lifetime value (LTV) of one client?
- What would it mean for my business to pick up 5, 10 or 20 new clients a month?
Now what will be realistic in terms or return will very much depend on the context of your business but please consider how much you’re potentially leaving on the table. The final question to ask yourself is why leave anything on the table at all?
#13 SEO Is Low Risk
Not all SEO companies are created equally, but if you hire professionals that can provide results there shouldn’t be any hesitation. There are a few things to consider when hiring an SEO company that can lower your risk further and ensure you choose the right SEO company.
When hiring an SEO company, we advise you look for month-to-month SEO campaigns. This gives you control to increase, decrease, or stop your SEO investment completely month by month. It’s not a great idea to lock yourself into a long-term or fixed contract that locks you in.
Next when you speak with an SEO company pay close attention to how they react when you mention getting a return on your investment (ROI), consider are they hesitant to discuss your return and continue to talk about other metrics such as impressions and visibility to push you away from ROI.
This could be a sign that they are not result-driven and are not confident in their ability to deliver results. A great SEO company will ground their strategy around getting you a return on investment and will prioritise you getting your investment back with no exceptions.
#14 Increase Quality Of Traffic
One of the most underrated advantages of SEO is the fact SEO finds motivated buyers, this is discussed in one of our previous blog posts, the 7 core advantages of SEO.
SEO allows you to target a very specific demographic and psychographic which makes it a very powerful marketing tool. There are a range of keywords you may work with in an SEO strategy that will all range from broad to long-tail.
For instance, if we are targeting the keyword “Vape Pen” this is a very broad keyword and because of that it is likely to be very competitive. However, because it is so broad it may also not necessarily attract someone looking to purchase a vape pen, for instance it could attract the following.
- Somebody wanting to see what a vape pen looks like
- Somebody wanting to find an image of a vape pen for a project
- A person looking to understand how a vape pen is used
- Somebody looking to see the negative implications of vaping
The fact is because the keyword is so broad it may not be specifically targeting people looking to make a purchase decision. This doesn’t diminish the value of ranking for this search term entirely as broad keyword usually generate much more traffic than long-tail keywords and there is certainly a time and place to implement them in your SEO campaign.
However, lets now consider a more targeted keyword. This could be “Vape Shop Near Me”, this keyword is much more specific and more likely to attract somebody looking for a store in proximity to their location because they are considering making a purchase decision. This keyword would be much more targeted to attract somebody looking to make a personal visit to a local vape store.
#15 Competitors Are Investing In SEO
You need to consider the consequence of not investing in SEO and the fact your competition is taking customers that could have found your products and services. This is particularly of concern if you’re in the retail business, considering 81% of retail customers research online before shopping.
The fact of the matter is that your competition is investing directly into SEO. We can see SEO is a popular investment choice with the average CMO investing 10.5% of their entire marketing budget on SEO specifically and 20.6% of all budget allocation going directly towards website and SEO, (Gartner, 2021).
To be clear, you need to invest in SEO to simply keep up with your competition. If you hire the right SEO company, they can help you dominate your local space and ensure you don’t fall behind in the market place.
#16 Return On Investment (ROI)
A well-executed SEO campaign should ensure you get much more returned in value than you invested. For every penny invested there should be a penny earned and the SEO company you hire should be 100% committed to delivering you the highest return on investment (ROI) possible.
Return on investment is the final answer to the question, “should I hire an SEO company?” in this post but is also the only reason you need to consider as if you make a return on your investment, regardless of all the other reasons mentioned above it would still make sense to hire an SEO company with the outcome of a return.
Let’s break this down, let’s say we have business that sells one product for £50 per month. Let’s also assume that when somebody purchases this product, they are likely to stay with the business on average for around 6 months. This would give that customer an average lifetime value (LTV) of £300.
Now let’s assume that this business invests £3,600 on SEO for a 6-month campaign. This would require 12 new customers for the business to receive a full return over that full 6-month period. Now let’s consider they invested £14,400 into a 6-month SEO campaign; this would mean that the SEO company needs to deliver at least 48 new customers over that 6-month period for the business to see a full return.
Now a great SEO company should aim to deliver more than just a full return on investment, at Concourse Marketing we aim to provide all our clients with a 3X return on investment and this is grounded into your custom SEO strategy from day 1.
You can request a free consultation with us today with absolutely no obligations. We are happy to answer any questions you may have as we love to talk about all things SEO!
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