Hiring SEO Professionals – Are They Worth the Money?
Running a website requires a lot of time and effort. And if you go to work, run an offline business or own multiple websites, finding enough time to study SEO strategies and learn how to implement them may appear too much to handle all by yourself. After all, it forces you to deal with stuff you probably do not understand too well, preventing you from focusing on the main goal – developing your website. Well, you can always hire professionals to do it for you. But since their services do not come cheap, the question occurs are they worth the money? Let’s see.
SEO is a matter of great controversy. It can be defined as a strategy which is used to improve website visibility in the search engines but the techniques and methods that are used to achieve that remain a matter of debate. Not long ago, the SEO industry suffered a severe blow by the changes that were introduced by the major search engines and many previously successful SEO companies went out of business. What happened? The very same strategy that used to work perfectly all these years suddenly stopped working and the websites that were ranked very high suddenly disappeared from the search engine results pages. This is due to the fact that the success of many SEO companies and their clients based on unethical linking strategies. And these stopped working because the new link-based algorithms can no longer be fooled with meaningless back links.
Another thing that is controversial about SEO companies is that many, especially the largest ones are partly or completely outsourcing their SEO service to the Far East in order to both maximise their profits and to be able to have the work done on time. As a result, you may end up “repairing” the same things you have hired the professionals to do for you and of course, get charged heavily for something you could do better yourself if you had the time.
Considering that the website ranking system is subjected to continuous changes and that there is a chance that you may end with an empty wallet and possibly even a banned domain name, hiring SEO professionals may not seem a good idea. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that there are SEO companies out there that actually deliver what they promise. And just imagine how great it would be to rank number 1 on Google for instance which brings us back to the main question – are SEO professionals worth the money? Well, this depends on how much time do you have. If you are targeting keywords that have little competition and your website offers quality content, higher website ranking may be only a matter of time. But if you are running a business and have to compete with thousands of other websites, you obviously do not have the luxury to wait for the time to do its job.